Travel with Your Dream Body:
Lucid Dreaming in the Sorcerer’s Tradition
Lucid dreaming offers an extraordinary experience. When you dream consciously, you gain control over events—or at least the awareness that you have the power to influence the situation. Imagine a time when you can instruct yourself to dream about anything: soaring like a bird or reuniting with a departed loved one.
In my book, The Sorcerer's Dream, I unveil unique steps for lucid dreaming, knowledge passed down by the sorcerer Vidar during my initiation into the sorcerer's world. This article will give you a glimpse into the first steps of how to lucid dream in the sorcerer’s tradition.


Why pursue lucid dreaming?
Shamans believe that mastering lucid dreaming is a fundamental goal for humans. It allows you to become both the dreamer and the dream, transforming into a living dream weaver who experiences your own dreams.
Learning to dream consciously begins with attentiveness—being aware of your surroundings and actions in daily life. By recording your dreams without omitting details, you gain clarity about what transpired, enhancing your overall awareness. When you become conscious in your dreams, you'll notice their development.
The techniques described below help you build energy to develop a dream body, allowing you to travel beyond known reality to the boundless second reality of dreaming and creativity. Ultimately, this journey leads you to totality, where you realize you're creating your own reality.

Ordinary Dreams and Dreams of the Spirit
Before delving into traveling to the second reality and totality, it's crucial to distinguish between ordinary dreams and dreams of the spirit.
On the path to totality, mastering your dreams involves halting ordinary dreams, which are replaced by dreams of the spirit. Ordinary dreams must cease because they consume energy without offering value. As you learn to control your dreaming, ordinary dreams gradually diminish, giving way to the art of mastering lucid dreaming.
Stopping ordinary dreaming requires fixating on dream images—watching them intently—to transform them into dreams of the spirit. Unpleasant dreams vanish when you see through them, changing into images of beauty. Fixating on these images leaves only beauty, dispelling fear of certain situations. This is essential because traveling to the second reality demands releasing your fears.
To illustrate traveling to the second reality: The Totality consists of the first and second realities. Imagine a circle with a line down the middle—one half represents the first reality, the other the second. A dot in the middle signifies the totality of the Self. Your dreaming creates the first reality while revolving around your totality.
When you start dreaming, you become conscious of your dream body. The totality creates a dream body to travel from this reality. With your dream body and intention—the energy used to create—you'll travel from the first into the second reality, reaching the totality of the self. You'll discover that you are the creator of the two realities.

Finding the Dream Stone
The following exercise is your first step in developing a dream body:
Select a stone and study it in detail. Know every line, dent, and outline. Visualize the stone between your inner eye—the space between your eyebrows. Familiarize yourself with every spot, dent, and marking from every angle. Practice until you can envision it clearly, aiming to find the stone in your dream within ten days. If unsuccessful, start again until you succeed.
Before sleeping, examine the stone closely, place it nearby, close your eyes, and visualize it at your inner eye. It's crucial to be conscious of the moment before you fall asleep. Visualize the stone at this moment, and you'll experience dream flashes you can fixate or stop to begin mastering your dreams.
Simply having the intention to be conscious will help you halt dreaming before sleep. Attempt it.
Aim to awaken consciously each morning, visualizing the stone with your inner eye. Pick it up, moving it from arm’s length to your nose, as if the stone is approaching. Remind yourself that you will find the stone.

The Bridge Between Reality and Dreaming
Prioritize attentiveness. Habitually observe your surroundings in detail and perform routine tasks consciously, imagining you are dreaming. Even simple acts usually done automatically should be done with awareness.
Before sleeping, rewind the day's images from evening to morning. You’ll notice these exercises influencing your dreams, as you start having a retrospective view of daytime images in dreams. Soon, even in dreams, you’ll thoroughly observe every detail of your surroundings.
Your dream body must be at full capacity to travel to the boundless second reality of dreaming and creation. Develop your dream body by consciously bringing experiences, objects, or movements from dreams into reality and vice versa.
For example, if you find a shell in your dream, solidify your dream body by finding a similar shell and placing it in a special spot in your home where you collect dream items. This practice builds a bridge between reality and dreams.
Be impeccable in both everyday reality and dreaming. This trains your attention, which must be perfect. Through attention, you build on your intent, enabling travel into the boundless unknown.

