DreamSpeak

An Interview With Ed Kellogg, PhD

E. W. Kellogg III
Questions by Robert Waggoner


This issue's DreamSpeak interviewee and creator of the LDE's Lucid
Dream Challenge, Ed Kellogg earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from
Duke University. A proficient lucid dreamer, he has a long-standing
interest in the phenomenology of dreaming. He has presented numerous
papers and workshops on such topics as the lucidity continuum, lucid
dream healing, and mutual dreaming. In 2002, 2003, and 2004 Ed
organized and hosted IASDs online PsiberDreaming Conferences.


Ed, I believe that you and I first met at an Association for the Study of Dreams Conference
in Berkeley about 10 years ago. When did you first learn about conscious dreaming or lucid
dreaming?
Up until about the age of twelve or so I experienced occasional semi-lucid flying dreams, as well
as what I now can identify as Out-of-the-Body Experiences. However, as a teenager I had few if
any lucid dreams or OBEs - although I still had vivid dreams. In college, after reading some
entertaining books about "astral travel" from authors such as Sylvan Muldoon, Oliver Fox, and
Robert Monroe, I made an intentional choice to regain the dream life I'd enjoyed as a child. I read
as many books on the subject as I could lay my hands on. I especially enjoyed Celia Green's
Lucid Dreams and Out-of-the-Body-Experiences books in which she took a more scientific
view, and the reprint of van Eeden's classic and inspiring paper "A Study in Dreams" in Charles
Tart's Altered States of Consciousness.
Unfortunately, I did not find the methods presented in these books particularly effective. I spent
many nights during my senior year in college, and in the summer before entering graduate school,
developing and testing my own techniques. I invented a technique that allowed me to
intentionally succeed in having an OBE 1 out of 3 times. I also invented techniques that allowed
me to intentionally have lucid dreams about 1 out of 10 times, but that required much less effort
than the OBE technique, and as a side effect also increased spontaneous lucid dreams. I did my
postdoc at U. C. Berkeley, and at that point heard about LaBerge's work - in fact I even obtained
a copy of his dissertation before the publication of his first book.
Over the years I've intentionally, and I think creatively, developed and deepened my lucid
dreaming skills, to the point where I can now consistently succeed - under defined conditions - in
having lucid dreams. The lucid dreams that I have now have also changed in the degree of
lucidity that I can attain. As a child, lucidity consisted of just enough awareness to know that I
dreamed and that the rules had changed - so that I could go flying for example. In many of my
lucid dreams today I become fully awake and aware while dreaming - as awake and aware as in
physical reality.



Can you recall your first lucid dream experience? Tell us about that.

Although I vaguely recall having lucid dreams as a boy, I don't remember any specifically. On the
other hand, I clearly and vividly recall a number of OBEs, where I would go flying around and
about our house, over the lawn and across the back field - usually at low altitude - less than 6 feet.
These experiences felt intensely real - just as real as if I had physically flown. Which, for me as a
child, led to some confusion.

On the one hand I knew - absolutely knew - that I could fly. Yet for some strange reason I could
only manage to do this at night, while asleep. And yet I had little success doing so when awake -
as an attempt that I made of flying from an upper bunk bed one night proved pretty dramatically!
<g> However, this set up an early awareness for me of on the one hand, "knowing with inner
certainty that I could do something", and on the other hand, "finding out that in practice I could
not actually do it." The tension between these two indisputable facts created in me a need, and a
drive, towards understanding.

How do you distinguish lucid dreams from OBEs?

First, I do not consider OBEs - of which I've had over a hundred - as simply a kind of lucid
dream. Over the years a lot of controversy has arisen on the nature of lucid dreams as compared
to out-of-the-body (physical) experiences. By definition OBEs fail to meet the most basic criteria
of lucid dreaming, that you realize that you dream while you dream. Also, the two experiences
have many distinct phenomenological differences. In my early pre-OBE experiences, I often felt
waves of energy rushing up and down my body, and heard a buzzing vibration sound. My
consciousness dissociated to a degree from my physical body and associated with a second non-
physical body, but this second body still felt attached to the physical. I can see and hear, but
although it seems like I do this physically, I often see and hear things not physically present. If I
intentionally speed up the vibration/ wave moving up the body, the second non-physical body
becomes unstuck, and I can move away from my physical body, which remains in place. During
all of this I feel fully awake in an almost identical way that I do when physically awake. In fact,
unlike in after even fully lucid dreams where I experience a real shift in consciousness when I
"wake up", when I return from an OBE I do not feel like I've awakened - but instead merely
shifted viewpoints.

