Laurel Clark, has been teaching metaphysics, including dreams and intuitive development since 1979.  A teacher, interfaith minister, and psi counselor, Laurel draws upon dreams and meditation for personal guidance and to aid students and clients.  This presentations is excerpted from The Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreams (edited by D. Barrett and P. Macnamara) and Laurel's upcoming book, Intuitive Dreaming.

Dream incubation is an ancient practice known in modern times for its use in healing.  Incubation means providing the proper conditions for something to grow; for example, incubating an egg so that a chick can hatch.  In the creative process, incubation refers to a time of subconscious reflection for an idea to come forth with knowledge beyond the scope of the conscious mind.

Properly incubated dreams produce answers and insights; provide guidance; and, like the ancient Asclepian dream temples, may result in healing dreams and messages.  The paper presents a metaphysical perspective of visualization principles and "universal law" that explains incubation as an interactive communication between conscious and subconscious mind.  Laurel gives specific steps for incubating dreams, examples from her own experience, and methods for PDC participants to experiment with and discuss.

Dr. Beverly (Kedzierski Heart) D'Urso, an "extraordinary" lucid dreamer all her life, has used her practical teaching called Lucid Dreaming/Lucid Living to give workshops and present at conferences for decades.  She completed her Masters, involving Cognitive Psychology, and her Ph.D. focusing on Artificial Intelligence, at Stanford University, where she also did lucid dreaming research with Dr. Stephen LaBerge.  Dr. D'Urso has over fifty publications and has done very well in many IASD/PDC contests.  She currently follows the "Diamond Approach" spiritual path of A.H. Almaas.  www.durso.org/beverly and www.wedreamnow.info

What if we actually "dream" while in the "waking" state?  Instead of labeling our waking state as distinct from our dreaming state, what if we look at everything we experience as "dreaming" and decide that our experiences differ only in our level of lucidity?  We could then continuously use lucidity techniques, and what we learned from sleep-state lucid dreaming to enhance our life.

In this session, we will discuss such lucidity techniques and lessons, and learn how to apply them in any state.  We will also inquire into whether we know or just believe we are or are not dreaming at any instant, so that we do not create disaster, nor miss out on experiencing the exhilarating creative and potent "magic" that lucid dreaming can bring to every moment.  By investigating our beliefs, assumptions, reactions, and judgments, we can keep them from restricting us.  When we don't resist our current internal state, find out where it comes from, and understand it, we can openly explore our questions and patterns, not from a constricted place of fear and limitation, but from an expanded place of clarity and truth.

Joy Fatooh (USA) has had a few dreams, one or two thoughts, a couple of ideas, and several musings.  She might have stories to tell.  Mostly, she'll listen.

Do we each have a little Border Patrol enforcing immigration laws between Awake and Asleep, checking whether Awareness is carrying a passport called "Lucidity"? 

Or is consciousness a vast, multidimensional continuum in which we move freely, naming and defining the states we visit only so we can describe them to our fellow travelers?

Here is a discussion with no border patrol.  As this conference draws to a close, come share your thoughts, stories, ideas and musings about what lucidity means to you...and where you can go with it.

This essay appears in a Russian book summarizing my work, thus this is its first appearance in English.  It is a research summary only, without examination of first person accounts.  A brief summary of research into individual differences associated with lucid dreaming is highlighted since my early work.  I also briefly summarize some of the induction research and applications work.  Research into lucid dreaming content and spiritual implications are also quickly highlighted.

Following a corporate career, Judy B. Gardiner set out to explore the bewildering images in her dreams.  Extensive research revealed explanations of science far beyond her waking knowledge.  In collaboration with the late Montague Ullman, they discovered that the bidirectional nature of dreaming simultaneously points inward to our personal concerns and outward to our planet.  This can be described as Cosmic Dreaming, in that it concerns us as members of a unified species.

Judy's presentation is excerpted from her recently published novel Lavender~An Entwined Adventure in Science and Spirit.  Inspired by a true story, Lavender is a unique study of the Dream as an unfolding process that reveals the transformational features of one's destiny.  The book's purpose is to dispatch a lifesaving message to humankind, while illustrating diverse functions of the Cosmic Dream:

* develops human potential

* invokes spiritual and cosmic connection; and

* alerts us to potential danger to the species

The presentation includes excerpts of an Introduction by Montague Ullman, and a chapter from the book entitled "Looking Through the Kaleidoscope."  Following the quest of Penelope, an unschooled, unscientific, and unexpected vehicle for higher truths, Lavender engages the reader in decoding dream-encrypted riddles and clues to a monolithic puzzle.

