Dream Games

In this essay, S D Anugyan explores the various kinds of dreams and their practical importance.

Early Beginnings

I was with the early morning rush hour in Edinburgh. A cold damp wind was blowing down the grey street onto my face, as I walked with the rest of the foot-traffic en route to work. The apartment where I was staying was up on my right. I looked up and realised that my body was there, still asleep. Then it dawned on me, I must be dreaming.

Everything was so convincing though. It felt physical, I could smell the air and – almost – the people around me in their fetid overcoats. How could I determine if this were real or not? Then I remembered, one of the indications that you’re in a dream is when your feet don’t touch the ground. So I looked down and realised – I didn’t have any feet.

With that realisation, I went into full consciousness and started dreaming lucidly. Not knowing how much time I had, I decided to make the most of it and took off from the street and up into the sky. I looked down at Edinburgh, its greyness warming somewhat from the rising sun, then at the distant Firth of Forth, its waters glistening brightly. I flew over the city, then felt strongly compelled to descend into one area.

Dropping down, I noticed a middle-aged couple standing in a garden looking up. They could see me! So I went to meet them, then as I got closer I could see their faces almost demonic, twisting with hatred. Their loathing was so great, perhaps through jealousy at my liberation – they felt very earth-bound in comparison – that I recoiled violently from their malevolence, rocketing backwards and up into the sky again.

The shock was so powerful it sent me through the stratosphere and out into Space. Within seconds I had traversed light years. I found myself over a planet and decided to see what was going on there. When I landed – I didn’t seem to have much control over where exactly I was going – I was in a high-tech facility surrounded by computers and machines. Through empathy or telepathy or something, I knew immediately what was going on. This was an advanced world dominated by technology, and the beings in it were waging a war not with bombs and physical weapons, but with mathematical equations.

There were soldiers from both sides now in the facility where I was, hunting each other. I glimpsed some of them passing by the metal corridor I was in. They were like tall elegant shadows. I tried to remain hidden but one of them saw me, and instinctively threw a sine curve in my direction. As the curve struck me, I died and woke up back in my body in the Edinburgh flat.

When I described this dream to a class of teenagers in Ko Hsuan School years ago, one of them said, ‘Wow. If I could dream like that I would never feel the need for drugs.’

He had said something profound, for later I felt that was exactly right, that if people were trained how to dream better, then drugs would become more or less redundant; certainly the psychedelic ones, but I strongly suspect a rich inner life would reduce the need for others as well.

It was when staying at the Findhorn community in Scotland as a young man that I initially expanded my interest in dreams. I joined a dream group where we discussed our dreams regularly. Other members of the community knew to avoid us at breakfast! One of the principal books we used was The Dream Game by Ann Faraday, a work that has never been improved upon to my knowledge. Writing in deceptively easy language, Faraday outlines Gestalt theory and how dreams can be used therapeutically, before expanding onto lucid dreaming and spiritual implications.

Her understanding of how dreams talk in puns was particularly useful. One dream I had at Findhorn was of being on a train. Rather than any dubious Freudian interpretation, the message was far more direct: I was being trained whilst at Findhorn.

Lucid dreams – where you become conscious that you are in a dream, and everything starts feeling ultra-real – were often considered, if not holy grails, then at least something to aspire to. Partly because they could be so wonderful and exhilarating, as in the dream I opened this essay with, but also because as therapeutic tools they could be invaluable. In Gestalt they talk about our inner Top Dog – the part of us that respects authority and structure – and our Underdog – the part that just wants to hang loose and party. Faraday calls them the Hounds of Hell. Knowing this, in a lucid dream it is very useful to be able to tell, when confronting a dangerous entity, if it is a symbol of one of those dogs, and which one it is exactly. A Top Dog can be a bully and needs a show of strength from the dreamer to put it in its place, whereas an Underdog needs sympathy and understanding, generally speaking. So when you meet a dragon, for instance, if you are lucid you have the ability to work out where that dragon is ‘coming from’, and consequently you can do some healing on yourself.