Also, although my state of consciousness in an OBE seems very similar to that in a fully lucid
dream, my memory of an OBE after the fact seems almost indelible. This stands in marked
contrast to my memory of even fully lucid dreams, which tend to quickly fade unless I make an
intentional effort to remember them. The clear and unforgettable aspect of the experience acts as
a reliable validation to me that I have had an OBE.

Furthermore, environmental stability in OBE reality behaves much more like physical reality than
dream reality. When I take a second and even a third look at objects during OBEs, the objects
stay very much the same. I generally find myself in a very close counterpart to my physical body,
but sort of a semitransparent white color, that can feel very light or very dense depending upon
how much I speed up, or slow down my "vibrational rate". I feel a very strong and defined sense
of embodiment, directly comparable to that felt in my "physical" body. My body shape seems
relatively immutable, and although I can fly (and go through walls) if I speed my vibrational rate
up sufficiently, I've had very poor success with other kinds of dream magic tasks which I can
easily do in lucid dreams.

Unfortunately, once one has had enough OBEs, the situation can become a little more confusing,
because one will begin to have dreams of OBEs, just as one has dreams of waking physical reality
experiences! Often times I find that paranormal researchers (especially those who have little or no
personal experience of OBEs themselves) will include dreams of OBEs in their OBE data files,
which often leads them to the mistaken belief that OBEs just seem a type of dream.

Curiously, I've occasionally had spontaneous partial OBEs, where for example, my OBE legs
have detached and float above my physical legs. I can sense both pairs of legs, but can only
intentionally move the "astral" pair. Also, when I have an OBE, until I move about 10-15 feet
away from my "physical body", I usually experience myself, to some degree, in both bodies
simultaneously. Once I've moved that distance, I only experience myself in my "non-physical"
body. In between, I feel to some degree embodied in both, depending upon the distance between
the two, and where I focus my attention.

Finally, usually people who have OBEs believe they have actually left their physical bodies.
Lucid dreamers usually do not. And OBEs - but not dreams - will often absolutely convince the
experiencer that they can exist without a physical body. They often lose their fear of death. Those
who have had OBEs quite often find that they enjoy life much more, with a different core attitude
towards it - an effect that can last a lifetime.

How do lucid dreams relate to OBEs then? Any ideas?

Well, I do have a theory. Just as an OBE body apparently comes out of the physical, so does the
dream body come out of the OBE body. The physical body seems the densest and most stable, the
dream body the most subtle and changeable, and the OBE body in-between. I've even
experienced the three bodies in sequence, like a series of Chinese boxes. Lucid in my dream
body, then returned to my OBE body, floating outside of the physical, and then back to my
physical body, in a two stage "waking up" process. Some metaphysical systems teach that we
have seven or more bodies, like layers on an onion, each more subtle that the next. I can't speak to
the existence of any of the "higher bodies" but I have experienced three.

What methods did you use to bring conscious awareness into the dream state? Has that
changed over the years?

