How to Dream While You’re Awake

[This article is part of an ongoing series on practical methods for performing dream magic, from basic techniques to more advanced topics. In our previous article we discussed Dream Incubation.]

Dreaming does not just happen when we fall asleep, and many liminal and transitional states of consciousness can be used for working with dreams magically while awake. This can be an important skill, as it is one of the ways of working with dreams with greater consciousness and self-reflectivity. Pre-sleep hypnogogic imagery and waking sleep paralysis are often discussed by dreamworkers, and can even be used magically (for instance the used of sleep paralysis symptoms to trigger an out-of-body experience). Naps are also effective ways of dreaming during the day, and artists and inventors like Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison each used napping dreams for inspiration, by falling asleep upright holding metal objects that would fall onto plates, waking them immediately out of the dream state.

While those liminal states tend to have less conscious control, we can also access waking dream states through meditation or trance. Trance has served as an effective means of entering into visionary and oneiric states in many indigenous cultures’ shamanic practices. Similarly, studies of meditative states have shown that they produce brain waves patterns similar to those found in lucid dreams. These states lower external conscious awareness to the degree that we can become aware of our unconscious, and sensorially access the experiential reality of our dreams.

Of course, there is a vast different between imagining things with our eyes closed vs. having a fully realistic, oneiric experience of the kind that happens while we sleep. The question is, what can we do to close the gap between these states? This involves two steps: learning how to induce a meditative trance, and how to properly visualize.

Trance states can be induced through two main approaches, the first being excitatory, possession, or frenzied trance states induced through strong emotions, sexual arousal, drugs, dancing, physical ordeals, or ritual pain. The second kind are inhibitory, vision, or oneiric trances, which can be induced through regulated breathing, visualization, soft background noise, focusing on a chaotic or noisy medium, monotonous rhythms like drums or mantras, fasting, exhaustion, walking, and even boredom and disengagement. You may need to experiment to determine which method of trance induction works best for you, but for having waking dreams, methods that involve physical stillness such as in meditation are ideal.

Meditation and inhibitory trance involve letting oneself sink into a state close to sleep without actually falling asleep. At the same time, however, there are ways to do this that also engage the parts of the mind responsible for dreams. Harry T. Hunt, in his cross-modal study of dreams, imagination, and altered states research, suggests that the kind of trance states in which waking dreams occur mimic the physiological conditions of dream sleep. First is complete stillness to the point of tonic immobility, which is used in both sleep paralysis and the heightened visual attention of the startle response. Second is the withdrawal from external sensory perception, which when it happens while asleep switches attention to internally-generated sense data, and can be aided by the use of monotonous rhythms to mask other sounds. Third is the use of complete absorption, which replicates the single-minded, non-self-reflectiveness of dreams and can be achieved by focusing on your breath, a mantra, visualization, etc.

Once we are in a deep, meditative trance state, we need to be able to engage our inner imagery or sensory field to such a degree that it can become a fully realistic experience, which can be achieved through visualization. Visualization is used in countless spiritual and occult practices, but can be a very difficult to learn how to do correctly. Often when people start to learn to visualize, they will close their eyes and try and create a shape in the darkness behind their eyelids as if they were still using their sight perception. This is not visualization, and given lack of better instruction, many people give up and assume they must be unable to visualize, even to the point of stigmatizing themselves with self-diagnosed aphantasia.

Instead, visualization come from and is experienced the same way we do our memories, imaginations, and our dreams. Whatever way you recall a memory or dream is how you visualize, even if this uses other sensory modalities than sight. This means that even the process of trying to remember a dream to write it down is exercising your ability to visualize. There are some tips, though, for making visualizations deeper and more realistic. First, don’t imagine objects or yourself in a void; instead visualize being in a scene or place you know, as this engages your mental awareness of perspectives, distance, lightning, etc. Second, being in a trance state rather than just trying to visualize with your eyes closed engages the physiological aspects of your brain where dreaming occurs, where it feels like rather than you making the images, they seem to arise on their own. You can also train your visualization through starting with simple shapes or figures that you make more complex with practice, staring at an external object or image that you then try to recreate internally, lastly don’t just focus on your visual sense but practice visualizing with your other senses.

Once you’ve mastered these techniques you can use them for a variety of different oneiric practices. This includes the Jungian practice of Active Imagination, in which you can encounter figures from your dreams or aspects of yourself personified in order to dialogues with them; Dream Reentry, in which you return into a previous dream to continue it or change its ending; and Shamanic Journeying, in which you enter into a visualized spiritual reality. Eventually you might even be able to enter into the dream while in full waking consciousness, and project it onto the world around you in the form of controlled synchronicities.