CHAPTER

Dreaming and beyond

FIFteen

I was on a ski lift, a double-seater chair, moving slowly up into the high

snowy peaks. It was cold and dark – nearly dawn, and the deep blue sky

was lightening where the sun was about to break through. ‘But this lift

isn’t supposed to open until 8.30 a.m.’, I thought. ‘How did I get here? Lifts

don’t run in the dark. What’s going on?’ I began to panic. I looked down

and realised that I had no skis on, and you need skis to get safely off the

lift. I would have to run and hope I didn’t fall. As my boots were about to

hit the ground I suddenly knew the answer. I was dreaming, and with that

realisation it was as though I had woken up. Of course lifts don’t run in the

dark. I looked around, conscious in my own dream, gazing at the beauty

of the morning mountains as the sun streamed over the top.

This is an example of a lucid dream: a dream in which you know during the dream

that you are dreaming. This ability to ‘wake up’ inside a dream while staying asleep

prompts all sorts of interesting questions about sleep, dreams, and ‘altered states’

of consciousness. What does it mean to say that I ‘wake up’ or ‘become conscious’

in a lucid dream? Aren’t you conscious in ordinary dreams? What are dreams any-

way? Are they experiences or only stories constructed on waking up? And who is

the dreamer?

In this chapter, we will skim over the basics of sleep and dream research, for they

are well covered in many texts (e.g. Empson, 2001; Hobson, 2002; Horne, 2006;

Moorcroft, 2013), and concentrate on what ordinary dreams, as well as some more

exotic kinds of dream and sleep-related phenomena, can tell us about conscious-

ness. We ask the same question about out-of-body and near-death experiences,