I started off using a self-hypnosis approach, and even made up a series of programming tapes to
listen to before I went to sleep. Because I had a lot of flying dreams, I set up "finding myself
flying" into a cue to realize that I dreamed. So I incorporated this key post hypnotic suggestion
into my self-hypnosis sessions and tape scripts: "Whenever you find yourself floating or flying in
a dream, you will realize that you dream." This worked - if sporadically. To this day, if I have a
flying dream, or find myself floating, it will often serve as a cue for me to do a reality check. I
created different, and I think improved, programming tapes as time went on, experimenting with
techniques from sources as diverse as Milton Erickson and Carlos Castaneda. I also tried a
number of dream incubation techniques. I found the MILD technique promoted by LaBerge quite
effective, and combined with everything else I did, it increased my frequency of success for
intentional lucid dreams to about 1/5. After noticing that the lunar cycle had an effect on my
lucid dreaming ("Correspondence," E. W. Kellogg III, J. Lucid Dream Research, 1(1), 48-49
(1983), I intentionally looked for other factors that might have positive or negative influences.
Eventually I developed my "Lucid Dreamer's Checklist" as a mean of systematically ferreting out
my own set of optimal conditions for successful lucid dreaming. (Note: if youd like a copy, email
requests to alef1@msn.com) I found for example that, getting up at about 3 AM, reading for a
half hour, meditating, and then using a specific dream incubation technique to set up lucid
dreaming works very effectively. And of course, as far as increasing the number of lucid dreams
goes, as with any other skill, practice makes perfect.

Why have you devoted so much time to lucid dreaming? What motivates you?

Why do I have a particular interest in the development of lucidity? Although beginning lucid
dreamers often see lucid dreaming simply as a kind of entertainment, for me lucid dreaming has
become a kind of spiritual practice. In essence, I see lucid dreaming as a kind of yoga (meaning
union). Individuation (in a J ungian sense) refers to a type of psychic growth, that usually occurs
slowly over a period of years, and through which the fragmented self - consisting of many
separate and even antagonistic parts - becomes more and more whole through a process of
integration. Dream patterns reflect this process, and over a lifetime will show slowly evolving
patterns of growth in dream content and theme.
On the other hand, in my experience lucidity also requires a kind of individuation, in that for
the lucid dreamer, two disparate "selves", the "waking self" and the "dreaming self", will
integrate to a greater or lesser extent into the "lucid dreaming self". If the "waking self"
predominates, the dreamer seems prone to either wake up, or to find themselves in a lucid but
powerless state. If the "dream self" overly predominates, lucidity can become marginal - one may
have abilities, but it doesn't occur to one to use them.
For me true lucidity brings a third self into the mix - the "Spiritual Self." The more truly lucid I
become, the more I've integrated these three aspects of self, and the more of my Beingness the
lucid dreaming "I" brings into play.
The waking self brings in my thinking aspect, the dream self my feeling aspect, and the Spiritual
Self my knowing/creating aspect. True lucidity for me requires a balance, but once the lucid
dreaming self has integrated these three aspects and made this state of beingness habitual, one
need not let go of a predominant waking ego control to fly, because the waking ego does not exist
separately, but has become an integrated and valued part of a greater Lucid Dreaming Self. One
need not 'let go' to fly - one just flies.

However, this seems just the beginning, as the continuing enhancement and deepening of lucidity
to me in essence seems a spiritual quest without real limits. A quest for the Holy Grail of
Authentic Being. Even in the most super-lucid states I've experienced I realize how far I have to
go - and considering how valuable I've found the journey so far, I expect to encounter far greater
wonders as the process continues.

Would you share one of your super-lucid dreams that significantly changed your
perspective?

Sure. This dream occurred during an eight week group of mine in November of 1996, that
focused on exploring the Kabbalistic Tree of Life through lucid dreaming. That week we focused
on the sefirah Tifareth, in many ways the "heart" of the Tree, and the energy center that
corresponds to the level of the soul. It also has an association with the Sun. In the first part of the
dream, I'd tuned into the afterlife of a disincarnate man, trapped in a sort of Earthbound limbo,
who had just "woken up" some 29 years after his murder. I won't get into the details of this part of
the dream, but the situation resolves itself, and suddenly I jump up a level to become part of a
Greater Entity:

