By Ian Jaydid
I began lucid dreaming spontaneously around the age of nineteen. For approximately the next fifteen years I would enter these intense, highly bizarre states of consciousness on a nearly nightly basis – often for hours on end. After my first experience of “waking up” within a dream there was only one thing I was certain of: whatever had just happened to me was unusual and significant, although I had no clue what that might mean. As the months and years went on, my nightly journeys grew ever more strange
and elaborate, and my questions only mounted. Some of these environments I was entering appeared quite earthly, others completely alien – and some were a bizarre mix of the two. Many of these lucid landscapes seemed to be inhabited by characters as sentient and intelligent as myself, and disturbingly enough, often every bit as capable of independent thought as the people in my waking life. Each experience brought up more questions than it offered answers, but I slowly learned tricks to maintain focus and control in these realms much in the same way a child has to learn to walk.
This phenomena became so jarring to my sense of perspective and self that soon my routine and worldly concerns took a backseat to my thirst for knowledge on the subject. At the time, the internet wasn’t yet a “thing,” so my success with finding reliable 
resources depended heavily on whether I managed to find articles and books by authors with real experience and insight. I poured through what little lucid dreaming research I could find, I read thousands of personal accounts, and studied a number of spiritual and religious views on the subject – I even discovered a small handful of scientists and physicians brave enough to discuss it openly. I eventually found that, as with any other phenomena that seem to border on the paranormal, I had to sort through heaps of dogma and wishful thinking to get to the more grounded, practical information I so desperately craved.
After many years of research and hundreds more personal experiences later, I began formulating a few, essential “truths” this phenomena pointed back to over and over again. One of the major lessons lucidity repeatedly exposed me to could best be summarized as: The level of clarity and focus of the environments I was engaged in was highly dependent on the quantity of my attention at my disposal.
What does that mean exactly? For me it meant that the more undistracted, undivided awareness I brought to the dream determined how “real” my lucid world literally appeared to me, as well as how much control I could exert over it.
Specifically, at the lower end of the spectrum of awareness, I’ve had lucid dreams where I was only barely cognizant of the fact I was dreaming; I was still somewhat “caught up” in the storyline the dream was presenting. These visions were “unstable,” objects were dim and out of focus, and I exerted very little influence over how the dream scenarios played out. The way I see it, when too much of my attention is directed on solving some “dream dilemma,” I don’t have enough of it to keep my reality focused or “solid.” However, on
the higher end of the spectrum where I’ve brought pure, undiluted attention to the dreamscape, I’ve been treated to environments that looked, felt, sounded, and even smelled somehow more real than anything I’ve experienced in my waking life. It’s as if the full onslaught of my present-moment awareness actively “reaches out” to make my dreamscape tightly focused and intensely hyper-real. I’ve run my hand over intricately carved stonework that was cool to the touch in such visions, where I was left in utter awe at the high-definition detail and textures spread out before me.
In short, the more undistracted attention we bring to our lucid dreams, the more clarity and control we enjoy in them. We might assume this dynamic is only true for dreams, which (we generally assume) are taking place safely in our heads. But does this 
“solidifying” quality our consciousness seems to possess only work in our dreams? We’ve been taught to consider taking in stimuli from the waking world around us as more of a one-way street where we are simply passive observers, but in lucid dreams we find our experience of our environment is far more a relationship where the very power of our attention is playing an active role in how “real” our surroundings are. Some of what I’m describing about the lucid realm may sound incredible, but to those of you with firsthand experience likely know exactly what I’m referring to.
Which brings us back to our waking reality: What does any of this relationship between attention and clarity have to do with our actual, daily life – here, in the physical world? Modern physics seems to suggest the answer is, well, everything. The idea of quantum mechanics often sounds so complicated and confusing, many of us run for the hills at the
very mention of it, but keep in mind that when we talk about this area of study, we are simply referring to how our world operates at the particle level; the atoms, the electrons, the photons and protons: the tiny bits that make up literally everything in the cosmos. And, strangely enough, what particle researchers have been discovering about the nature of “reality” seems to be the exact same dynamics I’ve just laid out: Attention literally pulls the world into focus. Furthermore, we’re even finding that more attention means more focus.