Shared Dreams

There are higher levels of dreaming to aspire to. One of those levels is indicated by a sharing of dreams with others. W B Yeats describes this experience in Towards Break of Day:

Was it the double of my dream
The woman that by me lay
Dreamed, or did we halve a dream
Under the first cold gleam of day?

My first experience of this level of dreaming was not quite as mystical as Yeats’s. For a while, as a teenager, I was staying in a large communal house. One night I had a dream which included quite a few of my housemates, but what really stood out was the experience of making love to a young lady to whom I was attracted, but she was in another relationship. The experience was vivid, though not lucid as such.

At breakfast the next day, everyone in the kitchen was abuzz with their dreams, because it turned out we had all been dreaming of one another. I stayed a bit silent, hoping no one actually realised what I had been up to in the shared dream, when the young lady in question walked into the room. Someone called her by name, saying, ‘We all dreamt of each other last night. Did you as well?’

She took one look at me, turned bright red and ran out the room.

Stranger Things

Carlos Castaneda, particularly in The Art of Dreaming, was later to prove helpful in developing my skills further. People often debate whether Castaneda’s accounts are fictional or not, but in that particular book he describes things that I had experienced, including encounters with what he calls Alien Scouts, entities from other universes that use dreams to connect with us and explore our world.

One snowy evening I approached a large house in a town somewhere. Everything was silent, flakes of snow falling gently to the ground. I approached the grand door of the house and pushed it open. I knew this was a dream so had gone lucid, and everything felt very real. The foyer of the house was empty but no less grand. I knew the people I wanted to see were upstairs, so I walked across the tiled floor. It might have been an exception from the rule about feet not touching the ground because, as I recall, my boots were trailing moisture from melting snow across the tiles. The staircase was on the left. I walked up it. The steps were bare wood which resonated in the hall as I ascended. I felt this was a House of Truth. It was beautiful, and deeply peaceful. There was a closed door on the landing on my left. I paused. Someone I knew, Nikki, was sleeping there, I could sense. I could even hear her breathing, but it was not her I had come to see.

I walked across the landing to the door opposite. There were noises from within. I pushed the door open and walked in to a large room with a long table that stretched from one end to the other. Seated all around it were numerous people of all ages, and they were partying with balloons, confetti, drinks… I knew many of them, including a young blonde girl who was Nikki’s sister.

‘Can we help you?’ someone asked, grinning ear to ear. They all looked at me in sudden, expectant silence.

‘I’m sure one of you is a Scout,’ I declared.

‘Ahh,’ another person said mischievously, ‘but can you tell who?’

I looked around at the amused faces, scanning them carefully.

My eyes rested on the blonde girl.

‘I don’t know you,’ I said, ‘but I do know one thing: Nikki does not have a sister. So I think it’s you.’

‘RIGHT!!!’ she yelled in glee, and everyone clapped as she exploded in a myriad colours, enveloping, overwhelming me, and I woke in my bed realising that I had just had an amazing encounter with an alien entity.

Yet to this day, it is the house that haunts me, with its profound silence, peacefulness and sense of truth embedded in its very walls. I have never come across one like it but I remain hopeful and on the lookout.

Going Further

For many years, when going lucid I would try and leave the Earth again as I had in that first dream. Occasionally I would manage, only finding barren rocks floating in Space, rather disappointingly; and I would include Pluto in that which was a total let down. Mostly though, I could not penetrate a psychic barrier that surrounded the Earth. It was like I wasn’t given permission to leave, and would bounce right back.

One night I got through and was so delighted I was determined to make the most of my freedom and shot as fast as I could through the solar system and beyond. I had miscalculated though and ended up traversing galaxies in seconds, going much further than intended.

Finding myself beyond known Space, I was curious. There was something ahead of me. I slowed down to look properly.

