By Michael Talbot

Training Yourself To Dream About Past Lives

Once you are able to remember your dreams, you are ready to start programming them to tell you about your past lives. Many people are surprised to discover that programming a dream or getting a dream to answer a particular question is a remarkably easy process. It is also a very ancient practice. In her book Creative Dreaming, psychologist and dream researcher Dr. Patricia Garfield notes that techniques for programming dreams to answer specific questions have been found in Egyptian records dating from 3000 B.C. The ancient Assyrians called the practice istiqara, and among the ancient Greeks it was known as “dream incubation.”

Many modern researchers have also developed methods for “incubating” dreams. Although devoid of the mythological jargon that accompanied ancient techniques, the essence of these techniques remain the same. Inducing a dream about one of your past lives (or about any matter on which you desire dream guidance) involves three basic steps.

Step 1:  After you have performed your nightly dream relaxation technique, spend some time thinking about what you want the dream to tell you and consider carefully the various possible answers you may receive. For example, you may want the dream to show you a past-life scene that you would like to become reacquainted with. Or you may want a dream that will show you an undiscovered past-life talent.

Step 2:  Once you know what you want the dream to tell you, formulate your request in one clear and simple statement. You should always be careful to tell your unconscious mind that you do not wish to unearth any past-life memories that will be too traumatic or painful for you to deal with. Once I made the error of asking a dream to tell me about a particular past-life injury without adding this qualifier and found myself tossing and turning for a week with vivid nightmares of how I had died during a 12th-century Persian war.

Because of this possibility, before asking a particular question, you can ask that your chosen subject is a safe one for you to dream about. Or you can simply couch your question in a way that will rule out a too-painful answer. For example, such a request might be phrased: “Tonight I would like to dream about an unpainful past life in which I knew my current husband.” Or, “Tonight I would like to dream about an unpainful past life which explains my current religious concerns.”

Step 3:  On retiring, after you have placed yourself in a state of relaxation, repeat the request several times aloud and focus on it as you drift off to sleep.

The next morning when you awake—or during the night if you wake following a dream—write down any dream experiences that you have had, no matter how cryptic. Remember that although many past-life dreams will be clear and straight-forward, a few, like van Waveren’s dream about the judge with the nine diamonds suspended beneath his arm, will be expressed in the sometimes daunting symbolic language of the unconscious. If, following the dream-inducing exercise you have a vivid or moving dream, but at first it does not seem to pertain to your question, meditate upon it and let it incubate in your conscious mind. Look beneath its literal level and try to determine whether it has any allegorical meaning. If you still cannot figure out what it means, ask your dreaming self for further guidance.

After trying the above exercise, if you do not have immediate success, try it again, making sure that when you ask for a particular dream you are completely relaxed and are indeed focusing your thoughts intently on the request. If you still do not have success, try modifying the exercise in some way. For example, before going to bed, spend some time thinking about why you are asking that particular question, and what you might gain by knowing the answer. Even write a paragraph or two in your dream journal about your expectations. By spending this time focusing consciously on your request, you will increase the likelihood of impressing your desire in your unconscious mind.

Before going to bed, you might even spend some time imagining that you are already in the midst of your requested dream and actually visualizing what you expect to see. If you do not know what to expect visually from a requested past-life dream, imagine instead the emotions you anticipate experiencing, and be sure to emphasize positive reactions, such as feelings of calm, increased understanding, and joy.

Do not expect all past-life dream experiences to be visual reenactments or even symbolic scenes. After programming myself to have a past-life dream, I have had dreams that contained no visual scenes at all, but consisted entirely of auditory experiences in the form of disembodied voices telling me the answers to my questions. I’ve also had dreams in which I was presented the information in written form. For example, a few years back I met a well-known Jamaican actress. The moment we were introduced, we were both swept with a powerful feeling of familiarity, a sense that we had known each other for a long, long time. We became instant good friends, and although we didn’t discuss it at the time, we later learned that we both shared a conviction that we had known each other in a previous life.

About two years after our meeting a talented psychic was giving me a reading and suddenly started to describe my actress friend in detail—her life-style, emotional temperament, physical appearance—everything. He even described the nature of our friendship, the subjects we tended to talk about, and the things we shared in common; then he told me that the first time we were friends was in a life in the 1700s in a French fort somewhere in what is now the eastern United States. He also told me many other things that seemed to shed new light on the nature and intricacies of our current friendship.

