Mustafa Akhrothy is 83 years old, lives in my community, in my neighborhood, and he doesn’t look a day older than 55 years. Hardly any signs of aging on his face, no crow’s feet, no ugly wrinkles, he attributes his youthful looks to what he claims to be his original slumber technique.
In fact, he runs the STC (Slumber Technique Club) with good success and surprisingly, draws people to cluster together at his once a month meeting held at random city coffee shop venues, without using social media or any hard copy advertising to draw a crowd of which there are devoted members. It is all just the old fashioned marketing approach and it is purely a word of mouth publicity which draws people to gather to listen to him as he assures them at the outset saying: “I am here to spill my secret of staying young and you need not even buy me coffee to peak into the secret of the technique, and I emphasize technique, for acquiring the ‘fountain of youth’”. It is true many of his attendees would readily have bought him coffee, and even far more than that, as they leave the meeting having gained what one person said is “King Solomon’s mine of wisdom for Free!”
“I don’t make a red cent out of this,” Mustafa says proudly as he opens his session and he has been conducting such meetings since the last one plus year. His passport attesting his real age is available and lies on the coffee shop table for anyone who doubts he is 83.
“So why do you do this?” I ask him.
With a broad smile revealing his, well laid, all original teeth—no, no dental interference here– he counters: “It is the vibes, you know…the good vibes you see… I get from this and the more you collect them the better for you.” Then as if to confirm he is no blast from the past, he quickly and perkily adds: “Hey it is better than collecting Pokemon rewards.”
One retiree jumps in “Or the McDonalds Monopoly tags!”
“That too.”
“He he he, ha ha ha.” There is an appreciative laughter among the fairly large crowd huddled around this unassuming but imposing gentle looking man.
So, like others, I was curious to know more about this technique Mustafa wanted to share.
Hearing about it I felt it was based on different pillars of belief and practice and one of which was in close proximity to a theme you might find in Inception, a 2010 released Christopher Nolan movie starring Leonardo di Caprio, where you have to wrap your mind around the possibility of various levels of reality that are presumed to be lurking in the minds of human beings. Exploitation or exercising of these can accomplish the impossible as does Dominick Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, when he beats all odds through a heavily schemed “Inception” heist used to dismantle his now dead father’s corporation. The puzzling ‘spinning top’ scene of the film certainly indicated toward a phenomenon of lucid Dreaming according to me and many others.
The concept of lucid dreaming where the dreamer almost consciously augments or even manipulates the outcome and content of their dreams and is aware of the fact that they are dreaming is a key component in Mustafa’s claim to maintaining a youthful appearance. It certainly was a key component to Christopher Nolan’s popular movie.
The idea of lucid dreaming it should be noted is not a new one even though it has enjoyed more popularity and attention at certain times in our history. The great Greek Aristotle famously observed: “Often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents is but a dream.” The Committee of Sleep, by Deirdre Barrett is a good book to read if you really want to know more about lucid dreaming though it is very different than what Mustafa has in his technique to stay young.
The conception of lucid dreams also has had its share of detractors and in the 1970’s, when it was intriguing people, the skeptics claimed it to be an episode of a brief awakening or ‘micro-awakening’ as they called it. Stephen LeBarge, well known psychiatrist and researcher, blunted this criticism by establishing through experiments that lucid dreamers were not awake but indeed physiologically asleep while dreaming during REM periods.
“So Mustafa,” a person in the crowd says, “you are really advocating lucid sleeping to stay young.”
Hearing this Mustafa protests and points out that while lucid dreaming is a key component of his stay young technique it is much more than simply that. He explains that his technique is much more involved, as it is a fusion of dreaming, meditating and relaxing during sleep, of which everyone should get 8 hours in a 24 hour period. “But please don’t forget the key element of spirituality in my method, too,” he pleadingly points out as he re-explains that component in his technique.
In Mustafa’s stay young formula active meditation is to take place during sleep. A kind of a yoga type therapy though very different than yoga as taught in various schools in the western world. For that matter very different than yoga in India and extremely different to what the Beatles were attracted to when in February 1968 they latched on to the coattails of the Transcendental Meditation teachings of maharishi Mahesh yogi at the Rishikesh ashram.
Mustafa’s technique of injecting spiritualism in dreams struck me as being closer to that practiced by the Tibetan monks. For an easy understanding of it we in the west call it ‘dream yoga’ though this is an oversimplification of the whole process. The Tibetan monks derived the practice of dream yoga through the esoteric experiences of hermits or munis of India who are mentioned in the Upanishads and rig Vedas. The main idea around all this is that of moksha or liberation.
Mustafa in a private conversation with me after the meeting told me he had modelled his technique and the power of lucid sleep and dreaming by being inspired by Carl Jung’s idea of archetypes of the collective consciousness. He explained to me that archetypes are in the physical makeup of every person and hence we need to consciously get the best work out of them by using techniques to make these release endorphins throughout our system to negate the free radicals which cause havoc if left unchecked. An impressive example indeed, I thought.
But being a person with a very skeptical disposition almost a disciple of Dr. Michael Shermer and very much a child deriving solace in the tenets and beliefs of the enlightenment, I certainly am not the best candidate to buy into Mustafa’s methodology of staying young. But as Hamlet said to an educated person influenced by the humanist tradition and not given to belief in the supernatural, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Perhaps Mustafa is on to something big.