Dreaming Wide Awake - by David Jay Brown (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A detailed guide to mastering lucid dreaming for physical and emotional healing, enhanced creativity, and spiritual awakening

- Offers methods to improve lucid dreaming abilities and techniques for developing superpowers in the dream realm

- Explains how to enhance dreaming with supplements, herbs, and psychedelics

- Explores the ability of lucid dreamers to communicate with the waking realm and the potential for shared lucid dreaming and access to our unconscious minds

In a lucid dream, you "awaken" within your dream and realize you are dreaming. With this extraordinary sense of awakening comes a clear perception of the continuity of self between waking and sleeping and the ability to significantly influence what happens within the dream, giving you the opportunity to genuinely experience anything without physical or social consequences. In this way, lucid dreaming offers therapeutic opportunities for fantasy fulfillment, fear confrontation, and releasing the trauma of past experiences. With development and practice, lucid dreaming can provide a powerful path to greater awareness, heightened creativity, spiritual awakening, and communication with the vast interconnected web of cosmic consciousness.

In this detailed guide to mastering the practice of lucid dreaming, David Jay Brown draws from his more than 20 years' experience using these techniques and his interactions with dozens of experts on consciousness, physics, dreaming, and entheogens, such as Stanley Krippner, Rupert Sheldrake, Stephen LaBerge, Robert Waggoner, Dean Radin, Terence McKenna, and many others. He explores the intimate relationship between lucid dreaming, shamanic journeying, visionary plants, and psychedelic drugs and how they are used for healing and spiritual development. Offering methods for improving both lucid dreaming and shamanic journeying abilities, he explains how to enhance dreaming with oneirogens, supplements, herbs, and psychedelics and offers techniques for developing superpowers in the dream realm.

Summarizing the scientific research on lucid dreaming, Brown explores the ability of lucid dreamers to communicate with people in the waking realm and the potential for dream telepathy, shared lucid dreaming, and access to the vast unconscious regions of our minds, opening up a path that takes us beyond dreaming and waking to dreaming wide awake.

Review Quotes

"A fascinating read. With curiosity and heart, David Jay Brown invites the reader to explore a unique fusion of shamanism, psychedelics, and lucid dreaming. Watch the doors between the worlds swing open!"-- "Clare Johnson, Ph.D., author of Breathing in Colour and Dreamrunner"

"David Jay Brown's book is a brilliant synthesis of current research, ancient and indigenous wisdom, and extensive personal experience. Based on a wealth of hard data, historical research, and dream diaries, Brown deftly ties together not only lucid dreams but also similar events from other altered states. While the book centers on lucid dreams, it incorporates parallel experiences in psychedelic use and shamanism, giving us, perhaps, the first sophisticated synthesis for exploring difficult to access realms of consciousness. Filled with practical and doable suggestions on how to enhance lucid dreaming and how to maximize its healing effects, Dreaming Wide Awake is a splendid, well-written, revelatory, yet pragmatic look at the dreaming mind."-- "James Fadiman Ph.D., microdose researcher and author of The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe"

"Dreaming Wide Awake takes you on a psychedelic romp through the beauty, mystery, and healing potential of the 'conscious' unconscious. Well researched and written, it has something for every inner explorer."-- "Robert Waggoner, author of Lucid Dreaming Gateway to the Inner Self and coauthor of Lucid Dreaming,"

"Encyclopedic yet personal, rigorous yet highly accessible, Brown's book is enormously successful. The author covers every conceivable theoretical and practical aspect of lucid dreaming: from neuroscience to shamanism, anthropology to the occult, ethnobotany to telepathy, the electronic to the pharmacologic. In so doing, he brings clarity and relevance to this mysterious and potentially highly influential consciousness-altering tool."-- "Rick Strassman, M.D., clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico Sch"

"For millennia, many tribal shamans have used lucid dreaming and psychedelic plants to obtain information that they have used in helping and healing members of their community. In this groundbreaking book, David Jay Brown has brought together findings from contemporary science to demonstrate the similarity between these two types of altered consciousness and how the insights they provide can help alleviate nightmares, restore health, hasten recovery from injuries, and even yield creative insights. Dreaming Wide Awake may evoke a new field of research, both experimental and applied, that will enhance human potentials in ways that have been too long neglected."-- "Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., coauthor of Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them"

"Kapow. Brown's Dreaming Wide Awake connects the multidimensional dots that are strewn throughout the tiered cosmos. He goes far and deep into the mysteries of the dreaming mind and, even more impressively, does this with his feet planted on the ground and armed with a skeptical but compassionate outlook."-- "Ryan Hurd, coeditor of Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep and author of Drea"

"With his customary precision and style, David Jay Brown illuminates the dreamtime . . . and he tells you how you can work and play in that dream space. An important book for true dreamers."-- "R. U. Sirius, musician, digital culture iconoclast, and author of Transcendence: The Disinformation"

About the Author

David Jay Brown holds a master's degree in psychobiology from New York University. A former neuroscience researcher at the University of Southern California, he has written for Wired, Discover, and Scientific American, and his news stories have appeared on The Huffington Post and CBS News. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The New Science of Psychedelics and Frontiers of Psychedelic Consciousness. He lives in Ben Lomond, California.