I was taking a walk in the park today, reflecting on how interesting it is that I’ve been having many spontaneous lucid dreams lately. In the last few weeks, without any effort or active intention, I experienced multiple instances when I suddenly realized that I was dreaming. Each time, the realization made me giddy. Rather than trying to control or manipulate the dream, like in previous times I’ve become lucid, I simply continued dreaming with this awareness, enjoying the vividness and magic of the elaborate world my unconscious had constructed for me.
As I walked on, a bit lost in thought about how I might share this pattern with you in today’s Lab Report email, I suddenly heard a man’s voice barking, “Hey Wake Up!”
I looked up from the ground to discover a stranger, a jolly old man with glasses and a cane, who had just directed those three words at me. We locked eyes, chuckled at one another, and kept walking in opposite directions. I guess I must have looked a little sleepy or daydreamy as I walked. How ironic!
Or was it?
Just last week, I learned about cledomancy, a form of ancient divination using overheard words of pedestrians. The universe had just sent me a kledon! THIS “REALITY” IS A DREAM TOO, it was reminding me. WAKE UP!!!
LUDIC and LUCID are anagrams of each other, and the delight of this twinning wordplay is certainly not lost on me. I believe that the practice of ludic liberation can help us experience lucidity in the waking dream—to become more attuned to the true nature of reality (which is, of course, the realization that we are divine awareness itself manifesting in an infinite multitude of forms).
The more conscious I become of the existential games I’m playing and the rules I’ve been unconsciously following, the more the playbook of my life opens up to invite revisions. I see the way my desires AND my shadows manifest themselves through conflicts and characters around me and I begin to recognize and appreciate the opportunities they present to change the pattern. And then of course there are many divine miracles and jokes and synchronicities the universe keeps throwing my way! It’s all happening for me, for my living dream!
This month, I’m a Gamemaker-in-Residence at Julie Balderrama’s Academy for Wild Dream Magic. Julie and I are collaborating on a game to play with our dreams, and it’s going to involve intentionally inviting more synchronicities into our dreaming and waking lives. I’ll also be hosting a Ludic Liberation Lab on SYNCHRONICITIES to experiment with some of the rules of meaningful coincidence and divination.
The concept of synchronicity was proposed by Carl Jung to describe the strange phenomenon when events that have no causal relationship to each other appear to be meaningfully connected.
Cosmic rhymes. Universal mirrors. Sympathetic magic. The mystery of intuition. Precognition. Prophetic dreams.
How does it all work? Not causally or rationally, that's for sure! But the game of synchronicity does have rules—rules of association, correspondence, concealment, revelation!
This month at Ludic Liberation Lab we will be playing with the rules of synchronicity by engineering many surprising meaningful connections in ordinary and familiar places. We will tinker with domestic divination (using books, receipts, and various objects to decode clues and guidance from the Source), pass messages through space and time (without any of the usual communication tools), and collaboratively create and consult a democratic oracle. Throughout our experiments, we'll consider whether synchronicities are a form of delusion or a deep sensitivity (or both!), and invent how we might play with their dynamics in ways that feel liberating rather than fantastical or fatalistic.
JOIN US to play with Synchronicities!
(Someone will have a special message there, just for you!)
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 (that's 9/9!!!!!), 6-7:30pm Eastern Standard Time – that's 6pm Philadelphia Time, 5pm Chicago Time, 3pm Los Angeles Time, 11pm London time, 2am Moscow time, 7am Macau time, 10am Melbourne time.
Ludic Liberation Lab lasts for 1.5 hours, which includes fun warm-ups, collaborative gameplay and design activities, and a debrief that helps us build collective wisdom about play & liberation. Join if you're curious, stay as long as you like, give whatever you feel inspired.
Julie Balderrama has generously invited Lab Report subscribers to join her private membership community for the month of September, if you want to play along with the official dream game we’re making! The community has so many amazing resources for Julie’s special form of Embodied Dreamwork, which I’ve personally experienced and can testify is life-changing! Click here to sign up!