A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming: Mastering the Art of Oneironautics by Dylan Tuccillo, Jared Zeizel, & Thomas Peisel

4/5 – You should be reading this [TCC review guide]

Warnings: Glossed over science and history

Overall, this book was pretty good and I’ll be looking to add it to my personal library. It’s a great how-to guide to lucid dreaming and many of the techniques can be used for astral travel as well.

You can pick up this book over on Amazon.

I keep a very large private wishlist on Amazon of which books I want to read. When my To Be Read pile is sad looking, I pull half a dozen titles from the books from that wishlist and request them from the library. Most of the time, I end up taking them off the Amazon wishlist because I decided I didn’t want to own them. This is not one of those books.

This book is very easily read and easily understood. I’ve read a lot of books on this subject and this is the only one thus far I’ve felt I should recommend. It’s easily accessible and the information gathered in from an internet forum of lucid dreamers and the writer’s own experiences and research. It’s written with lightheartedness and humor. It’s a fun read and easy enough for someone to pick up and put down at will so you could read it on the bus or subway or in between classes with little issue.

As said, I’ve read a lot of book on this subject and most of them repeat the exact same information. I’ve even run into a few that had some sort of twist on the information that was shaming or repulsive in some fashion. While I haven’t been able to get my hands on more academic books of this nature in years and years, this one is the most user friendly.

Now, if you’re like many of my followers, you’re more interested in astral travel than lucid dreaming. You’ll still want to read this book. You can easily swap out the words ‘lucid dreaming’ for ‘astral travel’ and find the information and instructions given completely and totally relevant.

Make no mistake. If you’ve read a book on lucid dreaming techniques, you’ve pretty much read them all. There aren’t really any new techniques mentioned in this book or explored. Instead, it goes through some usages for lucid dreaming that you probably haven’t thought of. And it’s the open-hearted manner of presenting the material that’s a major draw to the book. The instructions are easy to follow which is a super bonus in any how-to book.

It also covers some information about the kind of beings you’ll meet in your lucid dreams or astral travels. The worlds are more varied than they present in the book but they’re approaching the subject matter as lucid dreamers and place beings broad categories. It’s useful as it can quickly help you identify things to look out for.

While they don’t specifically get into it, they also mention that you can be in danger during lucid dreams. As mentioned, since the book covers lucid dreaming and not astral travel defense techniques mentioned are often how you approach the dream but I recall specific incidents mentions of running away and so on.

They also cover methods of travel in lucid dreams / astral travel. I find this to be one of the areas of interest that are rarely covered by similar books and if you’re new to the topic or looking to shake things up, then this is definitely worth a read.

I’ll be honest with you: I wasn’t impressed with the history or science sections. While they were interesting to read, I feel like they might mislead people who aren’t familiar with the subject of Out of Body Experiences, astral travel, or lucid dreaming. These tidbits and paragraphs were usually interesting facts or summarized studies. In an academic version of this book, counterarguments would be made and flaws point out. Since this book was written for a general audience, this is never done so it gives more “weight” to the material presented because hey look! Science. It doesn’t mentioned the numerous studies that doesn’t suppose their beliefs and theories. I’m an academic at heart so this annoyed me. For a casual reader (and most people are casual readers), you probably won’t care.

I also believe there was some slight controversy when it came to publishing as the authors used Kickstarter to fund the book publishing costs and some people felt the material wasn’t worth the funds gathered. But I’m not really up on the details of that and so long as the campaign promises were delivered (and I believe they were from what I’ve read), then I’m ambivalent towards the controversy.

Pros of both areas might not find the book worth full price, as much of the information is stuff you’ll already know but it would be worth a lazy Sunday afternoon read just to see a different perspective of the material and to read the testimonials of various interviewees.

Overall, the book is detailed and worth reading or picking up if you’re interested in lucid dreaming and astral travel. So long as you don’t hold the science or history as gospel, the book is an extremely useful and detailed how to book. The friendliness and depth of the material makes this book stand out from others in this field. Give it a read.