"He/I now sits at a large desk or an impressive table. He/I seems in charge of a group of
incarnates and disincarnates, a sort of Oversoul. He/I feels extremely competent, self-confidant,
and powerful, but He/I still takes orders from an even Higher Level. Out of a clear tube He/I gets
hundreds of cards relating to instructions for different sefiroth, blue cards, green cards, orange
cards. He/I feels a sense of having Eternity to work in. Now I (the Ed Kellogg part), become fully
lucid. Although I feel very curious about the cards, and even though it might not seem appropriate
("the tail wagging the dog") I decide to try taking advantage of this opportunity to do my
predetermined task. I chant SHH AHH MASHH (Shamash, the Hebrew word for the Sun). As I
chant I intend Integration, for me to tune into the Oversoul entity and become one with it. I feel a
powerful vibration on both sides of my head, like two speakers over-volumed and ready to blow.
My head feels ready to explode or come apart from the powerful vibrations. I intend the bridges
(connecting pathways), and manage to chant Shamash one more time before returning to waking
physical reality."

This bare bones account needs some commentary. First, both I (Ed Kellogg), and the disincarnate
man, belonged to the group of entities over which this Oversoul had charge. His/It's attitude
(which I felt) seemed benevolent in a purely nonattached way - He/It cared about his charges as
parts of a larger picture but had little concern for their individual well-being as such. And as far
as their physical well being went, He/It cared no more about the duration of their physical lives,
or the state of their physical bodies, than you or I might care about that of a pair of paper shoes.
(The disposable ones they give you at health spas to walk around in. Once the shoes have served
their purpose, or show any wear, you throw them away and get another pair if you need one. And
you do so without slightest thought or regret for the fate of those shoes.) The Oversoul lived in
Eternal time and could not view the physical situations of his charges as they did. Unless the
physical condition of their bodies had to do with the greater purpose or pattern, it simply had no
relevance or importance.

Up to the point of this super-lucid dream I had a vaguely anthropomorphic concept of my "Higher
Self". I felt that It's concerns had at least some kind of similarity to my own, and that if I could
find some way of communicating my needs to It, It would respond in a positive fashion. After
this dream I realized that living in Eternity, that the purposes of this "Deeper Me", had very little
to do with my own temporal and physical concerns. Not out of a lack of caring or compassion,
but simply through a fundamental difference in viewpoint. Some might argue that I could have
come up with a similar insight if I'd taken the time to consider the matter logically. Granted, but
this misses the point. After this dream I did not understand this in a tentative or abstract way - I
knew it experientially and with certainty.

From your lucid dreams, I also notice that you use chants and "spells" to achieve desired
ends in the lucid dream. Did you develop this technique? What value do you see in it?

As any lucid dreamer knows, in dream reality "magic" works - dream [mind] can and routinely
does directly affect dream [matter]. However, for me simply wanting, hoping, or intending for
something to happen did not produce very reliable results. Reliable magic requires a way for the
dream magician to focus intent. So taking my cue from the wizards and witches of legend, and
inspired by one of my favorite fantasy books (The Incomplete Enchanter by L. Sprague de
Camp and Fletcher Pratt), I decided to give rhyming spells and incantations a try. I found that
they worked quite well - not all the time mind you, but far more often than my simply wanting or
wishing for something to happen did. Focusing my intent through verbalizations has allowed me
to perform many of the feats attributed to the most famous magicians and wizards in fact and
fiction, from Merlin to Harry Potter, and with special effects that would make George Lucas or
Steven Spielberg envious. Teleportation, visiting the dead, levitation, conjurations,
materializations, and transformations of one's body and environment have become a routine part
of my dream life. Although some people assume that "anything goes" in dreams, in practice
certain techniques work far better and more reliably than others. And in my case incantations not
only work, but they keep me amused.

Have you ever had a lucid dream experience in which the dream characters responded
unexpectedly to a chant? Have they ever chanted back at you?

In contrast to spells, I use chants (verbally repeating a simple name or phrase) as a means of
tuning into something or to someone, or to resonate with something, the way that you might use a
mantra in meditation. On the other hand, I use spells to create a particular effect or type of
phenomenon.

I have had quite unexpected responses from dream entities, when I've pronounced certain kinds of
chants. For example, I've worked a lot with Hebrew "God-Names" as a means of exploring the
Kabbalistic Tree of Life in lucid dreams. Certain names, if chanted with a specific pronunciation
AND with a special kind of authentic intent (Kavanah) on my part have resulted in a beautiful
chorus of hundreds of other voices joining in. I've also had occasions where dream entities have
made fun of me, or have simply told me to shut up!

