Have you ever experienced lucid dreams and astral travels?

It is said that only a small percentage of people in the world can spontaneously experience lucid dreams and/or astral travels (projection).

I, for example, am good at the first, but have had a traumatic experience with astral travels.

I am not aware of the official definitions that the Internet world has explained in the course of history on these two extravagant topics, but I do know what my involvement has been, something that no scientist or know-all-person can take away from me.

I will clarify why.

I have had lucid dreams for almost the entire lifespan of my existence, but I learnt to recognise them relatively late. When I was a teenager, I didn’t understand to what extent reality could be divided into real and unreal. To me, dreams have always been a vehicle of some meaning. And, if you stick with this story long enough, I will reveal what dreams are for and why we dream. In addition, I will explain a very simple technique for entering the lucid dream state. 

Myself, my then fiancée (whom I will call Anna, after Anna Karenina from Lev Tolstoj ‘s book) and her brother (whom I will call Bob after Bob Marley), decided out of the blue to quit our jobs and embark on a journey like real nomads. Without money. Without a roof to stay under. At first, we thought of the Camino de Santiago, but then we discovered that there are paths and routes from the ancient world all over Europe that we could use to cross Italy and, who knows, maybe reach the ends of the earth.

To survive, we used to perform in the streets, as Street Artist. I learnt juggling (never been very good at it), and with Bob, I would perform at traffic lights, where we could earn as much as a hundred euros in just two hours.

Then we had to run because of the police.

Otherwise, when we got to Sestri Levante, a picturesque seaside place near the famous Cinque Terre, Anna and I would make music for passers-by. She with her powerful and well-tuned voice, myself with my skills as a guitarist. At that time, I could play practically anything, I even learned songs I didn’t know, all I needed was the leading melody or finding the chords when we were able to use the internet. The repertoire ranged from De Andrè to the 4 non-blondes, as well as other international popular bands (Tracy Chapman, Queen, Oasis etc.). We earned less, but with that money we bought breakfast and what we needed to continue our journey. Many of the day’s meals we took at local homeless support centres or churches.

In short, we were getting by. And we were good at it.

There was a special fibre between us, and that doesn’t mean that everything was nice and perfect, on the contrary, sometimes it was the opposite, we risked fines, robberies and stabbings, and I even jeopardised Anna getting raped by strangers.

Then, one day, Bob leaves us.

Anna and I continue on our way, visiting the Italian Eco-villages, especially those in the Valley of the Elves, perched on the mountains between Pistoia and Porretta Terme. An enchantment, but also a nightmare at times.

We kept in touch with Bob (and sometimes with our parents) when we could, when there was a signal, or if we had somehow managed to charge the battery of our mobile phones. Bob had left for Spain, to walk a part of the Camino de Santiago. And there was a moment when we didn’t hear from him for days. Anna was desperate, and so were his parents. They thought the worst. I used to tell Anna that there was nothing to worry about, that living on the road meant we could have lost the phone or not be able to recharge the battery for weeks.

They, however, would not rest.

And there it happened.

One night I had a lucid dream.

I had had several in the weeks before, and since Bob had left, I had not had any spontaneous ones (reading Castaneda I had also learnt some techniques to induce them to my liking). That night, however, I had no intention of experiencing lucid dreams or astral travels; I was tired and wanted to rest. But in that dream, I was walking through the woods of an Eco Village where we had been, and on one side of the mountain, I could sense that Bob was there and that he was coming down to talk to me. We could not meet, but I remember his words. He was above me, separated by a rock about ten metres in height.

“Tell Anna I’m OK and that I’ll be in touch soon.”

The next day, I woke up and told Anna that Bob had assured me (in the dream) that he was fine and that between today and tomorrow, we would receive a response from him. By then it had been more than a week since his last message.

Anna didn’t believe much in this kind of thing, although she knew that both Bob and I had experienced states of consciousness that were difficult to explain and without the use of toxic or psychedelic substances (I would take my first drug 12/13 years later, specifically a peculiar mineral, extracted from roots, which induced states of deep connection with the world).

When she told me in the evening that Bob had been in touch, I was not at all surprised.

The next day, we managed to talk to him by voice. He was calling us from Portugal. Bob and a group of friends had suffered a robbery. They had all left their belongings in a car that was then robbed. So, over the next few days, he had to scrape together enough money to be able to afford a new mobile phone and a card, as they had ended up in an unfavourable situation.

