Dear Dreamers,

Let’s consider: lucid euphoria, lucid ecstasy, and the lucid afterglow.

A common and noticeable effect of becoming consciously aware in dreams is what you could call lucid euphoria.

At that moment of realizing “This is a dream,” you often experience a giddy feeling, like some type of primal, creative energy is now coursing through you. When you couple that feeling, that energy, with the awareness that you now exist in the mental realm of dreams, it creates a noticeable lucid euphoria. You feel newly empowered with a yet to be expressed brilliance, as if truly knowing everything actually is possible. A new world opens to you and anxiously awaits your creative breath.

In waking life, it seems rare to experience this lucid euphoria. You might have to conjure up memories from childhood – those moments of mental or physical struggle, when suddenly, without knowing exactly how, you “got” it! Sitting in the third grade, you spontaneously “got” how to divide numbers. Or in band, you finally “got” how to blow into your flute! Those brief flashes of insight and mastery that erupted within your mind – and gave you a brief sense of euphoria and sudden mastery. Those moments hint at the dreamer’s feeling of lucid euphoria.

But why lucid euphoria? I recall reading excerpts of an early panel discussion on lucid dreaming at the Association for the Study of Dreams when Ernest Hartmann, M.D. brought up that question. Why would lucid dreaming result in a sense of joy, of euphoria? No one had an answer.

As I see it, there may be any number of explanations, so let me express a few possible contenders.

Neurologically, a sense of euphoria may result from the neuro-chemical splash of mixing the dreaming brain with the lucid (more-waking) brain. The addition of conscious awareness to the dreaming brain may spark new cells, new brain areas to activate, as new mental powers come online. Science has noticed that the dreaming brain operates differently than the waking brain. As Richard C. Wilkerson notes:

“Generally speaking, when we go to sleep the brain becomes deactivated, desensitized to outer sounds and sensations and switches over from an aminergic neurochemical system that keeps us alert and focused on the outer world to a cholinergic system that allows for relaxation. We are sleeping. Then something strange occurs, the aminergic system stops almost completely and the cholinergic system becomes hyperactive” (Electric Dreams, March 2003).

If my conjecture is correct, the awareness of lucidity prompts both systems into activation, and you suddenly get a joining of brain powers, which the lucid dreamer feels as lucid euphoria. Of course, that is simply a conjecture on my part. To my knowledge, no scientist has broached or considered this point.

On a mental level, lucid euphoria may be a function of moving from a reactive mode of being chased by dream figures or accepting bizarre situations to suddenly switching to a more conscious, more powerful and deliberate mode of lucid awareness. By gaining a sense of directive control, the lucid dreamer feels a sense of euphoria – now that he or she can consciously direct the dreaming to his or her liking.

On a spiritual level, I have only read one comment pertaining to what I call lucid euphoria -- and that was in the writings of Jane Roberts. She suggested that the giddy sense of joy reflected the Self’s awareness of having accessed the larger storehouse of its inner abilities. Our waking self rarely accessed its fuller abilities, she maintained. When lucid, all of those abilities are activated more directly, and the dreamer senses the additional power inherent in those abilities as a type of joy.

Now others may point to a psychological explanation, such as lucid euphoria represents the ego inflation that naturally results when mixing the waking self with the unconscious self. Perhaps a strict Jungian might say that. Or (thinking like a behaviorist now), lucid euphoria results from having been rewarded in previous lucid dreams; so the joy reflects the conditioned response of expecting the same playful fun as in other lucid dreams.

However it arrives, lucid euphoria truly exists. It loftily carries many lucid dreamers forward, who feel its energy as a welcoming to the dreaming awareness.

—Robert Waggoner

P.S.: Next blog, we’ll talk more as we move into the space of lucid ecstasy, and then move onto the after-effects of lucid dreaming, or the lucid afterglow. See you then . . .