Dream Visions

Lucid Dreams in 30 Days

Another handy book on lucid dreaming is Lucid Dreams in 30 Days by Keith Harary, Ph.D., and Pamela Weintraub. Published in 1989 by St. Martin’s Press, it is a slender paperback that sold for about $6 originally. You can still buy it on Amazon.com.

Dr. Harary is a psychologist, internationally known for his research on altered states of consciousness. He has written dozens of scientific and popular articles and a couple of dozen books.

Pamela Weintraub, was a senior editor at Omni magazine and a contributor to the health and psychology sections of Discover, Ms., Longevity, and other national magazines.

The book offers a complete, step-by-step plan for learning to dream lucidly. You can work your way through the program in 30 days or work at your own pace, taking as long as you want to.

The text is clear, simple, and easy to understand. The authors waste no time getting to the point.

Yet they provide all the background information you need to do the dream exercises they provide. In fact, they cover an amazing amount of ground in such a small book, and they do it well.

Each chapter has a section for each day of the program. Each section is several pages long, with stories, explanations, background information and dream exercises. The chapters and sections are as follows:

Week 1 Waking Up to Your Dreams

Day 1-2 Dream Recall

Day 3 Temple of Dreams

Day 4 Vision Quest

Day 5 Life is But a Dream

Day 6 Dream Rehearsal

Day 7 Edge of Consciousness

Week 2 Lucid Dreaming

Day 8 Reality Check

Day 9 I Love Lucidity

Day 10 Dreamer’s Guide to the Universe

Day 11 Who’s Flying Now?

Day 12 Whirl Without End

Day 13 Dream Weaving

Day 14 Free Dreaming

Week 3 High Lucidity

Day 15 Altered States

Day 16 The Adventures of Gumby

Day 17 High Lucidity

Day 18 Winds of Change

Day 19 Shifting Sands

Day 20 Trading Places

Day 21 Free Dreaming

Week 4 Creative Consciousness

Day 22 Dream Therapist

Day 23 The Healer Within

Day 24 Double Vision

Day 25 Dream Lovers

Day 26 Forbidden Fantasies

Day 27 Extended Awareness

Day 29-30 Toward Higher Consciousness

What I don’t like about this book is the authors’ seeming lack of awareness of how our dreams affect others. They also don’t quite seem to realize that encouraging people to focus on their sexual fantasies about people they know and see every day could turn into a dangerous obsession.

These authors know the techniques, but they seem a little weak on the ethics and metaphysics of dreaming. Lucid dreaming can be very powerful. Please don’t do anything in your dreams that would be unethical in daily life.

Oddly enough, the authors discuss the possibility of psychic dreaming in the very next section, including the research indicating that people communicate in their dreams. Yet the implications never seem to have sunk in. They just don’t seem to get it!

Research has shown that everyone is psychic to some degree, though most do not realize it until some event brings it to their attention. And you certainly aren’t likely to know if they are psychic, even if they do know it.

In North America people generally keep such things to themselves if they are smart. In some parts of the U.S. letting other people know that you are psychic could have serious legal and economic repercussions. You could be ostracized, lose your livelihood, even lose custody of your children.

So you may not know that the object of your fantasies feels your attention on them. They may become aware of it through your dream visit or through your fantasies in preparation for the dream. And a lucid dream or out-of-body visit from you may be extremely unwelcome or even damaging to them.

Lucid dreaming may be a great way to commune with your spouse while separated by business or military duty. But it is a very bad idea to use lucid dreaming to indulge in sexual fantasies about your neighbor, a coworker or your boss’s wife. It could also have practical, unpleasant, real-life repercussions for you.

Needless to say, indulging violent or nonconsensual fantasies, especially with underage or helpless partners, is just asking for very, very bad karma. That is to say, you would be damaging your own soul.

At the very least, the concentration you need to do to make such things happen in your dreams could create or strengthen an obsession, making it harder to refrain from acting out the fantasy in real life. That is dangerous!

Except for that weakness, Lucid Dreams in 30 Days is a useful and interesting book and a real bargain. I recommend giving it a try.