My curiosity piqued, I decided to program a dream to see if it could tell me more about this revelation, and that evening while I slept, I had a dream that I was flying through a universe that was filled with nothing but an ocean of words, all suspended motionless in space. The firmament of this cosmos of words was not dark, but white, so that all of the floating words stood out sharply, and as I zoomed through this three-dimensional dictionary, I suddenly approached one word that filled my entire screen of vision, Onondaga. I did not know what the word meant at the time, but I wrote it down in my dream journal. When I researched the matter the next day, I found that Onondaga is the name of a lake in Syracuse, New York, and it was the site of Fort St. Marie de Gannentaha, an old French post and one of the area’s first settlements.

How To Continue A Dream Once You Are Awake

If you have a past-life dream but do not understand what it is telling you, you have several options. You can simply make a note of it in your past-life journal (see how to keep a past life journal here) then wait until further information turns up that helps you make sense of it or you can request further information to come through your dreams. You can use the dream as the subject of a past-life meditation, or you can continue the dream once you are awake by employing a technique devised by Jung and known as “active imagination.”

In active imagination a person is completely awake but enters a relaxed state and then visualizes an evocative image or scene from a dream that he desires to know more about. Then, without any conscious interference, the visualizer simply allows the dream image to do what it will, growing and changing in whatever way its own internal processes dictate. Active imagining is a sort of conscious form of dreaming. Or, as British psychiatrist Anthony Storr puts it, it is “a state of reverie in which judgment [is] suspended but consciousness preserved.”

To continue a dream by employing active imagination, set aside approximately half an hour. Find a comfortable place and enter a state of relaxation. Once you have quieted your thoughts and feel completely relaxed, visualize the past-life dream you wish to explore further, and once again conjure up every detail you remember about the dream. You might also want to have a tape recorder present so that you do not have to interrupt your active imagining process by taking notes. Then, once you have as vivid a recreation of the dream image as you can muster, simply sit back and allow the image to do whatever it wants. Remember also to follow your impulses.

For example, if you are visualizing the image of an 18th-century Austrian ballroom and you find that you suddenly have an urge to go through a doorway at the opposite end of the room, allow your imaginary self to go through the doorway. However, don’t consciously try to anticipate what you are going to find there. Just sit back and allow your imagination to roam freely in any direction that it wishes. Similarly, don’t be concerned if the ballroom suddenly becomes a boat, or if some inanimate object like a statue or a grandfather clock starts talking to you or giving you advice. Remember always that the language of inner experience is a symbolic one.

Jung also encouraged his patients to draw and paint their active imaginings, and this is another approach that you might try.

Once you have actively imagined a sequence of scenes or impressions, study them and see if any particular themes or messages pop out at you. Just as with dreams, do not automatically assume that the information you glean from active imagining is a literal transcript of one of your past lives. It may be, or it may be a symbolic message from your unconscious, or even a stream of allegorical images pertaining to a range of psychological events taking place in your mind. Whatever the case, concentrate on the scene or image that strikes you as the most meaningful and see what its overall message is telling you. If you find, for example, you see an image of many people starving, examine yourself and see if your unconscious mind is actually trying to tell you that there is some part of you that is starving. Similarly, if you see an image of Marilyn Monroe, do not automatically assume that you have some sort of past-life association with Marilyn Monroe. Instead, ask yourself what Marilyn Monroe represents to you on an archetypal or symbolic level, and see if that image helps you unravel the message your unconscious is giving you. Once you feel that you have deciphered such a sequence of images, write them down in your past-life journal as another possible area wiped off your past-life fresco.

In addition to being a tool for unraveling past-life dreams, active imagination has many other applications as well. Jung encouraged his patients to use it as a way of establishing a consistent and continuing dialogue with their unconscious minds—an ongoing process that Jung felt was a vital part of every human being’s daily life.

Lucid Dreaming

Another dreaming technique that can be used to unearth past-life information, but which is more difficult to master, is “lucid dreaming,” or the ability to be awake in one’s dreams. In a lucid dream, not only are you completely conscious of the fact that you are dreaming, but you can also use that awareness to direct and control the subject matter of the dream. I have only been able to program myself to have a few past-life lucid dreams, but I count them among the most profound experiences in my life. Thus, in spite of the difficulty of mastering the ability, lucid dreaming is still a method worth exploring.

