A Beginners Tutorial on Lucid Dreams
Lucid dreaming is being aware that you’re dreaming while dreaming. This happens when the dreamer experiences something strange and stops to question reality and realize it’s a dream. Once you’ve become lucid you control your dream and the possible experiences are limited only by what you can imagine.
“Although we are not usually explicitly aware of the fact that we are dreaming while we are dreaming, at times a remarkable exception occurs, and we become conscious enough to realize that we are dreaming.” Says Dr Stephen LaBerge who has written several books on lucid dreaming, most notably “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming” based on extensive laboratory work at Stanford University mapping mind and body relationships during the dream state. The place to start is with dream recall, he explains.
“If you don’t recall your dreams, even if you have a lucid dream, you won’t remember it”.
The most important tool for dream recall is to keep a dream journal by your bed and record every dream that you have. You need to keep it in one specific spot so you have easy access to it, and there’s no looking around for it while losing bits and details of the dream.
Write down your dreams until you have a fairly large list of dreams to analyze, two or three weeks of remembering at least one dream a night should be enough to get you started.
If you wake up in the middle of the night from a dream, write key elements of the dream down. When you wake up in the morning you may have forgotten the dream, but when you look at these few key words it will spark your memory. You still might not remember every single detail, but you’ll remember the vague idea of it, then you can write it down in more detail when you’ve fully awoken in the morning.
Once you have a nice selection of dreams down, go through your dream journal and spot your dream signs, which are things that happen in your dreams on a regular basis. It could be reoccurring thoughts, environments that you’re in, people that you meet, it could be anything. The longer you record your dreams the easier it will be to spot similarities between them, these are your dream signs.
“I’d have dreams where I find double sized coins spurting out of drains, it’s very strange, and I’ll be on my knees trying to claw up all these massive coins, putting them into this bag. As you can see they can be quite obscure.” Says Reece Jones, an avid lucid dreamer that has posted several videos online discussing how to lucid dream.
He advises to write down your dream signs in the back of your dream journal, for easy access. Every night before you go to bed, read the list out loud to yourself and make some sort of mantra up, something along the lines of “these are my dream signs, these things only happen in dreams, these things don’t happen in real life.”
The brain is very receptive to repetition, so if you do this night in and night out and keep on telling your brain that these things only happen in your dreams, when they do eventually happen in your dreams you should be able to figure out that something isn’t right, and then you’ll be conscious and lucid enough to do a reality check in your dream.
A common reality check among lucid dreamers is done just by looking at your hands, because in a dream your hands usually look strange. They will be very malleable and bendy, if you were to pull your finger it would likely stretch like a rubber band.
Run your eyes around the outline of your hand. Ask yourself if the shape looks normal, and then look in the middle of your palm for any contortions, or any weird colors.
“When I do this reality check in the dream world my hands are often very red, or they’re on fire, or they’ll look strange in some sort of way.” Jones explains.
Once you perform a reality check and realize you’re in a dream, the real fun begins, but at first, beginners may have difficulty remaining in the dream after they attain lucidity.
“Becoming lucid is exciting, but expressing the excitement can awaken you. Suppress your feeling somewhat and turn your attention to the dream.” Dr LaBerge advises.
If the dream shows signs of ending, such as the disappearance, loss of clarity or depth of the imagery, spinning your dream body like a top can help bring the dream back. Remind yourself that the next scene will be a dream. If it’s not obvious that you’re dreaming once you’ve stopped spinning, perform a reality check.
If you’ve made it to this stage, you are well on your way to becoming a lucid dreamer! If you would like to advance your lucid dreaming skills there are a number of sources online to help you, including Dr LaBerge’s website lucidity.com. Sweet dreams!
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