Dreaming While Awake; Reviewed by Laurie Simpkinson. Shift Magazine, an Institute of Noetic Sciences review. March 2004. Page 31 and 32.

“In one of the many personal stories Arnold Mindell shares, he describes the difficulties of being cross-examined in a courtroom. The lawyer insisted Mindell only answer with “yes or no,” but Mindell apologized, saying the “yes or no” answers that were being demanded were not the “whole truth” he promised in his oath to tell. The “full truth telling” that followed resulted in the dropping of the court case and a friendship between the opposing parties – and the lawyers!

Dreaming While Awake is a testament to this oath. “Something is asking me to tell the whole truth about dreaming,” Mindell admits. “The ‘yes and no answer’ to reality is that you and I are people. We come from the same or different nationalities, age groups, genders, sexual orientations, religions, mental and physical health, and so forth. ….But this is not the whole truth. These are just the yes-and-no-answers, the ones that fit our legal systems and political realities worldwide. The whole truth includes the viewpoint of Aboriginal Australians, Zen Buddhists, and native peoples everywhere. That whole truth includes the Dreaming that created each of us.”

This “dreaming” to which Mindell refers is the base of all reality and a three –tiered system from which dreamland (night-time dreaming) and consensus reality arise. The challenge is to become awake to the and aware—to become lucid—of the Dreaming twenty-four hours a day. This lucidity is different from the “lucid dreaming” popularized by Stephen La Berge. “{O}ur goal will not be to interpret dreams, not to become lucid in dreams, but to know their significance before they occur,” Mindell says.

In order to achieve this lucidity, we must pay attention to “flirts,” and follow them to their source. For example, let’s say you are walking to the mailbox. Normally you are lost in your thoughts of the day’s agenda, but today you decide also to pay attention to your surrounds. Although the agenda is still running through your head, you also notice a car driving by, a flower growing from the crack in the side-walk, a bird overhead---all things that you would have normally marginalized from your awareness.

You pause and look at the flower, investigating why it may have “flirted” with you and shown up in your broadened awareness. As you consider the flower, you may remember a dream you had, or simply be aware of the flower being aware of you. Did you notice the flower, or did the flower notice you? Whoever initiated this connection is lost in Dreaming, for “lucid experience…occurs before it is broken up into parts, before you know whether it is coming from you or me….Lucidity allows you to sense how observations co-arise from everything involved.”

Learning how to be lucid in your everyday life—how to pay attention to the little flirts and beeps of seeming insignificance—can be used to keep yourself mentally and physically healthy. For example, Mindell cites many stories where individuals who work on becoming lucid were able to “sense the onset of symptoms hours before they actually occurred,” and thus circumvented what would have developed into a headache, explosive anger, or even a disengaging speech. Circumventing the unproductive outcome included working with the massage, dream imagines, communicating directly with the symptoms, “shape shifting,” and “time-traveling.”

Although the ideas explored in this book stand on their own, Mindell’s frequent references to his previous works (Dreambody and Quantum Mind, in particular) provide avenues to explore further the sometimes generously metaphored theories in physics. Reading the book is much like taking a step into the Dreaming, stepping outside of time and rigid thought patterns in order to notice what we are truly not separate from “sentient reality,” but rather one expression of that same Dreaming reflecting back on itself.

Laurie Simpkinson is a graduate of JFK U, an IONS staff member. Her previous dream research includes work with Stephen LaBerge and Amit Goswami. She’s currently devoting her time to raising her children.