Like many of the techniques offered here, lucid dreaming is a very ancient practice. In Tibet the ability to be awake in one’s dreams was considered prerequisite to spiritual advancement and was known as the Yoga of the Dream State or Mi-lam. In his book The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet, the distinguished Orientalist and translator of the I Ching John Blofeld states, “In this yoga, the adept is taught to enter the dream state at will, to explore its characteristics and return to the waking state without any break in his stream of normal consciousness. Thereby he discovers the illusory nature of both states and learns how to die … and to be reborn without loss of memory.”

Although researchers in the Western world have been studying lucid dreaming for at least a century, it has only been in the past several years that this curious mental state has really come into its own among members of the scientific community. In 1981 the Association for the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep acknowledged lucid dreaming as a phenomenon worthy of scientific scrutiny by allowing a number of papers to be presented on the subject, and since then increasing numbers of researchers have been drawn to it.

Techniques for Inducing Lucid Dreams

Before you can learn how to induce a past-life lucid dream, it is first necessary to learn how to have lucid dreams in general. After learning how to remember your dreams, one technique is simply to request a lucid dream during your nightly dream-programming session. This can be accomplished by telling yourself, “Tonight while I am dreaming, I am going to realize that I am dreaming.” As with all dream requests, this sentence should be meditated upon and repeated several times with conviction.

In his book Lucid Dreaming—an excellent sourcebook on both the history and current scientific status of lucid dreaming—Stanford University psychologist Stephen LaBerge offers an alternative method that he arrived at as the result of his research at the Stanford University Sleep Laboratory. LaBerge, one of the modern pioneers in lucid dreaming research, calls his method the Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams or MILD. In spite of its somewhat intimidating name, LaBerge notes that MILD is based on nothing more complex or esoteric “than our ability to remember that there are actions we wish to perform in the future.” After stressing that a powerful desire to have a lucid dream is essential, LaBerge outlines the procedure in four simple steps.

1. At some point in the early morning when you have awakened spontaneously from a dream, quickly go over every detail of the dream in your mind and repeat the process several times until you have completely memorized the dream.

2. Then, while you are still lying in bed, repeat to yourself several times, “Next time I’m dreaming, I want to remember to recognize that I’m dreaming.”

3. After repeating this phrase, picture yourself back in the dream you just finished dreaming, only imagining that this time you realize that you are dreaming.

4. Keep the visualization in your mind until it is clearly fixed or you fall back asleep.

If all goes well, LaBerge asserts that by following this procedure you will find yourself lucid in another dream (although not necessarily one that resembles the previous dream).

German psychologist Paul Tholey suggests that you can induce lucid dreams simply by getting into the habit of asking yourself, “Am I dreaming?” five or ten times a day. By habitually asking yourself whether you are dreaming during your waking hours, you greatly increase the likelihood that you will ask yourself the same question while you are dreaming, and by adhering to this procedure, Tholey asserts that most people will have a lucid dream within a month.

One trick I use to help me stick to this regimen is to write the question on little note cards and place the cards in various places I glance at often during the day. For example, you can place a card on the mirror in the bathroom cabinet where you’ll see it when you brush your teeth, above the sink where you do dishes, on your desk or in a desk drawer that you open and shut frequently, on a nightstand, on a bookmark, on a frequently used notebook and, if you are inventive, you might even want to tape a small reminder of some sort somewhere on the face of your watch.

Tholey’s suggestion is not new. In his book Teachings of Tibetan Yoga, the Buddhist scholar Garma C. C. Chang cites a passage from an 11th-century Tibetan manuscript that offers a similar technique for inducing a lucid dream. After first advising the adept to cultivate a powerful desire to become conscious in the dream state, and to stay away from intoxicants and other substances that pollute the body, the manuscript states, “To think continuously in the daytime that all one sees, hears, touches … is in a dream, will greatly increase one’s chances of recognizing dreams at night.”

Although not couched in the form of a question, the end result of such an exercise—constantly reinforcing an introspective attitude toward the possible dreamlike nature of an experience—remains the same.

In his now famous series of books detailing his conversations with a Yaqui Indian brujo or sorcerer named don Juan, the anthropologist Carlos Castaneda reports that the Yaqui Indians also speak of a special type of “dreaming” that bears a striking resemblance to lucid dreaming. As don Juan informed Castaneda, “‘Dreaming’ entailed cultivating a peculiar control over one’s dreams to the extent that the experiences undergone in them and those lived in one’s waking hours acquired the same pragmatic valence. The sorcerers’ allegation was that under the impact of ‘dreaming’ the ordinary criteria to differentiate a dream from reality became imperative.”

