From JH FREMLIN
I read Susan Blackmore’s article on lucid dreaming with great interest
(‘Dreams that do what they’re told’, 6 January). While I was a graduate
student at Cambridge I became interested in dreams, and for a month or so
recorded as many as I could remember as soon as I woke up. On a number of
occasions I dreamt that if I tensed my shoulders I could lift myself from
the floor and drift up to the ceiling, and travel round the room or along
passages without touching the floor. I do not know whether I was deeply
asleep but it happened a considerable number of times, and I used to go
to sleep each night hoping it would happen again. I don’t know how many
times this happened before I had a lucid dream, in which I realised I was
dreaming and thought ‘This is a dream; now I can fly!!’ and found that I
could.
This happened again several times, but stopped at the end of term and
has not recurred since. It left no observable effects; but lucid dreaming
may have been of importance in the development of early civilisations.
I have no idea how primitive peoples interpreted even ordinary dreams;
but it seems quite likely that after the death of a chief or close relative
a lucid dream of him alive and active and answering favourably questions
by the dreamer would have been accepted as a real visitation from another
world in which the ‘dead’ were still active.
It has always puzzled me that practically all early civilisations –
with a meagre subsistence level for the large majority of their people –
believed so firmly in the existence of a deity or deities as to spend a
huge proportion of their available resources surplus on the maintenance
of powerful priesthoods and expensive religious ceremonies. I now suggest
that this may have resulted in many cases from efforts to explain lucid
dreams.
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It is easy to see that a small group of cooperating lucid dreamers,
recruiting to their ranks any new lucid dreamers, could have formed and
maintained expensive and powerful priesthoods in independent communities.
That it was such priesthoods which advanced knowledge in several parts of
the world by studying the heavens, making calendars, and forecasting storms,
was a real advantage of their privileged state.
J. H. Fremlin Birmingham
