The Lucid Dreamer

The Lucid Dreamer

2014, Mystery  -   41 Comments
7.07
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Ratings: 7.07/10 from 129 users.

The quest to unlock the mysteries of the mind lies at the heart of the documentary The Lucid Dreamer. Following committed Buddhist and teacher Charlie Morley, the film explores our capacity to maintain awareness during our deepest sleeping state, and how this practice may reap enormous benefits that we can then carry into our waking lives.

The focal point of the film follows Morley as he teaches the discipline of lucid dreaming during an intimate four-day retreat, and it's complimented by a series of testimonies from additional pioneers of the practice.

Lucid dreaming was born from the Buddhist tradition over a thousand years ago. In their belief, tapping into your deepest unconscious - in effect, remaining completely self-aware during the process of dreaming - could relieve fear and stress from our lives, instill a feeling of oneness with our surroundings and our fellow man, unlock our most progressive potential, and promote greater harmony between our body, mind and spirit.

Nightmares, in particular, provide perhaps the most desirable opportunity for growth and enlightenment. It is only by facing our fears and phobias with clarity and purpose that we can empower ourselves to overcome them. As detailed in the film, this is exemplified by one of the tenants of the practice known as shadow integration, which is based on concepts originated by philosopher and psychotherapist Carl Jung.

For both committed practitioners and beginners who may feel skeptical of its efficacy, Morley proves to be a convincing and impassioned advocate. He informs us that we spend as much as a third of our lives sleeping. That's up to thirty years of an average life span. Why spend that vast amount of time existing in oblivion? He lays out the steps to mastering the discipline in practical, easily achievable terms.

The power of the mind, and the depth of imagination and potential locked therein, is nothing short of astonishing, yet it remains largely untapped by humans. The Lucid Dreamer gives us hope that we have the capacity within us not only to reach personal breakthroughs through our unconscious, but to contribute to the next evolution of our species as well in the process.

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Kate
Kate
1 year ago

Dreams are like children... no one is interested in hearing about other peoples.

Stefan
Stefan
3 years ago

The main guy is popular, but he's been really pretentious and abusive to people in the online space. He puts on a show as this caring spiritual person, but he's snarky and even insulting to people in an immature way. I'd learn from someone else, instead of buy his expensive books and courses. No sense in supporting someone like that. We need more positive creators in lucid dreaming.

Tracey
Tracey
4 years ago

I have not watched the entire documentary. I can tell you that I know I am dreaming each time I dream. I have fun with it. I don't interpret anything else out of it. My first one was at age 7. I was dreaming that I was in the local candy store. Suddenly it came to me that I was dreaming. I just had fun with it! It's fun. That is why I enjoy it and do not read into it.

alyaa
alyaa
5 years ago

that's great !!!!! inspiring
thank you

Loring Palmer
Loring Palmer
5 years ago

Dream work has changed my life. This discovery is as important to me as meditation: I've been a meditator for 50 years. Two teachers set my course re 'the dreaming.' Please check them out: Andrew Holecek and Robert Shay. Both have several books and videos on dream yoga available. Another gem is Cristina Donnelly's award winning (short) book, TRANSCENDENT DREAMING, "Stepping Into Our Human Potential". My deepest spiritual experience has been a recent lucid dream where I became one with love. Dream work could change the world, like 'mindfulness' is doing, if people simply paid attention to this major part of their life. Many wisdom culture peoples discuss their dreams together during breakfast. Ask yourself, "is this a dream"--what is real? So I'm delighted to find this video," Lucid Dreamer" by Morley. Well done. May you thrive and spread this message.