Then, Bob said something that I didn’t expect at that point. He told us that he was lying by a river and dozing off under the branches of a tree; as he was falling asleep: ‘I saw Marcello’s face asking me how I was and when I would be back. I replied that I was fine and that he could tell Anna that I would be in touch soon.”

Anna’s eyes widened in disbelief.

I laughed, and then told him about my dream.

Synchronicity. Dreams.

You think they are separate things from reality, but you’re wrong.

Dreams are messages. To comprehend this, one must understand life through all spectrums, not only through the scale of the rational, of what is tangible and known, for everything, before it was revealed, seemed intangible and unknown.

For my part, I will keep my promise to describe at least three meanings of dreams to you. In the future, if it is possible, I will also stretch insights into them.

In short (and I emphasise again in short), dreams come to us for three reasons.

• • Health-related reasons. We think of our bodies as a mass of flesh and blood (and little else as far as we know), but the organs, as well as the brain, communicate with each other, support each other, secrete alkaline or acidic fluids (homeostasis) depending on what we need and/or what we have introduced into the body, in short, a much more living mechanism than you think. The process that makes your being real is encapsulated in the knowledge of the Five Transformations as told by Noboru Muramoto and other gurus before him. A certain type of dream happens because it is a request or a message from your body, perhaps there is a problem, maybe you have eaten too late last night, maybe too much, maybe you have been over-salting lately, etc., so you have overstimulated your organs and one of them is sending an insight while you’re dreaming, and usually your unconscious brings up particular visions of animals (every animal is linked to a specific organ), or you dream about feel the need to go to the bathroom.
  • Conditioning: this typically happens because of what occurs in the last hour before sleep, especially if you are watching a film or reading, but it can show that in the dream you see people or things that somehow your mind has registered more than it should and so it exposes them to you to shape meanings or hints. I remember there was a time when I was reading Berserk (a Japanese manga) every available hour of the day, especially before falling asleep, and literally after three days of tireless reading (I had to catch up on over 30 volumes) I dreamt of the pages of the manga as if my mind was continuing to read even though I was asleep. I was seeing the very images of the manga with a mixed narration, between the real subject and a story adapted from my imagination. I still remember this dream vividly to this day.
  • Divine messages: There is a wider Force, difficult to grasp, coming down from above that walk into your unconscious. They are unexpected dreams, sometimes lucid, sometimes they occur while you are walking and take you away from reality for very few seconds. They are interconnections with the Absolute, and I am sorry for those who are sceptical, but in the face of those who have experienced them (like myself), there is no objection or other explanation available. I discovered, years ago, that there are like receptors, made of fats and proteins, on our brain, that are there to pick up signals “from the Stars”. Incredible, isn’t it?

This is just a summary of the role of dreams in our lives. The three points indicated can be broken down into other subcategories, which I will (perhaps) discuss in the future.

The easiest way to experience lucid dreams is to observe your hands while dreaming, or your feet. Usually, we let the dream drive the film or scene, in this case, to look at the hands you have to become aware of the dream and have your own will, such that it allows you to stop and look at your hands. At that point, my advice is not to focus on a single point, but to keep shifting your attention so that the dream does not suddenly collapse.
This is a rather well-known technique, and it is the only one I have used in the past to induce a non-spontaneous lucid dream. There are other ways, unfortunately some of them are hard to explain as they involve a special kind of meditation that changes the frequency and signal of your mind. Not being an expert, I cannot explain it. What happens to me is that at certain times, while I am between the end of sleep and waking up, or the other way around (as I enter sleep), I move into an altered state of consciousness that allows me to experience a different realm, in my opinion much deeper and more powerful than an ordinary dream. Interesting things happen there, and I believe it is the closest thing we have to our secret well that is the unconscious. In the film Inception, we are told that there are different layers of dreaming, and that is indeed the case, but in my experience what happens is very different from Nolan’s masterpiece. The concept, however, stands solid and fascinating.

Oh God, I would like to tell you about other similar experiences, but not today. I have written a book, The Mushroom Effect, a science fiction novel that explores in a solid and captivating way the possibilities of our psyche (partially based on Carl Jung studies), and how the fabric of our reality can be manipulated to the point of experiences beyond all possible reason and limits.