Michael Langevin on Lucid Dreaming and Shamanic Journeys (Interview Archive)
The program runs as a sequence of exercises, with conversations threaded between them. A typical group has around 24 people, and two trainers (both articulate, both deeply versed in the material) draw them out, getting participants to describe what they went through and then push those experiences further. The work doesn't stop when the sun goes down. People are roused at intervals during the night, listening through headphones to the audio recordings, and afterward they field questions, the kind of prompting questions that help them make sense of what just happened and figure out how to read it.
By the close of the five days, nearly everyone, and often the whole room, comes away convinced that lucid dreaming opens up more of their waking life. The idea is to hold onto awareness inside a dream and then put it to use: solving a stubborn problem, traveling somewhere distant on the planet or, if you want to call it that, into other dimensions, improving ordinary parts of daily life, raising the bar on personal goals.
It's close to what shamans across Latin America practice. They reach for drumming, chanting, sometimes plant substances, anything to move a person into an altered state, and then they hand over methods for perceiving that state and finding your way through it.
I was once at a ceremony in Bolivia, and a man in the group with me had a son who was dying of something no doctor could name. During the ceremony, while in a lucid dreaming state, we traveled to see the boy. The father spoke to him and handed him a blue feather, telling him, "I believe this is meant to help you." In the moment it felt touching, and once we came back out of the ceremony it settled in memory as a nice experience, nothing more. Two days afterward I ran into the man again. He told me he had phoned his son, and the son brought up a blue feather on his own, unprompted. When the boy's mother had taken him in to the doctor, the doctor said the illness was gone.
Things like that are possible, and they can happen more than once in a while. It doesn't matter whether the route is a course at Monroe, time spent apprenticing with shamans, or simply your own commitment to widening your awareness. People manage to improve both the quality of their lives and the frequency of such unexplained turns. I've lived through versions of this many times over, and I've watched people climb out of fairly wretched circumstances into lives that were prosperous and genuinely glad, all by working with tools like these.
Erik: That's wonderful, really wonderful. For anyone who isn't familiar, the Amazonian plants you mentioned include San Pedro cactus and ayahuasca. There was one more as well. Could you say a bit about the different tribes and how their uses of these plants differ?