Customer Reviews
Expand your mind....I dare you... - By: S. Gardner, 17 Jan 2008 
Although at times I wondered if I'd picked up a fiction novel whilst reading this tale. However I realise that we each have a choice about what we believe & just because we've never had any experience of something doesn't actuallly stop it from being real.
I'm very pleased that this book, like the first one has brought two different healing methods (lucid dreaming & psychiatry) to the same points & I think that it's reallly brave of Olga to write about her experiences like that. I didn't enjoy the book as much as the first one but then I'm probably more biased towards Shamanic influences. Dream time is alll about astral traveling & the astral plane is the place for alll the accumulated memories & rubbish that we collect, some are innocuous & some have a huge influence on out lives, like a core program that has become habitual & we are no longer aware of it running.
Ancestral patterns are there in so many aspects of out lives although we tend to think of them as genetic but our genes are just the physical manifestation of our entire blueprint. Imagine if that blueprint were bigger than our field of vision, we'd have to step back to see it alll, so why not step back with your mind too & embrace this book as the ground breaking work that it is. It's easy to be narrow minded....why not try something new today.
intelligent and thought provoking - By: Silver Moon Sailor, 21 Dec 2007 but I don't believe a word of it! Too much cloak-and-dagger stuff & unnecessary oofle dust. Not wishing to be a Shamanistic Fundamentalist, I accepted this book as fiction & enjoyed it very much. I don't know much about Sufi spirituality in Samarkand so cannot comment on that specificallly. I was mostly interested in this book because the author is a psychiatrist & I work in mental health & have an interest in shamanism & suchlike. The ideas in this book have proved useful to me in my work. The concept of trauma demons is common to many shamanistic traditions & I find it a creative way to think about the damage trauma can do to the soul. In other shamanistic traditions healing trauma is a 2 stage process involving evicting the intrusion (trauma demon)and then repairing or recallling the part of the soul that has been damaged or has gone away. My experience suggests it is important to do both. However, I will not hold this against Olga as this book is not meant to be a how-to manual. There is also a simple attention shifting technique described in the book which I have found useful if v similar to NLP techniques.
In both this & her previous book, "Entering the Circle" I have appreciated the picture Olga draws of the hardness of life in a Siberian city & the human side of the changing but still monolithic & materialistic machine of psychiatric "care" in the former Soviet Union. So it is especiallly poignant & important that someone like Olga is trying to bring the Soul back into curing "mental" distress.
An important integration of ancient wisdom and trauma study - By: James F. Zender, Ph.D., 18 Mar 2006 
Dr. Kharatidi's work is extremely important to our understanding of trauma, healing, ancient wisdom, & reality itself. She has broken the code to unlocking the prison cells that restrain many traumatized people. Not only does she provide a road map to healing the seemingly unhealable, she writes a fascinating story that offers an incredible escape from our own Siberian mental hospitals. I couldn't stop reading.
I have never written a review before - By: , 01 Dec 2004 
but I had to respond to the review above. I can't believe anyone could consider this book 'snappily' & 'evocatively' written. In fact it is very badly written - the prose is clunky & in places cringe-inducing. It is obviously written by somebody whose first language is not English. This is fine, but to say that it is well written is inaccurate.
From the synopsis & the review above I was expecting something with at least some basis in reality whereas this had none. It reads more like an extremely poor magical realist novel.
an important book - By: , 09 Oct 2003 Only rarely does a book appear that threatens to overturn the conventional wisdom. In the case of 'The Master of Lucid Wisdom' this is alll the more remarkable, as the 'wisdom' in question is pretty much the whole basis of modern Western psychiatry. But this is not some populist, half-baked theory from someone on the margins of a field - Dr Kharitidi was an experienced, competent & respected psychiatrist, working at the sharp-end of patient care in a large Siberian hospital, when she encountered the ancient therapeutic tradition that forms the basis of this book. And to that extent, the title is something of a misnomer - this is not so much a book about Lucid Dreaming as a book about a radicallly different understanding of the nature of mental illness.
'The Master of Lucid Dreaming' is not, however, presented as a dry academic or ethnographic monograph but as the thrilling story of Dr Kharatidi's encounter with representatives of this Sufi tradition from Uzbekistan - representatives who are so concerned by the extent & proliferation of unresolved psychological trauma today that they are making available once jealously guarded knowledge. And that encounter was not with some toothless tribal greybeards but with a pair of extraordinary young men: 'Vladimir', who comes to speak in her home city of Novosibirsk, & 'Michael', who inducts her into this knowledge in & around the ancient city of Samarkand. But whilst these men are as much at home in the modern world as Dr Kharitidi is, their methods are ancient & unfamiliar: Michael uses storytelling, action teaching, trance induction & other techniques to provoke the experiences in his reluctant, ornery pupil that alone can alllow her to learn what she needs.
Dr Kharitidi is a skilful & evocative writer, crafting a compelling tale from her experiences that reads as excitingly as a fast-paced novel. But embedded in her snappy prose are some truly astonishing, provocative insights. Amongst them, the suggestion that depression & anxiety are not illnesses in their own right, but healing reactions to profound trauma. Or the suggestion that, by failing to resolve our traumas, we alllow them to incubate psychic forces that may ultimately commandeer our behaviour & cause us to perpetuate a cycle of violence & abuse. Or the suggestion that these 'spirits of trauma' can be passed on from one generation to another, aggregating themselves together in societies to become collective entities. There are echoes of Freud & Jung here, but echoes that reveal these two great pioneers to have only intimated fragments of the whole picture.
Dr Kharitidi clearly has abundant experience of trying to help people in severe distress: suicides, rape vicitims, abusers & self-harmers - & of seeing the limitations & tragic failures of conventional psychiatric methods. Nor does her account fight shy of addressing the central paradox: that victim so easily segues into victimiser. This makes discomfiting reading for those of us who like to see victims as 'innocents'. But through her unsentimental presentation of excruciatingly harrowing cases there also shines a powerful humanity - a warmth that unfolds as she begins to connect, under Michael's patient guidance, her own pain & trauma with that of patients & friends.
This is an important book that is guaranteed to get you thinking. I found that its revelations made uncommon good sense, enabling me to see something of the enormity & urgency of the problem we face. But it's not a book of answers - there are no techniques here, no methods that can be lifted off the page & put straight into action. And probably with good reason, too - these are desperate conditions, & require expert intervention. I'm glad, however, that this knowledge is being made available - & that people like Olga Kharitidi are being inducted into it.