Janet Garrett (UK/Spain) has been interested in all aspects of dreams and dreaming for more than 20 years.  She attended her first PsiberDreaming Conference in 2004, and has worked backstage at the PDC since 2008.  Janet is also part of the team that produces IASD's Dream News.  In June 2011, she completed an MSc in Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University (UK), for which her master's thesis was on the topic of mutual dreaming.  Janet lives in Spain, where she leads study groups on dreams and psychology for other English-speaking ex-pats.

For my recently completed master's thesis, I attempted to update Jean Campbell's group dreaming research for an Internet experiment.  In my experiment, a group of eight dreamers, plus myself as facilitator, dreamed together in four dream sessions conducted over a period of eight weeks, with a different focus for each cycle.  In one session the dream focus was a target word transmission from a lucid dream; this presentation describes the results from this experimental cycle and suggests a role for lucid dreaming in psi dream research.

Lou Hagood, Ph.D. (USA) is a licensed psychoanalyst working with dreams one-on-one and in dream sharing groups for fifteen years.  He trained at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysts in New York.

Lou has led dreamsharing groups at the annual IASD conference and at the Institute for Noetic Sciences in New York, as well as presenting at several IASD conferences.

Dream incubation is one of my lucidity practices.  I used it to explore lucidity by asking what lucidity was to me, and got a vivid image in a dream.  Later I asked a follow-up question and got further clarification--all of which I will share and discuss.

Tony Hawkins

My earliest memories are of dreams suggestive of pre- or other-types-of existence.  Dreams informed my adult writing of epic novels and have now taken over from the writing of fiction as my main interest.  I am trying to capture this ever-developing human story in a book.

The Worm

I have become fascinated by the multitasking/multifaceted nature of dream.  It has made me respect much more the "small" dream, and cast doubt that "great" dreams are really any bigger.

The Worm is perhaps the most surprising dream I've ever recorded, seemingly so minor and unpleasant that I instantly wanted to forget it, yet leading to a spiritual illumination which took place right inside all my resistance.  Given that you are about to read it, I doubt that the process has ended.

Curtiss Hoffman, Ph.D. (USA) is a professor of Anthropology at Bridgewater State University.  He teaches a wide diversity of courses in archaeology and anthropology, including a writing intensive, "Symbol and Society in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth."  He is Program Chair for the 2012 IASD Conference, and is a member of the IASD Board.

It is well known that precognitive dreams play an important part in Tolkien's epic The Lord of the Rings.  Frodo, in particular, is the recipient of dreams which move the plot along and which subsequently turn out to be "true."  It is also fairly well known that Tolkien assigned a recurrent dream of his own past of a past cataclysm to the character of Faramir, after which he ceased to be plagued by the dream.  What is less well known is that Tolkien apparently quite independently of Van Eeden and others at the time, explored the realms of lucid dreaming and expressed this in his writing.  The evidence for this is mostly contained within a curious unfinished manuscript, "The Notion Club Papers."  Written as if from the vantage point of our day looking backwards to events of the late 20th century among a group of Oxford dons,  These are thinly veiled members of his own literary society at Oxford, the Inklings.

In this presentation, I will explore the nature of Tolkien's experiments with lucid dreams, which may have some important ramifications for lucid dream adventurers today.

Ryan Hurd, M.A. (USA) is a dream educator living in Philadelphia, PA.  He is founder of DreamStudies.org (www.dreamstudies.org) and the author of Sleep Paralysis: a guide to hypnagogic visions and visitors of the night.  Ryan is also a member of the IASD Board.

Lucid Immersion is a method for increasing lucidity in dreams and waking life.  Just like learning a language, this method helps you create a saturated environment for going lucid in a way that simultaneously targets your mind, body and soul.  As a meta-method, Lucid Immersion is drawn from the latest lucid dreaming research as well as the wisdom of historic dreaming lore.  This presentation helps you build a container for safe and effective lucid immersion within the constraints of everyday life.

"I'm no artist--I don't have the imagination for it."  Sound familiar?  People come up with all sorts of excuses for not exploring their creative potential, yet everyone has imagination, and so everyone has an artistic side.  To find it, all we need to do is look to our dreams, which teem with symbols, memories, eidetic images and emotions.

