Don Juan Matus had some really philosphical sounding advice to Carlos Casteneda:  "On order to become a warrior, the first step is to open your eyes while you are dreaming."  

I tried it once.  It was an uncomfortable feeling, but it resulted in a lucid dream.  I can remember the images down to the tiniest detail to this day.  

It reminds me of Freud's secondary revision where thoughts are deliberately imposed on the dream work.  

-Larry

--- On Tue, 1/26/10, Carole Brooks Platt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Carole Brooks Platt <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Neuropsychoananalysis
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 8:11 AM
> Speaking of Allan Hobson, he has a new
> article out in the International Journal of Dream
> Research called "The Neurobiology of Consciousness:
> Lucid Dreaming Wakes Up." 
> He refers to lucid dreaming as a dissociative phenomenon
> where consciousness is split between the actor (the dreamer)
> and an observer (a conscious waking self). 
> 
> 
> 
> Here's a good quote:
> 
> "Primary consciousness has recently been proposed by
> us to be characteristic of dreaming. Put another way,
> waking, by including secondary consciousness, is
> characterized by higher orders of insight, abstraction, and
> awareness of awareness, precisely those attributes which
> dreaming normally lacks. Dreams have strong primary
> consciousness elements. They include a strong sense of self,
> of self-as-agent, and movement of that self-agent through a
> perceptual space, all integrated with emotional salience.
> Dreaming is thus a virtual reality experience with a
> remarkably predictive simulation of external reality. Lucid
> dreamers may experience primary consciousness (the dream)
> and secondary consciousness (the waking) separately but
> simultaneously."
> 
> 
> 
> I wonder if psychoanalysts ever get reports of lucid
> dreaming from their patients. In fact, the "conscious
> exploration of dreams" while asleep can be very
> healing. Unfortunately, they are pretty rare. My sister,
> Janice Brooks, and her husband published a book entitled
> The Conscious Exploration of Dreams: Discovering How We
> Create and Control Our Dreams with a foreword by J.
> Allan Hobson. I once had a lucid dream myself unlike
> my sister who is quite proficient at it. The obverse can be
> very revealing and is more easily done: the waking
> exploration of free-floating imagery as in Jungian active
> imagination and in NY psychoanalyst and mystic Gerald
> Epstein's waking dream therapy. Epstein, though,
> doesn't like how Jungians interpret the imagery along
> archetypal lines, forcing an "analytic, logical
> framework." In his method, by imagining positive
> outcomes to traumatic insults from the past, one can trick
> the brain into believing the rewritten scenarios and
> lessening the emotional impact of the real ones.
> 
> 
> 
> As far as literary and artistic creation goes, there are,
> of course, plenty of instances of dreams, voices and visions
> informing the waking mind. 
> 
> Carole 
> 
> On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 4:06 PM,
> Norman Holland <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> 
> 
> Thank you, Matt Carland, for your
> intelligent comments on the denigrating of science and
> neuroscience that has taken hold on this listserv.  
> 
> 
> 
> With respect to neurologists' ignoring psychoanalysis,
> I would remind one and all that Nobelist Eric
> Kandel has famously written, 
> “[P]sychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and 
> intellectually satisfying view of the mind.”   
> His early training was in psychoanalysis as
> was often true of psychiatrists of his generation.  Another
> example of a psychoanalytically trained neurologist would be
> Alan J. Hobson, although he has reacted strenuously against
> that early training.  I was watching on tv Lester Grinspoon
> give a neurologically enriched account of addiction, and he
> trained with me at the Boston Institute.  I think there is
> more crossover than you allow for, Matt, 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Certainly it seems to me that the burden of proof is on
> psychoanalysts to provide evidence of the efficacy of their
> treatments.  The neurologists have shown abundantly that
> such physical treatments as ECT, valproic acid for bipolar,
> chemical treatments for severe OCD, and so on, work as well
> as most medications work.  Granted, the jury is out on
> anti-depressants, but that's no reason to dismiss all of
> neuroscience, which seems to me both stupid and, as usually
> goes along with stupidity, arrogant.  
> 
> 
> 
> 
>                       --With warm
> regards,
> 
>                                   
> Norm
> Norm Holland
>   
> 
> 
> 
>