Gary John
Gary John
6 years ago

one and a half stars . crap crap cripple crap . storyfomercial , youcantapyourinnerselffomercial
gary john = (onefractalsparkofcreation) and you are too

Gary John
Gary John
6 years ago

Lucid Dream's , sort of a bonus dream you get to brag about if anyone will listen . Your first choice is your spouse or significant other because they cant get away from you as fast as other's (plus you cant hold your friends hostage) but them ? ___ yeah for a minute or two . But consider briefly (and I'm not trying to up sale this ) that in the center of our brain is a gland that has all the rods and cones of an eye , minus the pupil the cornea and vitreous stuff . suspiciously like a way to visualize dreams (or not) . Missing here are the overlapping other fields , astral projection , precognition , remote viewing or sensing ___to name some . There's also acid trips , peyote and oral accounts from many human races since the dawn of us . Lastly , an oddly enough back in the day the word lucid was the same as saying a light shinning . or "the shinning" . Now whether your a believer or not some people do have the shinning or it runs in certain families or whatever , so in my opinion being aware of your dream (lucidity) better than usual is much different than being somewhere else in your dream . or in fact your not actually in one of your dreams your really seeing **** and wandering around during it and help me out here some of you could not have imagined or dreamed some of this shit because it was w a y different . the end

john
john
6 years ago

Lucid dreaming has been around long before Buddhism. What nonsense.

tim
tim
7 years ago

Well .. i lucid dream all the time and this video is some serious BS. This video almost looks like a gateway to some esoteric new age religion.

The main problem people have is that they do not wake up in a REM state. This is the crux of lucid dreaming. If you are not constantly dreaming every night you will not get comfortable with the dream state. There is basically one technique to lucid dreaming ... wake up for +-10 mins, 2 hours before you normally do .. then go back to sleep. You will slip back straight into rapid REM cycles.

Aryan
Aryan
7 years ago

are you serious valerio?

valerio
valerio
7 years ago

five months ago i dreamed my father would have died , after five month he died in the real life ....please (martin) explain how it s possible....

Chris
Chris
7 years ago

An interesting video with some practical applications.... I sometimes stumble into lucid dreaming, but now can try some of these suggestions.
If Charlie might be checking these comments, I hope you don't mind one observation along the lines of constructive criticism. You're what I call a "hand talker" -- one of those people who believe that every spoken word must be illustrated with elaborate hand gestures in the air. It really distracts from your insightful commentary. I've lived in Japan some 30 years now, and in my opinion the constant hand motion is, well, unBuddhist. You'll notice that newsreaders in Japan keep their hands calmly folded on the desk before them... spiritual teachers, even more so. You needn't paint every word for the viewer with the constant hand action. But thank you for your work in this field.

pwndecaf
pwndecaf
7 years ago

@seedgaia - TMI

Paul
Paul
7 years ago

I have tried to lucid dream for over a decade and have only had a handful. Count me jealous! My first one was exhilarating. There were so many intricate patterns on a wall in a hallway I was flying down. Pretty intense how much intricacy there could be. I'd love to have more lucid dreams. Most techniques don't help me, though. Perhaps I'm too gullible. I'll look around and ask myself if everything looks like it usually does and no matter how wonky or totally unlike real life something is, in dream I'll believe it's been that way forever.

corynski
corynski
7 years ago

Virginia....... Why? Why not? It's another dimension of mind I guess...... You might learn something......

Virginia Watson
Virginia Watson
7 years ago

Why would anyone want a "lucid dream"? Reeks of a marketing effort.

seedgaia
seedgaia
7 years ago

Wow Martin, I don't know you're being racist but claiming an entire countries gullibility makes you look totally ignorant. Also you did a great job of reciting the modern western view of what dreams, which had been started with Frued's work with hypnotics and continued until now. One that you had nothing to contribute too and probably don't even fully understand yet had no problem asserting its dominion over teachings which predate Frued drastically. I do believe that the work of these scientists is relevant, I never would have gained the perspective I have now without their work. Morley did a great job of backing up his techniques with scientific information e.g. the hand test. The true value of this scientific information, in my opinion, is to guide us to be more effective in our mindful practice.

To cleosaurus, you are right, but you can't really know anything fully right? There are theories like the uncertainty principle and another that says all theories will be proven wrong as they are expanded by their seed. That being said, of course we should still pursue science and benefit culturally from the insights gathered. This is paralleled exactly with mindfulness, which seeks to objectively observe the internal mind and corroborate those experiences by asking others to test your findings. To me this makes mindfulness a much more interesting tool; Think of it do you have $100 000+ for some brain monitoring equipment and experiment subjects? Probably not but you will go to sleep tonight and literally every moment is an opportunity for formal or informal mindfulness practice.

