Werner Heisenberg said: “What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Of course this is also true of ourselves, situations, even, it would seem, dreams. For in a dream, we may form the question ‘am I dreaming?’; and this question usually leads to a branch where we awaken, continue dreaming as previously, or acquire some degree of lucidity (awareness of dreaming in dreaming). What we are able to ascertain through perception and thought has a great deal to do with our methods. The dreaming situation turns out to be particularly instructive, in a variety of simultaneous senses.

Of course I am most interested in discovering what forms of questions and activities reveal or activate opportunities for lucidity while awake. Or while relating with others. In my own relations with the streams of my ongoing thoughts and emotions. Having had an experience which I might liken to waking lucidity, or at least that might stand as a prototype, it is not so much that I ache to restore it as it is that my ordinary waking experience seems relatively impoverished in comparison. Lucidity beckons with promises of an undiscovered country close at hand, where cascades of fascination and prodigy replace the relatively passive mentalities we most often evince. Where otherwise nascent capacities for insight, creativity and sensing are stimulated into constant emergence and development.