Without getting too bogged down in the math or the complex details, let’s take a brief look at how awareness itself impacts the world from the physics’ perspective. If you recall your high school science class, you were taught that light can act as a wave or a 
particle. As students, we were just asked to memorize and accept that fact, but rarely were we asked to really consider just how strange that is. Stranger still, we’ve found that all of matter at the quantum level can act like a field of energy spread over an area of space (called a “wave”) or a highly localized “thing” that exists in one place at one time (a “particle.”) One way to think of this is to say that the particles that make up all the objects in our world can exist in an abstract field of energy, or they can be actual, solid “things.” And, here’s the punchline: Observation itself is a factor that can literally shift waves into particles.
You read that correctly: Our reality seems to exist in a “field of possibility,” but only when it is not being observed. Once a particle like an electron is formally measured or observed, only then does it become a particle. To be perfectly clear, physicists have conducted 
experiment after experiment which demonstrate single particles moving through tiny openings in screens where they behave like waves of energy; where a single particle moves through several openings at once – as long as nothing is observing the experiment take place. But once a device records the particle’s precise behavior everything changes: Only then does the particle behave like a normal object that exists in one place at a time. From Science Daily’s article, “Quantum Theory Demonstrated: Observation Affects Reality” on particle research conducted by Weizmann Institute Of Science:
“Once an observer begins to watch the particles going through the openings, the picture changes dramatically: if a particle can be seen going through one opening, then it’s clear it didn’t go through another. In other words, when under observation, electrons are being “forced” to behave like particles and not like waves. Thus the mere act of observation affects the experimental findings.”
This notion is illustrated – perhaps a little ominously – in the famous Schrödinger’s Cat 
thought experiment which imagines a cat locked inside a box along with an unpredictable device that may or may not release a poison and kill the poor beast. As long as we don’t open the box, there is no telling whether the cat is alive or dead. Now, ordinary common sense and reason dictates that the cat must either be alive or dead, right? This is not the case with our universe at the particle level.
This may sound like absolute science fiction, but these bizarre properties of our universe have been tested around the globe in every way imaginable. And if this doesn’t sound 
impossible enough, we’ve uncovered yet another layer to this dynamic in these wave-to-particle experiments: When the capacity of a device to observe particle behavior is increased, the less wave-like properties our particles exhibit. To quote the same article on the Weizmann Institute Of Science research above:
“The experiment revealed that the greater the amount of “watching,” the greater the observer’s influence on what actually takes place.” – Quantum Theory Demonstrated: Observation Affects Reality
So, this brings us back full circle, to perhaps one of the most valuable lessons lucid dreaming imparts to us: The level of clarity and focus of the environment we are engaged in is highly dependent on the quantity of our attention.
Sound familiar? Now, is it possible that these exact same dynamics we are uncovering both with lucidity practices and by particle physics is pure coincidence? Of course it is. 
But it’s irresponsible to cast these independent discoveries aside until we know for sure – especially when there is so much we don’t know about consciousness. I am not a scientist and certainly not a quantum physicist, but there is clearly a profound overlap here with my area of expertise. While I’ve not spent hundreds of hours in labs or science classrooms, I have spent years studying the one area that science is still scratching its head over: Consciousness. Consciousness is the one phenomenon that our friends in the anatomy, biology, neurophysiology and even physics departments don’t have an explanation for – not even a working hypothesis. They can’t say what it is, what it might be made of (if it’s even a proper “thing” at all) or where it might reside; i.e. they don’t understand its nature. But the one thing that modern physicists do agree on about consciousness is that it absolutely has an active hand in how the world around us takes shape. Literally. And more attention means more clarity.
My intention is to reach across the aisle and ask researchers to seriously consider that lucid dreamers and quantum physicists have a lot we could learn from each other. We are 
both discovering the exact same truths about the nature of awareness, we simply use different tools to explore reality, and a different language to describe our findings. Let’s work to be less suspicious of each other and engage in more open dialogue about our personal and objective findings on the topic of consciousness. This information concerns us all and if we are drawing the correct conclusions from our respective endeavors, the implications of the role our own awareness plays in our moment-by-moment experience of reality cannot and should not be ignored.
If you want to study some of these fascinating experiments discussed in this article in more detail, I suggest starting with theoretical physicist Brian Greene’s videos on The Double Slit Experiments or the research articles I quote above from Weizmann Institute Of Science. If you wish to really dig into the wildest implications of the Observation Effect on reality, pick up the novel inspired by my own lucidity experiences, “Tripping the Field”, an adventure through astral projection, shamanism and shapeshifting which takes place in a world manifested by consciousness.
Ian Jaydid
Author of “Tripping the Field”
See all of his art, cartoon and book projects at http://Ianjaydid.com
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