Becoming lucid in a dream adds an element of consciousness which enables the dreamer to watch his or her imagination at play and react in situ to what is happening.  Lucid dreams can be guided in an artistic direction, and the lucid dreamer can elicit helpful impulses and ideas to inspire artwork and creative writing.

Whether you're a professional artist or someone who has never picked up a paintbrush/pen/fistful of clay, if you'd like to know more about the potential of lucid dreaming as a catalyst for creative art work, come along to this interactive workshop; try out the techniques; and prepare for some rich surprises.

Ed Kellogg, Ph.D. (USA) earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Duke University, and has published numerous papers on his work in fields as diverse as the biochemistry of aging, bioelectricity, general semantics, lucid dreaming, voluntary controls, and the phenomenology of consciousness.  From 2002-2005--with a lot of help!--he created, organized, and hosted IASD's first four online PsiberDreaming Conferences.

"Individuation" (in a Jungian sense) refers to a type of psychic growth, through which the fragmented self becomes more and more whole through a process of integration.  Lucid dreaming also involves a kind of "individuation" in that, for the lucid dreamer, two disparate "selves," the waking self and the dream self integrate to some extent into an expanded "lucid dreaming self."  In lucid dreaming the waking self dormant during ordinary dreaming, becomes activated and integrated with the dreaming self.  In a similar way, in lucid waking, the dreaming self becomes activated and integrated with the waking self in waking life, making available an enhanced sense of Beingness, as well as abilities not available to the waking self normally.  As in lucid dreaming, in the beginning stages this state of consciousness often proves unstable, both as to duration as well as to the degree of integration achieved.

A "lucid waker" will experience both the physical and dreaming worlds simultaneously to some degree.  As the dreaming world seems predominantly a world of meaning, this overlay will also result in experiencing more--or at least meaningfully intending more--with regard to what comes through the physical senses.  In theory, effective healers and people who demonstrate high functioning psi, in the waking state must to some extent experience lucid waking in order to do what they do, either in healing or perceiving psi information.  When healers see auras, they may well do so by looking at the world through their "dream eyes" as well as through their physical eyes.  Waking precognitive or remote viewing visions may provide useful information.  This workshop will explore methods for enhancing Lucid Beingness in both waking and dream states.

Jacquie Lewis, Ph.D. (USA) is an educator, researcher, and author on dreams who offers dream lectures and workshops focusing on personal insight, transformation, and spiritual growth.  She has appeared on radio and TV, has lectured at educational conferences, and has conducted dream workshops at Infinity Foundation in Highland Park, IL.

Jacquie holds a Ph.D. in Psychotherapy with an emphasis on consciousness and spirituality.  She teaches Dream Analysis at California Southern University and is the Co-Director of the Dream Studies Program at Saybrook University.  She also incorporates dreamwork into her graduate courses at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Jacquie is IASD Dream News editor and secretary of the Board of Directors of IASD.  She is currently co-editing a book on dreams and education www.lotusdream.org

People have reported having psi experiences in waking where they feel a presence around them.  Usually when one has had such and experience it is difficult to forget.  While some people feel uncomfortable believing that deceased Aunt Martha came for a visit; others accept the experience as a direct communication.

As the Buffalo Springfield song from the 1970's says, "there's something happening here."  What are these experiences and do they also occur during dreaming?  Have you ever had a dream where you feel a dream character's presence, but you don't actually see the individual in your dream?  What do we make of such dreams?

This dreamer will share three such dreams she had, one involving a non-human and two involving a childhood influence and a woman in her dream group.  Perhaps the most interesting experience is what happened after these dreams and how the dreamer began to understand their power.  Readers are invited to share their own similar experiences.

We live in amazing times, when it sometimes feels as if the ground beneath our feet is shifting.  The magnitude of change is reflected in sky patterns.  Lucid dreaming is one way our consciousness can expand, and is expanding, making this an intriguing time to look at astrology and lucid dreaming together.  The current issue of The Mountain Astrologer, the premiere astrological journal, mentions lucid dreaming (and the movie Inception) as an example of our expanding ways of experiencing the world.

This workshop explores how lucid dreaming as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual practice, is reflected in astrological charts. During the discussion, we will share experiences with lucid dreaming and discuss how astrology, in the sky now and in our birth charts, relates to our dreaming.

