I want to get this out of the way quickly: this course is not about lucid dreaming. It doesn’t contain tips for lucid dreaming. I’m not a fan of intentional lucid dreaming. I think that a focus on lucid dreaming interferes with the kind of dream work we’re doing in this course.

To explain my rationale a bit: the style of mythosomatic dream return this course focuses on operates on a few core assumptions. One of those assumptions is that the unconscious mind will do what needs to be done if we let it. If we stop constricting, constraining, ignoring, and otherwise belittling the unconscious and its expressions, it will intuitively carry out its processes through us, and we can help those processes along.

There’s a core value here, the humility of the conscious mind before the unconscious.

In intentional lucid dreaming, that value is mostly reversed: the idea is that the unconscious mind (via our dreams) should be utilized and guided by the conscious mind — or even be a playground for it.

Rather than giving the unconscious more space and energy to do what needs to be done, in lucid dreaming we try to complete the manifest destiny of the conscious mind by conquering our dreams, taking them under the ego’s control and dominion.

Of course, lucid dreams happen on their own from time to time, and there are definitely positive ways to lean into them and interact with them. But the desire for intentionally cultivating lucid dreams is almost always connected to an egoic Manifest Destiny that interferes with the structure of mythosomatic dream return.

For more of my thoughts on this, watch my video here.