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"Conscience dreams were a great study in college!" --Jared Leee Loughner

That quote interested me. What was Loughner learning in college? I looked through the Pima College on-line catalogue for "Conscience Dreaming" and couldn't find anything.

But when I googled "conscience dreaming," I found a lot of links to "conscious dreaming," which is also referred to as "lucid dreaming."

Lucid Dreaming --Wikipedia:

In a study of fourteen lucid dreamers performed in 1991, people who perform wake-initiated lucid dreams operation (WILD) reported experiences consistent with aspects of out-of-body experiences such as floating above their beds and the feeling of leaving their bodies.

It seems to be a New Age practice that blends Eastern meditation techniques with astral projection and old-fashioned "consorting with spirits."

Christians know that attempts to conjure up "spirit guides" and "dead loved ones" are occult activities that place the practitioner in grave spiritual danger.

Equally as frightening is this quote from the Booklist review: "an angel in a dream could be the dreamer's better self." Ideas like these, if taken to heart, can provoke profound psychological disturbance --even psychotic breaks-- as do New Age practices like "A Course in Miracles":

During a time of incredible loss, (the murder of her infant nephew and subsequent life sentencing of her brother, the suicide of one of her New Thought students, and the mental collapse of another; resulting in her being committed to a psychiatric ward) Sharon says she saw clearly, as if for the first time, the very real consequences of sin and the true teachings of the Bible playing out right before her eyes amid the tragic events surrounding her. With courageous honesty, she reveals how her "New Age" influence may have unwittingly played a part in these tragedies. --About Sharon Lee Giganti

From a review of the book on Amazon:

I loved this book, and found it to be a very "shamanic" dreamwork manual. It has wonderful exercises for both the beginning and more advanced dreamworker and includes everything you could imagine, from dream incubation, dream reentry and working with nightmares to shape-shifting, meeting deceased loved ones, angels and psychic self defense.

What are they teaching at Pima College?

Can we find out what courses Loughner was taking?

Oddly enough, there is a peculiar rule of thumb for orderly manipulation of awareness. That is, the more rational a person is in their normal frame of mind, the better they will be when their awareness has shifted away from their normal frame of mind.

This can be very ordinary. For example, there is a considerable shift in awareness when a person is going about their ordinary day, and when they are submerged underwater. This is extremely dramatic for a child when they first learn how to swim underwater, but with practice, being underwater is no big deal to an adult.

But a person who is very rational when out of the water will be able to adjust much faster and better to being underwater. The same ability to be rational has an equivalent in different states of mind.

That being said, lucid dreaming is astoundingly complex, by some accounts more complex than waking life. So there are almost innumerable directions someone can go with it.

And no, trying to define it in terms of religious understanding is pretty much a waste of time. To do so, I suppose, the Bible would have to be ten times as large as it is, and they had other, more pressing things to write about.

Granted, there are people of all kinds, and all religions, scared of the true unknown, and their opinion is that mankind should never venture into it, lest they meet up with something that growls and has sharp teeth. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

And most important, just because you ignore something that growls and has sharp teeth, does not mean that it ignores you. Better to know if it is a tiger, or just an irate dachshund.

There were some reports that his father was an abusive alcoholic. There are reports that the young man overdosed on alcohol and smoked pot. Couple that with the fact that he was probably mentally ill and it doesn’t matter what he was reading. He couldn’t understand simple instructions for walking dogs at the animal shelter.

One neighbor said even when he was young she knew something wasn’t right with him. I’d like to see reports from his elementary & high school teachers. He was a ticking time bomb. And for all the blah blah blah after each one of these events, somehow they still happen anyway.

This kid was obviously ‘crazy’ for a long time and no one - not parents, not law enforcement, not the education system - apparently, no one ever tried to get him into treatment. And according to news reports in Arizona they could have forced him into treatment. It isn’t against the law.