The more I read about dreaming, the more important I believe it is for accessing both creativity and the upper realms of reality.

When I was a child, I went through school with an excellent memory. This helped me get good marks throughout grade school and high school. Unfortunately, by primarily using my memory to get by, I never developed the discipline for study that is needed in college.

Thus, I attended well over four years of college yet never got close to the requisite number of credits to graduate. The discipline I lacked could also have served me well in the many jobs I jumped out of an into after college.

Then at about age 40, I found that the memory I'd relied on for so long was failing me. I've always attributed this to the normal aging process, but today, my lack of memory is legendary in my family. I can watch, for instance, a movie on Sunday and forget almost everything about it on Monday.

When I became a computer programmer, I created in my mind another reason for this memory deficit. It was simply that the organic RAM was full with all the experiences and facts I'd picked up in my many decades of life. For anything new to enter this RAM, something had to be pushed out. Fortunately, it seems that I am still able to live in this fast-paced society well and I perform my job adequately enough...to get by.

In addition to these reasons, ten years ago I began taking Paxil--the SSRI antidepressant--which I've found to be an excellent way to deal with the rage, anxiety and OCD tendencies I'd experienced for years prior to that.

To eliminate the rage and obsessive tendencies, I reasoned, the memories that feed these negatives have to be masked or hidden.

The result has been a much more livable reality for me. I've recommended SSRI's to many people because of the positive results I've experienced. And for all intents and purposes, I could have gone on in this serotonin-bathed world for the rest of my life.

Enter my desire for knowledge of Spirit and of hidden worlds--or simply for evidence of something greater than the frail imperfect beings we are.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I must learn to use the Imagination to help me achieve these goals, and one of the best ways to tap into the Imagination is by cultivating the recall of the many dreams we all have when we sleep. Taking that a step further, if we can learn lucid dreaming, we can not only recall our dreams, but we can actively participate in them.

This perhaps is the way in which shamanic journeying works. It does seem to me that there is another element of shamanic dreaming that goes beyond lucid dreaming, and that is the idea that the worlds shamans enter contain elements of the unknowable that can be brought back to our waking reality for purposes of healing and wisdom.

But then maybe this is only the difference in intent. Lucid dreamers explore their dreams more for adventure than for knowldge.

If dreams truly are an important key to my search for Knowldge, then I'm fairly screwed because I've never in my life been able to remember my dreams to any extent. I might wake up with a few highlights, but I don't ever remember a dream from beginning to end.

Until now, however, I figured that this is just the way it is.

Again, there are scores of resources on the Internet that give information and advise on developing the recall of dreams, as well as for lucid dreaming.

So for the past month or so, I've had a personal recorder at arm's reach and occasionally, I wake up and am able to get the few pieces of my last dream into the recorder before it dissolves into the mental ether. When this has happened, even though my memories have been brief, I've been thrilled with the fact that I can actually do it.

Still, most mornings, I wake up and I can't recall a thing about my dreams that night. Even when I wake during the night to go to the bathroom, I'm dreamless.

So I continue my dream quest. There are expensive supplements I could take that include vitamins and amino acids, or I could take these ingredients individually at a much lower cost. I could set an alarm clock to go off every 90 minutes, which is how long REM cycles last and with luck the clock would awaken you in the middle of a cycle.

Other suggestions scoff of these remedies and say that dream recall and lucid dreaming involve a kind of mental discipline that can't be learned using sleep or dream aids.

Self-suggestion seems to be a big part of this kind of thing and could also be called self-hypnosis, self- actualization, self-realization, self-visualization, etc., etc. etc.

It's all about the self, big guy! It's all about the desire and determination to achieve something important, something vital, to making this brief existence meaningful in the entire stream of existence.

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I wonder what it would be like to be able to study and write all day.

I think of a talmudic scholar, whose life is devoted to study, or a scientfic researcher, whose preoccupation is also his occupation.

My day is spent from 8 - 5 (and often longer) engaging my brain for the sole purpose of assisting humanity in its obsession with meaningless material consumption. A foot soldier in the capitalistic assault on spirit, compassion and cooperation, I long for a life that will somehow allow me spend all my time in more useful pursuits.

This isn't something new, however. I've had dozens of jobs in my life; only a few of which made me feel that I was contributing something worthwhile to the Gross Industrial Product

This may be a pipe dream, since I've yet to figure out the formula that will let me do this, but wouldn't it be nice if it was as simple as the phrase "if you can dream it, you can do it"?

I can echo Teyve here when in "Fiddler on the Roof" he muses:

If I were rich, I'd have the time that I lack
To sit in the synagogue and pray.
And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall.
And I'd discuss the holy books with the learned men, several hours every day.
That would be the sweetest thing of all.