This documentary sent me reeling, reconnecting many significant events I have had in my life. One of the big ones is that it made me finally understand the true meaning of Plato's allegory of the cave. That's where we all are, watching shadows on the cave wall and mindfulness is the tool that allows us to exit the cave into the light where we may realize that the shadows were merely in the likeness of this new found reality. Plato said that the world will grow great in the days of the philosopher king, I guess what he never said was that the king would be born a pauper. We must all lead from behind, toward this philosopher king. I really do think Morely will be looked back on as an important character in the turning point of human consciousness for his ability to share the awesome power of lucidity through the frameworks of mindfulness to the already large and growing audience of mindful practice.

I think one of the most major implications of this will be our final release of self-deceit. It is taught that most fundamental disillusion is the attachment to desire or desirous attachment, and this will lead on to some form of self deceit when one will add more suffering to the human condition. And if one accepts Gaia then it is natural to think perceived separation is the most fundamental deceit to maintain a desirous attachment to this reality we project. Mindful acceptance of this truth is the true path to the shedding of ego. Lucidity will seed mindfulness, will seed truth, will seed kindness.

Another big revelation that came to me from this is: Lucid dreaming is a way for all people to experience a waking state dmt experience. Obviously, dmt is the compound responsible for dreaming so you would think this would be axiomatic but for some reason I feel like I've always been lead to believe that a waking state trip is more valuable with source information than a dream. It is only the lack of the waking state in the dream that disconnects one from the source information.

Some of the most grounding and personality reshaping events in my life have been driven initially as a rejection of modern society manifested as a suicidal depression and experimental drug use. These events where I dissolved my known personality using cubensis mushrooms or mdma and connected more to Gaia or the true self. These experiences are what forced me to reevaluate myself and eventually led me mindfulness and a conscious rejection of ego. I'm no buddha, giving up ego is damn near impossible but I think lucid dreaming will be looked back on as the tipping point that truly accelerated human consciousness to its next state of evolution. And really it is funny when I think about it, all this sort of coalesced sometime in 2012 and a lot of it seems to connect to the teachings of the Mayan's calendar and how we are entering a golden age now of human consciousness, which is also mirrored by the I Ching.

If this has an impact on you and you are curious about my perspective here are some leads to check out:
-Parmaculture
-Gaia / James Lovelock
-Waking Life (great art film about the nature of dreams, very insightful/powerful)
-Terrance Mckenna
-Dan Ariely (power over your deceitfulness)
-Take a Mindfulness course locally (FREE) or just google john kabat zinn
-listen to crystal fighters - love is all got & life on the island

These are just the crazy ramblings of a millennial hahahah

BUT if you do believe this stuff it makes sense I was born in '93 at the climax of the dark period, my adolescence, the falling action and now my adulthood is entering the new age of light. My personal story mirrors this, as a child I was indoctrinated into the hateful, competitive, and compartmentalized nature of human culture. Then In my adolescence I propagated these qualities myself as a bid to find a niche in the society I perceived. Now, I am young in my adulthood and the most important of my future plans is to seed Permaculture, grow food forests and share fresh food so as to seed more creation. If that doesn't exemplify the expanding of the common human spirit toward the loss of ego I don't know what does. Seed Gaia, seed love.

zend
zend
7 years ago

The negative comments above are from people that have never experienced full lucidity. My first lucid dream experience was one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

Che
Che
7 years ago

i actually thought this was some BS documentary but you know what this was actually very insightful, i have had allot of lucid dreams, in fact i learned how to drive through a lucid dream when i was 21, yes true story, and i have had allot other experiences through lucid dreams.
the real battle is waking up from this world we call reality, coz this is also not real its all an illusion