The technique don Juan taught Castaneda to use to achieve such a lucid state was to associate constantly looking at his hands with realizing that he was dreaming. The point was, of course, that by inextricably linking the two activities together in his mind, sooner or later Castaneda would glance at his hands in a dream and trigger the same realization. Castaneda reports that although acquiring lucidity in a dreaming state was difficult to master, he eventually became successful by employing this method.

What To Do If You Have Problems

For some people, lucid dreaming is a relatively easy talent to acquire, but for most it takes practice. If you try lucid dreaming but have no success, there are several things you can do. One is to set your alarm for very early in the morning and perform a lucidity-programming meditation then. Research has shown that lucid dreaming is a much easier state to attain after several hours of sleep, and most lucid dreams occur in the early morning.

For those who are having difficulty, Garfield suggests thinking more about dreams during the day, concentrating on trying to recognize what sort of rules distinguish your waking experiences from those you have come to expect in your dreams. Again, because we are prone to dreaming about what occupies our waking thoughts, this practice has a tendency to heighten dream awareness during sleep.

The 11th-century Tibetan manuscript cited by Chang asserts that if a person is still not successful after many attempts, this is an indication that “his mind is full of distracting thoughts, or his yearning to do so is weak,” and these two problems must be remedied before success can be expected.

How To Induce A Past Life Lucid Dream

Although there is little modern research connecting the lucid-dreaming state to past-life recall, researchers agree that you can choose and direct virtually anything you wish to occur in a lucid dream, so past-life recall is not precluded. In my own past-life lucid dreams I have employed various techniques.

For example, in one, on finding myself awake and in the midst of a lucid dream, I merely willed myself to go back to a past-life scene and found myself whisked back through time on a vivid past-life memory experience.

In another, on awakening in the dream I found myself in the presence of another individual, an indistinct but human-shaped energy presence that emanated a feeling of great wisdom and compassion, and I asked this entity to show me one of my past lives. At this request the entity took me by the hand and literally flew me through the clouds and back through time. It then proceeded to explain to me what I was seeing and answered my questions as we visited a scene from one of my previous incarnations.

The key to turning a lucid dream into a past-life lucid dream thus appears to be simply to will it to happen. However, if you find yourself in a lucid state, it is very important that you keep your thoughts positive and focused. In one lucid dream experience, while I was flying over a beautiful mountain lake, I suddenly became frightened at the realization that all I had to do was imagine a sea serpent beneath the waters of the lake, and one would materialize. Sure enough, as soon as this thought passed through my mind, a sea serpent started to materialize in the depths of the sparkling clear waters, and like a dutiful Senoi child, I had to suppress my fear quickly and will the sea serpent to vanish before I could continue.

The lesson inherent in this is that during a past-life lucid dream you should always be on your guard to keep extraneous thoughts and impulses from steering the dream off in other directions. I feel that it is important to point out that the only time I have not encountered this danger during a past-life lucid dream is when I have been guided through the experience by the aforementioned guardian figures. Other researchers have also commented on the apparent importance of such dream guides. For example, Garfield reports that, although it has not yet become a part of modern lucid dream research, the concept of conjuring up a protective guardian figure can be found in many older and culturally diverse schools of thought. Among the native Americans such “dream friends” were essential before the seeker could undertake extensive journeys through the world of dreams. The Ojibwa referred to them as manidos (“guardian spirits”). In Tibet they were referred to as viras (“heroes”) and dakinis (“fairies”), and every adept was advised to make friends with one of several before traveling deeper into the varied planes of the dream state. The Senoi call them simply “father” or “child-friend,” and although every Senoi dreamer cultivates at least one or two, those who are lucky enough to make the acquaintance of many such guardian figures are considered to be great shamans. It is intriguing to note that the Senoi believe that a guardian figure need not be human in appearance to provide such protection but can be equally effective even if it assumes the shape of a natural object such as a rock or flower.

Thus, once you have reached the point where you can induce your own past-life lucid dream, instead of venturing off on your own, you may always want to conjure up a guide or dream friend to assist you.

Excerpt from Your Past Lives

See Part I here.