Do you predetermine a spell or do they spontaneously come to you?

Both. I prefer having the time to work on incantations beforehand - so that I can optimally work
out their "feel", a combination of word choice, sound, rhyme, meter, and meaning. On the other
hand I've improvised spells many times in dreams, creating spells "on the spot" that worked quite
well in producing an effect. I've also found that not all incantations work equally well - for some
reason some spells work far more effectively and more reliably than others, even when I designed
them for the same purpose. I can only determine which spells work, and which ones don't, by trial
and error. And even the most reliable of spells don't always work the way I expect every time I
use them.

From your presentations and writings, it appears that healing in lucid dreams seems of
special interest to you. What brought about that interest?

I have a long-standing interest in the mind-body field, as well as in the greater process of reality
creation and how that relates to consciousness. Even as a high school student I'd read about the
psychophysiological effects seen in scientific studies on biofeedback, directed visualization, and
hypnosis. And while many "dream experts" believe that they know the limits of dreaming, and
what "having a dream" means, because of my phenomenological orientation I assume -
emphatically - that I do not. And as I like to "push the envelope" with regard to what one can do
in dreams, the idea of experimenting with lucid dream healing came quite naturally to me.
Although I'd not seen any reports of any lucid dream healings, given the vivid multisensory
impact of dreams, it seemed likely that they could produce positive mind-body effects.

Have you had successes with healing yourself in lucid dreams? Also, do you think it possible
to heal others, when in a lucid dream?

Over the years I've had many successes, and some failures, in healing both myself, and others, in
lucid dreams. I first used lucid dream healing in 1984 to heal an infected tonsil (Id skewered it
while overenthusiastically eating a fish shish-kabob). I decided to try the LDH technique myself
as an experiment. The pain decreased markedly immediately after the dream healing, and when I
checked the tonsil a few hours later, the swelling and redness had almost entirely disappeared.

I've learned quite a lot about the phenomenon since then. However, rather than trying to go into
detail here in this interview, I'd rather beg off for now with the promise of writing up a fuller
account of lucid dream healing for some future issue of LDE.

At this point I will say that the experiences I've had of successfully healing other people in lucid
dreams adds credence to the idea that dream reality has a consensual and intersubjective basis,
something that the phenomenon of mutual dreaming (where two or more individuals have similar
dreams about each other at the same time) also supports. It also brings up the troubling "can of
worms" issue that psi-dreaming might not simply involve remote viewing, but remote influencing
as well.

Aside from lucidity, in your work you also have focused quite a bit on psi-dreaming. Why?

In my view what we today call "psi" and "spirituality" comprise two aspects of the same thing.
We separate them linguistically, but in actuality they seem inseparable.
Let me try to make my viewpoint clear. Spirituality in essence requires a type of
interconnectedness between all beings, and that we as individuals have a Greater Aspect of Self -
a "soul" or "spirit" if you will, that transcends the limitations of space-time.

The accumulated evidence of parapsychological research has demonstrated that psi seems a non-
local phenomenon (e.g. it transcends the limitations of space-time), and that it serves as an
encompassing medium that connects each of us to one another. Without psi, spirituality becomes
an empty shell. To me psi does not seem "an extra", something "tacked on" to spirituality, but an
inescapable and integral element, without which authentic spirituality as such can not exist.

For many in our culture dreaming seems the only practical way in which people can access their
greater, non-local selves. Unfortunately, modern culture for the most part trivializes dreaming and
minimizes its importance. For the individual, a single instance of validated psi-dreaming can act
as a powerful counterforce, that not only highlights the potential importance of dreaming, but that
can open pathways towards self-knowledge and the first hand experience of inner spirituality.

What do you feel keeps science from looking in that direction?

Muggles.

You have decades of experience in lucid dreaming and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Duke
University. If you chaired the Department of Lucid Dreaming, what experiments in lucid
dreaming would you suggest to your faculty?

