Active dreaming is better than meditation and safer than psychedelics
superbowl.substack.com
superbowl.substack.com
On the one hand, many meditation instructions will explicitly tell you to abandon any intentions or goals, as they will almost certainly get in the way.
On the other hand, nearly everyone who starts meditating does so with a goal in mind. They want to improve their mental health, achieve some personal insight, or access the strange mindstates described by expert meditators.
Both Active Dreaming and psychedelics address those same goals. But the way they go about it is very different--there is definitely a lot more "doing" involved.
- Phase 1. When you engage in it, you indeed need to "abandon any intentions or goals" and “do nothing on purpose" because your goal is that emptiness.
- Phase 2. Once you attain that state of "emptiness", you are now (and only now) able to very sharply focus the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity.
Active dreaming could be seen as one of those activities. You need at least a minimum degree of that meditative "emptiness" for unlocking the process you called "Active dreaming".
I think "Active imagination" [0] is a term Jung used for a similar technique.
It's about observing one's own thoughts (basically brain chatter and sometimes sensations, perceptions) from a distance. Meta-cognition. :)
The peculiar thing is that you do not question the constructed reality and try to wake up. You just feel that you can alter it, and indeed do so. I'd like to have a scan of my cerebral activity because I often wake up very mentally tired after such sessions.
You're lucky that you have a foot in the door with lucidity. There are ways to modulate that feeling so it's more productive, and doesn't leave you feeling exhausted. I'd encourage you to experiment with different ways of interacting with the dream world to see what works best for you.
BTW, there is also “active meditation”. And there’s “shadow work” and Gestalt therapy, which are both forms of actively playing out the contents of your subconscious mind (though in different forms).
you cited studies with less than 20 participants, is this science or just a blog post with a click-bait title?
despite all, great insights…
We actually have some great evidence that psychedelics are very effective at treating mental illness. See [1] for a meta-analysis. Nothing has reached phase 3 clinical trials, but MDMA is on its way [2].
If you look at the addendum, which goes through all the studies, I'm pretty candid about how horribly underpowered most of them are. My main goal with this article is to convince folks that this is a promising line of research, and we should be doing more to explore it.
But also yeah...kind of a clickbaity headline.
The fear of having gone permanently mad is common—one of the best things you can do for someone having a bad time is remind them that it’s only temporary. I’m glad you were able to let go and get something out of it!