Being a psychonaut, one who explores the inner depths of the psyche through mind travel, I’ve always been fascinated by the dreams of sleep. Lately, what I’ve been reading has been cross-conferencing in a synchronous way: Dr. Rubin Naiman of the Center for Integrative Medicine, Arnold Mindell, author of Quantum Mind, and C.G. Jung. The more I pay attention to my dreams – the more I remember them, the more they speak to me.

Keep a dream journal. Take time in the morning trying to remember your dreams. Don’t interpret them, especially in light of your waking reality. Just let them speak for themselves. See them as a malleable reality, on equal footing with the conscious day. You may even find that some of your dreams become realized in the daylit world.

My novel, The Crippy, a tale of fantasy, science fiction and mystery, is about dreams, and deals with lucid dreaming in particular. It asks the question: is waking reality any more real than our dreaming? In the story, Mitch Cantsee, a deadbeat, drug dealing dad, takes his young ward, Samsara, pawned to him in a drug deal, on a wild odyssey across the country. He seeks to protect her from bizarre, shapeshifting creatures. Yet are these theriomorphic beings of his own delusional distillation?

What’s the difference between a hallucination and a dream? Between a delusion induced by drugs and one brought on by madness? Into this mélange of fevered unreality, throw in the afterworlds of Near Death Experiences for seasoning, and salt to taste.

How are all these forms of illusion different from what we see in the everyday world? Many dream studies look upon all these worlds, all these levels of consciousness, as emanations along a spectrum. They represent awareness along a continuum from dreamless sleep to waking reality in which the shaman and the physicist stand as practitioners of the same mystical, quantum arts. There seems to be a unity of knowledge along a spectrum of ‘dreaming’ in which the conscious and the unconscious merge across indistinct boundaries. Those who cast Grand Unified Theories need to account for consciousness among the quarks and gluons and leptons on their gameboards.

This is the kind of world you’ll find in my writing. Toss in a dash of cyber-demon as well. Enjoy! Purchase The Crippy in softcover o e-reader formats at  https://www.amazon.com/Crippy-Michael-Just/dp/1533034699/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518209793&sr=8-1&keywords=the+crippy