Dreamshield

Review The Sorcerer's Dream
"Dreamshield has an engaging narrative style and tells stories that are engrossing. There is a lack of literature on female sorcerers and this book makes an admirable effort to fill this lacuna. When, at the end, she attains “totality,” the reader will share her exaltation." ~ Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. Alan Watts Profess of Psychology, Saybrook University.

About the Sorcerer's Dream
The Sorcerer's Dream, A true story of initiation into the sorcerer’s tradition by Elizabeth August, Dreamshield (former penname Alysa Braceau). The author gives us a glimpse into the very real world of lucid dreaming and astral projection. Her direct experiences with a modern day mystic, Running Deer, takes the work of Castaneda one step further. In The Sorcerer's Dream, she reveals unique steps to mastering lucid dreaming and traveling to the unknown.


Bio
Alysa Braceau, Dreamshield lives in the Netherlands (Europe). She studied social legal studies and a (freelance) journalist and publisher. Besides that she has a healing practice and gives workshops about the Art of Dreaming.

Website: www.dreamshield.nl

Discover the Power of Lucid Dreaming:
Six Steps to Lucidity and Law of Attraction Tips

Lucid dreaming offers an incredible sense of empowerment. When you’re aware within a dream, you gain the ability to influence events or simply the awareness that you *can* shape your dream experience. Follow these six steps to begin your journey into lucid dreaming, and combine them with five powerful Law of Attraction strategies to make the most of your dreams.

Six Steps to Lucid Dreaming
1. Record Your Dreams  
   Write down your dreams as soon as you wake up, even if it’s in the middle of the night. No matter how random or meaningless they might seem, appreciate these insights as part of your journey.

2. Review Your Dreams Upon Waking  
   If you wake mid-dream, take a moment to reflect on what happened. This will help you improve your dream recall and build focus, training your mind to retain details the next morning.

3. Create Your Dream Body  
   Imagine finding an object like your favorite stone within your dreams. Developing your “dream body” with such markers can anchor you to a lucidity practice within the dream world.

4. Cultivate Mindful Awareness  
   Notice the details of your surroundings and actions in everyday life. Practice doing tasks—especially routine ones—consciously, as if you’re dreaming. This awareness can spill over into your dreams, helping you recognize when you’re dreaming.

5. Bridge Reality and Dreaming  
   Strengthen your dream body by integrating objects, actions, or sensations from dreams into reality, and vice versa. This practice builds a bridge between the two realms, enhancing your lucidity.

6. Reflect on Your Day in Reverse  
   Each night, mentally review your day from evening to morning. This trains your mind to trace events with greater clarity, preparing you to recognize and remember dream sequences.


Law of Attraction Tips to Maximize Your Dream Potential
These five Law of Attraction practices are powerful ways to support your lucid dreaming journey and amplify your dream experiences.

1. Stay Positive  
   Cultivating a positive outlook can increase the quality and vibrancy of your dreams. Positive energy attracts uplifting and transformative experiences, both in life and in dreams.

2. Visualize Your Desired Dreamscape  
   Visualization is key to both lucid dreaming and manifestation. Clearly picture where you’d like to go or what you’d like to experience, in dreams and in life.

3. Use Affirmations  
   Write down your goals and desires, and repeat them aloud regularly. Affirmations reinforce your dreams and intentions, aligning your mind with your aspirations.

4. Practice Gratitude  
   Acknowledge and appreciate what you have already achieved. Gratitude attracts abundance and helps you manifest what truly resonates with you.

5. Stay Focused on Your Goals  
   Maintain clarity and focus on your life ambitions. The more intent and purpose you bring, the more likely you are to achieve your dreams, both in the waking and dream worlds.

6. Take Inspired Action  
   Once you’ve set positive intentions, visualized your goals, used affirmations, and stayed focused, it’s time to take meaningful steps toward them. Action bridges the gap between dreams and reality.
 