Linda Lane Magallón, MBA (USA) has constructed collage imagery for shared dreaming projects, dream telepathy contests and dream journal presentations.  These creations are based on her vision board experience as a career counselor and women's reentry workshop leader.  Linda also produced the graphics for her book, Mutual Dreaming, the realization of more than two decades of field research while coordinator of the Fly-By-Night Club, Bay Area Dreamworkers Group, and Seth Dream Network.  Illustrations, dreams, articles, and presentations can be found on her web site dreamflyer.net www.dreamflyer.net

Vision Boards for Sleeping Dreams (workshop)

Although vision boards have been popularized as a graphical means to achieve waking hopes and dreams, they are quite fitted for the fulfillment of your sleeping wishes.  You can choose to create your own board on or offline.  Here's help to incubate the dream of your desires, for psiberconference play, for personal growth, or for group brainstorming...in the dream state, of course.

At one time, Al Moniz (aka almo) was a freelance comic book script writer for Disney Studios and Western Publishing (aka Gold Key Comics).  But all that ended with an unscrupulous editor and Al became just another worm spit out by the Big Apple.  Time passed, his comic writing days a distant dream, when in 2006 Al took a workshop in Carlos Castaneda's Tensegrity.  There a realization that he always wanted to DRAW his stories (not just script them) was awakened along with a latent ability to occasionally lucid dream.  Out of that odd coupling came The Far In Adventures of Kid Lucid  (tm)  Being published in The Lucid Dream Exchange for a year or so led to a monthly gag cartoon in the IASD Dream News and the rest as they say was history (or at least HIS story!)

Everything you wanted to know about Kid Lucid and Dream Thyme Toons, but hadn't bothered to think to ask because you had many more useful things to do with your time.  (or maybe you never heard of him????)

Paul Overman, Ph.D. (USA) Dream Psychologist and Sound-Consciousness Researcher

Paul Overman, a psychologist, consciousness researcher and author, specializes in shamanic-yogic dreaming theory and principles.  Paul's e-book, The Shamanic Dream will be available in the fall, with several key excerpts and exercises included in this presentation.  Initiated into "dreaming" since his youth, Paul Overman holds a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.  He is a trained yogic meditator of thirty years.

This program presents basic principles and techniques of the concept of the Vedic-Shamanic dream--with reference to ancient texts and modern Eastern authorities.  The focus is on developing dream lucidity at progressively higher levels of consciousness for more spontaneous and empowered lucid-creative dreaming.  Paul's dreaming tradition recognizes multiple levels of lucid dreaming based on ancient Vedic discoveries of the seers, framed within current-collective evolution and the need for transformation of consciousness.

In the ancient Vedic science of meditation and dreaming there are recognized four major "bodies of consciousness": waking; subtle-dream; causal-soul; and supra-causal, the Self.  It also recognizes higher and lower states or levels of dreaming--subconscious and supra-conscious.  The supra-conscious levels of lucid dreaming are most desirable from a Vedic and yogic-shamanic perspective for true personal empowerment and collective transformation.  Principles, basic techniques, and several exercises will be presented to facilitate higher-lucid, spontaneous-creative dream states.

Sherry Puricelli, MHA, M.Div., Modern Day Mystic (USA)

Sherry is a Life Coach, specializing in Dreams. A spiritual seeker by nature, she integrates dreams, synchronicities, contemplation, and ceremony into a seamless lifestyle.  Sherry’s current endeavor with partner, Brenda Ferrimani, is to create a dreaming community complemented by mystical traditions such as astrology, tarot, and Qabalah: http://dreamingglobalillumination.com/

Deborah Coupey, M.A. (USA) Dream Work Practitioner, Dream Research and Writer.  Founder of: “ The Art of Dreaming”.   I.A.S.D.  Membership Contact for California and France.  Co-host for 2012 Berkeley I.A.S.D. Conference.  

Her interest in dreams began with a recurring, relentless visitation dream from her paternal grandmother.  This led her to research visitation dreams.   In 2010- as a pilgrim on a path she studied the dream healing practices of the Asklepian dream temples and Oracles of the Dead in Eleussis, Ammoudia, Dodonna and Delphi.  On this pilgrimage Dr. Raymond Moody unveiled his new research on S.D.E.’s or shared death experiences. She is fascinated with sacred sites, and the transformative and mystical experiences that transpire.   

Line Salvesen (Norway) is a lucid dreamer with 20 years experience in lucid dreaming.  She averages five lucid dreams a night and is active in online lucid dreaming communities and with researchers.  Line also promotes lucid dreaming in Norway, where she has been in the media several times.