I'd set up a three phase program. First, a program to identify those individuals who have the
potential to become adept lucid dreamers, and second, a program to develop, test, and, improve
techniques that train people to become adept lucid dreamers.

Once we had trained a group of adept lucid dreamers, a third phase would kick in - using adept
lucid dreamers to explore - and reproducibly map - the potentialities of the lucid dreaming state.
This program would focus primarily on exploring psi-dreaming, such as mutual dreaming and
remote viewing, and of lucid dream healing. I believe that well designed protocols, and a cadre of
trained and adept lucid dreamers, could establish the scientific validity of psi-dreaming and of
dream healing beyond any reasonable doubt through a series of robust and reproducible
experiments. This would, at the very least, accelerate the shift away from the reductionist-
materialist mindset that still hinders mainstream scientific thinking and research.
When you think of the cutting-edge issues in lucid dreaming, what do you think of?

I think of using trained lucid dreamers to systematically explore phenomenologically - the
nature of dreaming while dreaming, and to explore the larger issues of the nature of reality and
the full potentialities of consciousness. This kind of work requires experienced lucid dreamers
who still have open minds about dreaming. If they think they know "all about" dreaming - what
they can, and can not do in a dream, they end up in ruts, and rarely if ever try anything new.
Because of my own open minded phenomenological orientation, I've felt willing to try many
innovative tasks that I had not heard of anyone else even trying before. Someone who believes
that dreams only take place "in your head" would not even consider attempting such tasks, even
as experiments. For theories on the nature of dreaming, the repeated experimental validation of
dream-psi seems the equivalent of the Michelson-Morley experiment in physics, with the
exception that few have realized the profound implications. Psi-dreaming has made such strictly
subjective, solipsistic, theories of dreaming outdated and untenable. We need to change how we
think about dreams, and to understand that dreaming involves a kind of perception.

Still, in one sense it doesn't matter what sort of unexamined assumptions one operates under -
scientific or metaphysical. In either case, once someone "knows" what a dream "is", these
unquestioned beliefs will limit not only the scope within which they can act, but their ability to
perceive without distortion anything that "does not fit". As Goethe put it: The most difficult
thing of all is to see what is before your eyes. In my groups I try to teach lucid dreamers to let
go of their preconceptions about dreaming - to experiment with open minds, and see what
happens.

For myself, right now I enjoy exploring the idea that we actually live in an information universe,
where at the deepest level we input the universe primarily as code, an information pattern, a code
that we learn to habitually translate and then experience in terms of sight, sound, touch, etc. A
computer does this in a simple way when it translates a stream of binary code information - a
pattern of 0 and 1s - into an animated visual display on your computer screen. We as humans do
something very similar when we read an engaging story, where the text presents us with an
arrangement of arbitrary shapes (letters and numbers) arranged in a meaningful pattern that we
ignore as such while reading, experiencing people, places and situations instead. The movie The
Matrix illustrates this idea in an entertaining way, where the characters live in a virtual reality
experienced and only perceived as physical, but which at its root consists of a mathematical code.

Might we tune into this information universe directly when we dream, when we bypass the
physical senses? Can we, as lucid dreamers, like Neo in The Matrix, find a way to perceive a
mathematical universe underlying the sensory dreamscapes that we usually perceive? Stay tuned.

Thanks, Ed, for your observations into lucid dreaming. Any parting thoughts?

The idea of "lucid dreaming" still poses an existential challenge to many in our culture. As you
know, until recently mainstream psychology considered this phrase a contradiction in terms.
However, to those who have experienced lucid dreaming first hand, the psychological impact can
seem extraordinarily profound. Although researchers minimally define a lucid dream as one
where dreamers have a vague awareness that they dream, a truly lucid dreamer can also enjoy
powers of intellect, memory, and free will that approximate and even exceed those of the
everyday waking state. Mainstream scientists frequently use the term reality as a synonym for
the physical universe. In contrast, I take a phenomenological point of view, that uses the term
reality to refer to the world of direct experience, where reality includes not only my waking
experiences but my dreaming experiences as well. And although I now feel that I live in
something like The Matrix, I still don't know "how deep the rabbit hole goes."