Sometimes I try to push my hand through the desk or wall. It is a wonderful feeling when you actually can push your hand through a solid object in a lucid dream. Your conscious lucidity makes this feel real - and, naturally, very weird!
... I know that I can't fly and that walls are solid. There should be no reason for me to continually question this. Unless you are a lucid dreamer!
Have you ever had a lucid dream?
The passage above is drawn from the essay Reality Checks: The Gateway to Lucid Dreams by Rebecca Turner. The "reality checks" method is one of many used to induce lucid dreams -- dreams in which we are "awake" in the sense of being consciously aware that we are dreaming.
Why would we want to cultivate the capacity to be lucid in our dreams? Well, for one, it's fun :) It's also a way of cultivating increased strength, clarity and flexibility of awareness; and brings up all kinds of interesting questions re: the nature of "reality" -- illustrated most famously, within the Taoist tradition, by Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream.
What's also interesting is that within the lives of the Taoist Immortals we find all kinds of stories of these beings doing things (e.g. flying) in their "waking state" that mostly we think are possible only within the "dream state." Challenging ourselves, within the context of lucid dreaming, to go beyond our perceived limitations -- to do things that we heretofore have considered "impossible" -- may be a way to create the pathways in consciousness, neural networks, or whatever, necessary as a foundation to one day be able in our waking world to perform the same feats -- as expressions of fully-awakened wisdom and power.
"There is no use trying", said Alice; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I dare say you haven't had much practice", said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day; Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."~ Lewis Carroll
Is cultivating the capacity to believe "impossible things" a mere frivolity -- something best reserved as a hobby, leaving the majority of our time and energy for the more important "realities" of life? Well, I dare say ... not! What our world needs now more than ever are visionaries -- people able to imagine "impossible" solutions to a whole variety of very challenging economic and environmental global problems -- which have remained impervious to our more habitual, conventional modes of thinking.
"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them."
~ Albert Einstein
So I say: let's become lucid dreamers -- dreaming into existence, together, a much more awakened world ...