Growing Up As A Lucid Dreamer (paper)

For children, just like adults, it can be frustrating to be interested in dreams.  Strange looks and comments such as "it's just a dream" are common and might cause dreamers, no matter the age, to keep their experiences to themselves.  Adults have the resources to seek out like minded in groups and associations such as IASD.  Kids, however, do not.  For them, it is much easier to give up and stop paying attention to their dreams.  The same goes for children who are lucid dreamers, which is probably a lot more common than we think.  The gift of lucid dreaming can easily be lost as the child joins the adults in claiming "it's just a dream."  Thankfully, not all lucid dreamers get this during their childhoods.  I should know, as I was one of them.  This is my story.

Gregory Scott Sparrow, Ed.D. (USA) is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas-Pan American.  In 1974, Scott wrote a master's thesis on lucid dreaming, and in 1976 expanded his thesis to a small book titled Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light.  In 1983, he conducted a dissertation study on lucid dream induction, and has since focused on lucid dreaming as spiritual practice and therapeutic modality.

Resolving Conflicting Paradigms That Have Influenced the Field of Lucid Dreaming

One of the great questions that has arisen in the lucid dream research community has bee, "What is the ideal stance that one should maintain in regard to the dream imagery?"  From one standpoint, the imagery is presumably a self-creation, and thus subject to the will of the dreamer.  But in the actual encounter, the imagery often asserts its own autonomous agenda.  To the extent that one regards the autonomous manifestation of the dream imagery as meaningful, then perhaps it is incumbent upon the lucid dreamer to establish a relationship with it in hopes of learning from it, and perhaps becoming more fully integrated with it.  But, on the other hand, such engagement potentially threatens the continuation of lucidity and the constructive disengagement from the chaotic forms and energies of the dream.  This dilemma reflects the age-old dialectic that expresses itself in various religions and spiritual traditions, in which two paths have clearly arisen: one leading to transcendence from the world of form, and one leading to the acceptance and utilization of the forms of creation, as well as the energies which empower those forms.  The first path is associated with various spiritual philosophies, such as Vedanta and Hinayana Buddhism.  The downside of this path is in its extreme form, a devaluation of the phenomenal world and, ultimately, a kind of solipsism that denies its independent reality.  The second path is associated with alchemy in the West, and Mahayana's tantric yoga in the East, in which the transformation of "lower" forms and energies is considered the ideal approach.  From this standpoint the Mahayana doctrine of nonduality holds that nrivana and samsara are two aspects of the same whole, and thus equally valuable.  Hence from this perspective, the form of the dream offers a relationship that leads to the transformation and harnessing of its energies.  The downside of this path can be the destabilization of the self and a loss of perspective through engagement with the world of form.

In my presentation I will draw upon a series of dreams in order to illustrate that when dreamers adopt one of these classic positions or the other, the autonomous aspects of the dream seem to compensate for the dreamer's stance, thus intimating the need for synthesis of these divergent philosophical and psychological perspectives.

Author of the popular book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, Robert Waggoner is past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and co-editor of the quarterly online magazine The Lucid Dream Exchange.  A lucid dreamer since 1975, he has logged approximately 1,000 lucid dreams.

As lucid dreams begin to flower in your mind, they drop idea-seeds in the garden of your awareness.  With practice, you notice how these idea-seeds can be recognized and cultivated to enhance your waking-dreaming-and-lucid life.  In this workshop, we will comb through the harvest of dreams, lucid dreams, and waking experiences to collect vital idea-seeds that you can scatter in the fields of your mind for a more bountiful, fulfilling, and illuminating life.

Craig Webb (Canada), Director of the Dreams Foundation is a physicist and dream and consciousness researcher/author/inventor who was involved with pioneering lucid dream research at Stanford University, and later research at Montreal's Sacré-Coeur Hospital.  Join Craig's upcoming dream mastery and lucid dreaming teleclasses at www.dreams.ca/teleclass.pdf

Life is but a dream says a familiar childhood tune.  We who have been interested in dreams and consciousness exploration for a while have likely seen or heard the idea often.  Yet how much do we actually consider it more than an intriguing though, without much context, as we row our boat sometimes gently, sometimes not, down life's stream?  The true perspective hinted at can be elusive, yet I believe it's also of great value to enhance fun and fulfillment in life.  To unlock its potential requires a specific conceptual tool that can expand and view the idea clearly, in context, and focus it in a particular way.  Lucid dreaming is just such a tool, and a series of real-life examples are shared that elucidate how Life truly can be likened to a dream and why it might be worthwhile.