Lucid Dreaming in Three Steps

Lucid dreaming, or dreaming while being aware that your are dreaming, is gaining popularity due to movies like “Waking Life” and “Vanilla Sky”. Both these movies revolve around ideas about the conscious manipulation of dreams. Lucid dreaming has been used for centuries to gain greater clarity in life, learn new skills, and just for internal adventure and exploration. There is no evidence that lucid dreaming is anything but safe, but if you have any reservations about being able to “control your dreams”, be sure to investigate further online and in the library, with books like “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge (a pioneering scientist in the field of dreams and lucid dreaming).

So, you want to fly over a town of your choice or make love to a rock star or be able to turn a nightmare into something positive and uplifting, these and much more can be done with lucid dreaming, but first a little work needs to be put into it. The first thing you can do is to keep a dream journal. Go out and buy a notebook to keep by your bed, along with a pen or pencil and a flashlight. The first hurdle to lucid dreaming is to recall more of your dreams overall, how are you going to know that you lucid dreamed if you can’t remember it in the morning? The fastest and most productive way to do this is to write them down as soon as you wake up. Write as much of the dream as you can before it fades from memory, no matter how silly or stupid the dream seems upon waking, write as much of it as possible. Write down the sights, the sounds, the colors, the characters, the music, the plot, and anything else that you can remember. The waking mind is sometimes hard to convince to do this easy task, so set the intention before you go to bed to write down your dreams no matter what. Your goal should be to recall (and record) at least two to three dreams a night. If you are committed to having lucid dreams, often you will start having them in the first couple weeks.

Alright, so you are committed to writing down your dreams upon waking each night. Another thing you can get into the habit of is what is called “reality testing”. Basically, as you go through normal waking life, periodically stop to ask yourself, “Am I dreaming?” Now, don’t simply shrug off the question. Look around you and take in the objects and colors. Take in the smells and sounds and feelings. If you get really interested in dreaming and lucid dreaming, soon you will discover how much waking life is related to dreaming life, we use much of the same areas of the brain in each state of being. Also, do some tests, try flying (from the ground, don’t go jumping off a building, obviously) or pushing your hand through a wall, try something that is impossible in real life that you seem to do a lot of in your dreams. In this way, you can condition yourself to ask the question (”Am I dreaming?”) in your dreams as well, especially with scenarios that appear regularly in your dreams. Be careful, though, and be prepared to justify your answer, when dreaming your mind will search for a rationalization for you new found flying ability or your ability to breathe underwater.