Although waking consciousness originated together with multicellular life on earth, the invention of agriculture was its apotheosis as far as the human species is concerned.  As compared with hunting, the invention of agriculture brought order, regularity, sleep 8 hours at night and work 16 hours during the day.  Humankind had outgrown dream consciousness; it had found dream consciousness – the consciousness of infants and animals – too unstable, too ephemeral, and therefore too limiting for its free expression.  Therefore humans literally constructed, piece by piece, thought form by thought form, over the surface of dream consciousness, the floating edifice of waking mind.  Humankind began to think and reason.

 Separation of quotidian life into 16 hours of wakefulness and 8 hours of dreaming – forcing our bodies to stay awake for such a long stretch of time – is a stern discipline, a way of clenching up, which helps block the intrusion of dream material (magical events) into wakefulness.  Ancient humans mixed the two together in their awareness – waking life was as ineffable as dreaming, and everything was a source of wonder and mystery.   Native cultures, such as the Mayan people of Guatemala, maintain much of this thought form structure to this day.  We North American-European-Asian moderns have learned to tone down our sensory impressions, to separate ourselves from our environment by taking everything around us for granted, by not paying attention to anything except our own incessant mental chatter.  This makes our lives utterly boring and meaningless, but nonetheless provides us with our ability to focus our attention, to be methodical, concentrated and deliberate.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were unable to focus that much attention.  They had no need to. 

Along with heightened focus comes a decreased sense of connectedness; a greater sense of separatedness.  And along with the heightened separatedness necessary to focus attention in the waking world comes a heightened sense of isolation and anguish.  In other words, suffering is an intrinsic component of waking consciousness.  Without suffering, the constant self-pinching, we could not stay awake. 

When we are awake we say “I am suffering!”  That “I” is made out suffering (self-pity in the parlance of shamanism).  To gainsay Descartes, “I suffer, therefore I am.”  Just as the “I” and the “suffering” arise together, so too do they dissolve together.   If “I” ever stop suffering, the disconnected “I” dissolves too.  The main cause of our self-hatred, the chief reason we are all so neurotic and out of kilter with our world, is simply because we’ve been awake too long.

The point is that waking consciousness is not something which is intrinsically different from dreaming, but rather something which evolved and developed out of it; which became more focused and intense and uptight as it evolved.  Waking is merely a way of imposing a semblance of order and control (mind – things making some kind of sense instead of being wholly ineffable) on at least a portion of the dream.  However this is a falsehood:  NOTHING makes any sense – EVERYTHING is ineffable.  In other words, waking consciousness – and the society which supports it – is a complete and total fabrication. 

Waking mind is like the insouciance of a drunkard staggering across a battlefield where bullets whiz by all around him but who is somehow protected from it all by his blissful indifference.  That is waking mind.  It is so totally a fiction (the sense that we are separated from everything around us) that it can only be maintained by the constant validation of other people (our sense of being part of society).   Only by all of us reassuring one another that we are separated individuals – by constantly picking at and annoying each other, just as we constantly pick at and annoy ourselves to stay awake – can we jointly uphold the fragile structure of waking consciousness.  Our society assures its continuance by setting its individual members upon one another like ravenous dogs.

When society dissolves because of e.g. war or disaster, everything becomes like a dream, since it’s out of control.  Waking makes for more control than dreaming, but with a concomitant loss of awareness and joy.  Over the next century, as the environment and civilization deteriorate, society will collapse and everything will spin out of control.  That is to say, waking consciousness will dissolve back into the dream from which it emerged at the time of the invention of agriculture.  There isn’t going to be any miraculous salvation:  no one is going to be raptured up into the clouds to sit next to Jesus; and December 22, 2012 isn’t going to be any improvement on December 20th.  And certainly the corporations, governments, and materialistic scientists who got us into this mess aren’t going to get us out of it.  Each individual human being will then be at a crossroads:  either lighten up and enter into lucid dreaming as your everyday mode of awareness; or enter into a nightmare. 

 In the same way that waking consciousness grew out of dreaming, lucid dreaming – that is to say, dreaming in which the dreamer knows that he or she is dreaming – is an outgrowth of waking consciousness.  Lucid dreaming is humankind’s next step in the evolution of consciousness – New, Improved, Lemon-Scented Consciousness.  It’s also our only hope for survival as a species. 

Lucid dreaming allows us to take a pause for reflection on the dream plane:  to make it stop happening for a moment to critically evaluate and redirect the experience, instead of being wholly caught up in it, forced to be constantly shifting and adjusting ourselves to it, as our hunter forebears had to do.  Hunters had to more or less go with the flow, and they were better or worse hunters as they were able to be flexible and quick to see and grasp opportunities and avoid pitfalls as they arose.  They were nimble, but not very capable of planning, organizing, or thinking things through.   If there was an easier way to do something, they probably wouldn’t have been able to figure it out (not enough separatedness).

What happens in lucid dreaming is that we preserve the thought forms of waking consciousness, but without the importance.  That is to say, lucid dreaming is waking consciousness without the driving urgency, the constant uptightness, the sense of a separated, suffering succotash of a self.  We still have a self, symbolized by a body thought form, while we are lucidly dreaming; but that body is a great deal lighter and less separated than our waking body.  It can fly, for one thing. 

The point is, as all lucid dreamers soon realize, that the thought forms of waking consciousness can be activated in the dream state once they have been cut loose from their importance.  Lucid dreaming is what waking consciousness could be (and will be) like when we get rid of our importance.  To do lucid dreaming consistently we will have to come to a general conviction in our daily lives that nothing is all that important. 

It is the purpose of the practice of magic to make everyday life more like dreaming – to release the fixation on a separated, suffering self.  This is accomplished by cultivating the practice of lucid dreaming while we are asleep, and by going to trees or nature spirits every day while we are awake.  The doorway out of wakefulness into lucid dreaming is what magicians term sensory thought forms, and what cognitive philosophers term qualia:  that is to say, shifting attention from thinking to feeling the world around us.  This entails quieting down our minds and listening to sounds, feeling the breeze on our skin, seeing the plants and the clouds.  It’s what mystics refer to as “suchness” or “thusness”; but really all it involves is just shutting up the constant stream of mental chatter long enough to see – hear – feel what’s going on in the now moment – i.e., to do what we do when we’re dreaming while we’re awake.  The “Following Feelings” chapter of my book Magical Living describes how to do this.   The practice of recapitulation (to be described in a later Magical Almanac article on William Butler Yeats’ theory of reincarnation) is also extremely invaluable in releasing the obsessive fixation of waking consciousness; releasing our obsessive grip on everyday life and the people around us. 

The goal for us as individuals is to merge dreaming and waking – to be as light and unencumbered while awake as we are while dreaming; and to be as rational and clear-thinking while dreaming as we are when we are awake.  The goal for us humans as a species is to make lucid dreaming our everyday awareness, in the same way that our hunter-gatherer ancestors made waking consciousness their everyday awareness at the time that agriculture was invented. 

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