9 Tips to Dream Like An Expert

By Lorrie Kazan 

The Woman Who Mistook Her Purse For a Cat 

Waking up in the Double Tree Berkeley Marina, I glance to the opposite bed and for a moment mistake my crumpled black bag for a cat.

Unlike The Man Who His Wife for a Hat, stook hi I normally only mistake people for each other.  Apparently Oliver Sacks has labeled the inability to distinguish faces from each other as an actual malady; he may suffer from it as well.

Artist, Chuck Close, began painting faces for exactly that reason; a hope that by painting them he would somehow begin to recognize them on the street.  But the brain doesn’t work that way.

If you can’t tell people apart, you’ll tend to smile a lot, especially at people who seem to know you.  Ah, if only the world wore name tags.

This weekend (at the 29th International Dream Conference – Sailing on the Sea of Dreams) the majority did wear name tags but I forgot to look as I asked the much-respected lucid dream expert, Robert Waggoner, about living in Montreal; he reminded me he lives in Iowa, where he also does his radio show.

I mistook him for Integral Dreaming conference presenter, Daniel Deslauriers.  For the most part, I can tell men and women apart, but not always.

I wouldn’t have gone to the Lucid Dreaming panel had I not been shanghaied the night before by a bright-eyed fellow named Ed Kellogg, III, Ph.D.  He’d been sent by another presenter to find out what media I represented.

Before I knew it, I was regaled by stories of his lucid dreaming prowess, which is evidently renowned.  He often wins the dream telepathy contest, which he may also have inaugurated.  And he’s the creator and facilitator of the psiber dream conference (info on that below)

What’s a lucid dream? When you realize in a dream that you’re dreaming.  From that deep place you can ask questions, alter actions, activate healing, travel wherever you want.

“I will be happy and anxiety free,” was the lucid dream suggestion that empowered dream panelist, Line Salvesen.  In order to fly to the conference from her native Norway, she resolved fear of flying by actively flying in her dreams.

“If you become lucid in your dreams you can explore anything you want,” proclaimed Ed Kellogg, who also told me of healing a friend’s sick child during a lucid dream.

“Why not just send healing from a meditative state?” I asked.  You can’t go as deep as you do in a dream. (As in passing alpha, beta and working from delta and theta.)

At the panel an audience member said she studied for a test during dreams, another called in experts and asked to be shown all possibilities for her new business. Someone else suggested that we have multiple dreams simultaneously, though we don’t remember it that way.