It was immense, as big as countless galaxies. I got nearer. It was dark. But what was it? As I approached, I suddenly sensed what it was: the complete negation of everything that existed. It was anti-life, it was anti-everything, and not in an enlightened transcendent view of things, for it would destroy that too.

It was absolutely terrifying, this overwhelming darkness, and it was consuming all that existed. It was about to consume me because I was being sucked into it inexorably, I couldn’t get out, when I felt/saw two arms appear from nowhere and grab me, pulling me away from the abyss. I woke up back in my bed.

Something had been watching out for me all long, I realised. My not being able to leave the Earth was for my own good, for I’d only get into trouble. In the physical world too I have a tendency to go off wandering without any clear destination in mind. I had been allowed out this one time to see what was out there, a secret no-one else might know, because it was absolutely terrifying. I still don’t know what this means, but it feels right to finally share this experience, so others know.

Masters Degree

Dreaming skills – knowing how to dream and how to use it – became a part of my inner resources. Osho in The Psychology of the Esoteric talks about the different levels of dreaming very clearly. He explains that with the first level, which is purely physical, dream and reality are totally separate. A hungry person will dream of food, a thirsty person of water, a repressed one of sex, and so on. A common experience is dreaming of going to the bathroom when your bladder is full: you are not actually in the bathroom, but your body is saying you should go.

Then as one progresses to other, non-corporeal bodies, dreams and reality get closer and closer until eventually they become synonymous. When reading this, I began to think of my lucid dreams as emanating from my astral body. It is commonly thought that dreams of flying are the mind’s way of recalling out-of-body experiences. The Edinburgh I flew over looked astonishingly real, except it wasn’t. The last encounter at the edge of the universe would not be 100% accurate either, but at that level of dreaming it’s pretty close.

I’ve managed to use this to my advantage when working on landscapes to find out what is really going on with them. So when I’m doing a Feng Shui survey, I often ask for a quiet twenty minutes to ‘have a siesta’ so I can use this technique to get a glimpse behind the scenes. It’s proven useful on many an occasion. An added bonus, as Osho stipulates, is that the astral body can move through time as well as distance.

In a recent lucid dream I found myself rising up at night above west Cornwall (Penwith) in the future. There below me was my village, now an industrial suburb of a vaster metropolis, Penzance likewise in the distance. Everywhere I looked, wrapped around Mount’s Bay, were buildings with a minimum of street lighting, and smoke rising from large chimneys. It was like a new London. Oddly, though somewhat Dickensian it wasn’t as ugly as it sounds. Moonlight still glittered on the waters, the wind still blew wildly and the city fitted into the landscape in its own unique way.

I returned to my body and woke, thinking about what I had just experienced. As an environmentalist and nature lover, I could easily have been upset by what I had just foreseen, yet I wasn’t. It seemed inevitable and part of a bigger picture. Though I choose not to live in cities, I enjoy visiting them and am aware that they can have their own beauty.

In the present ‘real’ world I was haunted by this experience, and things started to reveal themselves, such as the enormous geothermal potential of this part of the UK, the lithium deposits found in the old mining area, the new spaceport at Newquay, the new high speed trains, the reactivation of the satellite dishes at Goonhilly Down, the G7 meeting at St Ives… The list goes on. Penwith may well become the new London.

Finally, the Greeks distinguished between dreamscapes encountered through the Gates of Ivory (‘ivory’ being close to the word for ‘deceit’) and the Gates of Horn (‘horn’ being close to ‘fulfil’). The former are false and unreliable, whereas the latter speak the truth. It is not always easy to distinguish between the two. Indeed, Ann Faraday reveals how seemingly nonsense dreams can actually be quite revealing. One man, just entering a relationship he felt uncertain about, could only remember a dream about making bread. When asked to imagine he was doing so again and talk to the bread, he began with, ‘I’m kneading you… I’m enjoying kneading you…’ At which point the meaning became totally clear.

So, dream on, everyone. Not only can dreams enhance your inner world, improve self-knowledge and grant mystical experiences, they can also be extraordinarily practical – on numerous levels.