Good luck on your journey, and may your dreams come true!

Dreamshield

_Review: TheSorcerer's Dream By Paula R. Stiles, Innsmouth Free Press

If you’ve read much of my fiction, you’ll know that I have a strong interest in shamanism, both from the anthropological and the practical points of view. So, when a chance came our way to review, and host the author of, a new book on shamanism during her book tour, I jumped at it and talked Silvia into going along. Shamanism may seem like an odd subject for a dark fantasy ‘zine, but it isn’t, really. The first ghost hunters were shamans and the first people to venture deep into caves and other dark places were probably shamans, as well. Horror is perhaps the oldest genre of storytelling there is and the ghost story the oldest narrative. Hence the “campfire tale”.

The Sorcerer's Dream  is not so much about the terrifying aspects of shamanism, or at least, not so much the kind that rip you apart if you don’t master them before dawn, as the more-spiritual aspects of the belief in spirits and dreams. Dreamshield is a Dutch journalist who has spent a decade investigating, and writing articles about, New Age practices. The Sorcerer's Dream is about her apprenticeship with an American shaman named “Vidar”, who teaches her shamanic practices (mainly, lucid dreaming) in the general tradition made famous by (or created by, depending on whom you read) Carlos Castaneda. Hence the title, which echoes a famous biography/memoir about Castaneda. The book itself echoes the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice told by Castaneda in his books, with Dreamshields starting off with vision and dreaming exercises, going to a sweat lodge, encountering the question of using hallucinogens, and meeting her “spirit animal”, all under the guidance of an indigenous teacher.

I have to admit that I am not a fan of the Castaneda tradition. It’s been pretty clear since a now-infamous investigative article on him came out in 1973 that his anthropological research was a fraud and, to be honest, I thought a lot of his “insights” weren’t anything a broad-minded person couldn’t figure out on his/her own with a good book on meditation or guided dreaming. Also, the racism that his narrator character shows toward Don Juan (the narrator’s Yaqui teacher) is intense, patronising and difficult to tolerate. Going with the theory (commonly put forth by Castaneda’s supporters) that Castaneda is really supposed to be Don Juan and not the deliberately-ignorant narrator does not improve the use of the bigotry. Calling him a “trickster” figure doesn’t help, either. And the questions of fraud and cultural misappropriation (including an ongoing debate over whether a term/set of traditions originally identified in Siberia can really be applied beyond Eurasia) have never been satisfactorily answered.

But it’s not necessary to think much of Castaneda in order to appreciate The Sorcerer's Dream. One of the distinct plusses of the book is that Dreamshield is not just some naive dabbler who stumbled on shamanism during a quickie retreat. As a journalist on the New Age movement, she comes into the story already plugged into the New Age culture, hip to the various dodges and cons (initially, for example, she dismisses Vidar as a poseur looking to score with the ladies). In fact, some of the scene-setting and anecdotal asides that she puts in, especially early on, are quite interesting. This is someone with a lot of friends in the New Age movement, who regularly interacts with people involved in it. Of further interest to an American audience is that she’s Dutch, so you’re getting the perspective on the movement, and the Castaneda offshoot, from a European non-anglophone.

The discussion of “conscious dreaming” (and how to do it) has some good set-up (like the description of the use of stones as meditation tools), though it tends to get buried in overly-long paragraphs. The book tour’s blurb promises “instructions” on how to conduct conscious dreaming, but I felt the instruction-manual aspect got lost in the apprentice narrative, particularly in the second half of the book, as it often does in this literary tradition.
And the ending is strangely abrupt, with no indices or other endpages. I suppose this was intentional, to show that the apprentice’s journey is ongoing, but it confused me more than anything, and had me looking to see if my review copy had been somehow left incomplete.

You can also enjoy the book as pure story, the tale of a young woman learning about shamanism (by practicing an apprenticeship with a shaman) in a New Age context, a tradition few women have had access to until recently. The double role of telling a good yarn and telling the reader how to make a good yarn of his/her own is also part of this literary tradition. Joseph Campbell would have been proud.

The Sorcerer's Dream by
Elizabeth August (Dreamshield).