Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self [Paperback]

I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in lucid dreams. I've read nearly every book about lucid dreaming and I can say without hesitation this book is one of the best.

There are plenty of how-to books geared toward readers who seek to experience lucid dreams for the first time. While this book contains some techniques for that purpose, it offers so much more than that. Robert Waggoner takes lucid dreaming to a whole new level. Through his investigation of the profound inner awareness ever-present in our dreams, he demonstrates the vast potential for exploration and personal growth available to us lucid dreaming. This aspect of the book resonated deeply with me because it echoes my current approach to dreaming.

It is rare to find a book that approaches lucid dreaming from this angle, especially one that so thoroughly details the ways in which the dreamer can explore the hidden -- and often meaningful -- aspects of the dream. I wish this book had been around years ago when I first began my lucid dreaming practice.

Waggoner's enthusiasm for dreaming is evident on every page. Whether you are an experienced lucid dreamer or new to lucid dreaming, I recommend adding this to your personal library.

I've read my fair share of books about lucid dreaming and there are certainly better how-to books, but I'm glad that this isn't another how-to book. No other book on lucid dreaming has fascinated and inspired me as much as this one.

Before I read this book I just saw my lucid dreams as a playground where I could live out my fantasies. Now it's so much more than that. It feels like I've just started out on a great adventure into the unknown.

All the others that gave this book five stars have said it better than me, this really is a great book. This book has earned it's place in my lucid dreaming library, next to Stephen LaBerge's books. But if you're a beginner and want to learn step by step how to have lucid dreams, I recommend that you buy Steven LaBerge's book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming instead. If you can afford it, buy both books. They complement each other.

"Lucid Dreaming, Gateway to the Inner Self," by Robert Waggoner. Robert Waggoner guides you through his own personal learning experiences of over 30 years, as a trained psychologist, blazing a self-energizing path to enlightenment and advanced state of awareness. There is at least one additional chapter I would like to see Waggoner add to this easy-to-read page turner, the impact of the internet. The advent of the internet enables the most esoteric dream images and experiences to now be field-tested against our collective reality and knowledge base by the individual, as soon as one wakes up. The result of field-testing through the internet leads quickly to the transformational profound discovery that factual information that exists in our reality is knowable and instantly attainable merely through seeking it. The mass experience of internet confirmation of places, ideas, theories, and concepts holds the potential to quickly alter a species into an entire new level of consciousness and understanding.

Expect much more from Robert Waggoner's generous and giving spirit in which he writes. His easy to read writing style focuses on reader understanding. I'm hooked.

All my physicists and scientists friends are encouraged to read his Chapter 12 with an open mind. Page 153, Waggoner quotes a passage from Jane Roberts in her 1977 book, " The `Unknown' Reality " as Waggoner discusses discoveries made by scientists from many fields through their focused lucid dream explorations in which they set about to find scientific answers to frontier level questions of science through the lucid dream experience:

The trouble is that many in the sciences do not comprehend that there is an inner reality. It is not only as valid as the exterior one, but it is the origin for it. It is the world that offers you answers, solutions, and would reveal many of the blueprints that exist behind the world of your experience.

The true art of dreaming is a science long forgotten by your world. Such an art, pursued, trains the mind in a new kind of consciousness - one that is equally at home in either existence, well-grounded and secure in each. Almost anyone can become a satisfied and productive amateur in this art-science; but its true fulfillment takes years of training, a strong sense of purpose, and a dedication - as does any true vocation.

To some extent, a natural talent is a prerequisite for such a true dream-art scientist. A sense of daring, exploration, independence, and spontaneity is required. Such a work is a joy. There are some such people who are quite unrecognized by your societies, because the particular gifts involved are given zero priority. But the talent still exists...

A practitioner of this ancient art learns first of all how to become conscious in normal terms, while in the sleep state...

The true scientists understands that he must probe the interior and not the exterior universe; he will comprehend that he cannot isolate himself for a reality of which he is necessarily a part, and that to do so presents at best a distorted picture. In quite true terms, your dreams and the trees outside of your windows have a common denominator: they both spring from the withinness of consciousness."

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