Bad panda
Bad panda
7 years ago

So my bf is a scientist and a lucid dreamer. He thinks me being a spiritualist that I'm crazy that I used to use my dreams prophetically. But for many years I did. Then something extremely strange, even for me lol, happened. During a meditation my "soul" told me that it was going to now reside in me that I'll only notice her now and not later on. Since then my dreams can be interpreted by there general psychological meanings, and not the old symbolic books I used to use. I wish, if anyone knows what I mean, maybe they could let me know:)
Much love

Joseph Carl Ruger
Joseph Carl Ruger
7 years ago

Lucid dreaming must be familiar to most people. Perfecting access to it is amazing. I have had many myself, and hold them dear, since I can fly in them. But, the spirit in my heart is pointing out that we all die, so 30 years of dreaming isn't much time compared to eternity, where we all end up, no matter if you learned to lucid dream or not. Focusing so much dedication on becoming enlightened smells of folly to me. I trust the Holy Bible to be the inspired word of God in Heaven. The bible teaches us that there will be many false teachings, and that many people will follow them.

AlwaysNeutral
AlwaysNeutral
7 years ago

As they say, don't knock it until ya try it, im going to give it a whirl and see what happens. So you basically just need to remember to look at your hand eh? I had a weird and slightly terrifying dream before watching this (i was in a bus with a deranged person who was running people over and then a hobo started screaming and cussing at me which led me to toss a molotov cocktail at him... oddly enough before even watching this doc, i remember holding a fire extinguisher before waking up), so i want to attempt to re-enter it and control it. Maybe stop the crazy bus driver and simply kick the hobo in the nuts instead of doing something worse. lol

I will re-post here if my lucid dream works ;)

KookieBatPants
KookieBatPants
7 years ago

cleosaurus.

I am narcoleptic and go straight into REM sleep. I have been lucid dreaming since childhood and over the years got better and better at controlling my dreams. I have complete control now but don't always bother choosing or deciding what to dream, sometimes I just let it happen as it becomes tiresome doing it all the time.

How can I tell I am dreaming? Well, because I choose what to dream about and dream it. In waking life I can't choose to fly around and then it happens. I know when I am dreaming because I am doing things I definitely can't do when I am not dreaming. In dreams there are no rules of physics. Anything is possible. In waking life, I am subject to my situation as a human being on earth.

For example, In dreams, I can fly, be invisible, move things with my mind and drive a frickin car.
I can also experience things from the point of view of several different characters as well as someone viewing it all from the outside and am not always myself in my dreams. My dreams might take place in any number of realities and places in time or in a different dimension.

Denny
Denny
7 years ago

I am an artist and I paint in my lucid dreams. My new intention is to bring these new paintings into the 3 dimensional world. They are abstracts with many patterns. This is an exciting adventure for me.

cleosaurus
cleosaurus
7 years ago

No one can know they are not dreaming of having a lucid dream experience. There is no possible test for the dreamer or for science. That much is known. How would one ferret out if he is dreaming of having a dream of a lucid dream, and so on and so on? You can layer such constructs in such a way that you can never pin down where real consciousness ought to be. Good luck convincing yourself you were really aware.

Sri
Sri
7 years ago

More of a commercial than a documentary

Martin Hedington
Martin Hedington
7 years ago

Charley morley dot com (bio) refers:- "Before being asked to teach lucid dreaming Charlie studied Drama at Queen Mary’s University which led him to work as an actor.

'Nuff said.

J
J
7 years ago

I've been lucid dreaming ever since my first memories at 3 years old. I still do it quite often, and I can also get up and go back to sleep to continue the dream.

Hyker
Hyker
7 years ago

Been doing this all my life, I am an atheist, the spirit is the realization that all is one. Lucid dreaming can be a tool for creativity and understanding, the two sides of awareness.

Asshat9000
Asshat9000
7 years ago

Talking about things he can't know. Buddhists are dream scientists? You can't know that.

martin
martin
7 years ago

well! yet another money making venture at the expense of the vulnerable.
Dreams, in general, are a re-enactment of the days experiences - the mind stores the thoughts and in your sleeping hours sifts through those thoughts and like a photocopier re-presents them.
Best not to watch horror films before bo- bos.
This film was made in South Africa so why the gullibility??
you will have to look at their history.