3 Steps to Lucid Dreaming
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Most people go to sleep, wake up in the morning and occasionally remember fragments of their dreams. By the afternoon, unless it was a very shocking dream, they forget all about it. What would you say if you could not only remember every dream you had, but to control the dream as well? It's like owning a little private universe with a safety check. This interesting phenomenon is called lucid dreaming. The term was first used in the 19th century to describe dreams in which the dreamer is aware that he/she is dreaming. That way the person who is dreaming can be an active participant in the dream. Those dreams can be very vivid and it opens a lot of possibilities for self-improvement and can also be a lot of fun. Psychologists have even used lucid dreams in treatment of patients who suffer from nightmares or different kinds of fears. It is big playground with no limits. After all, most of us spend a third of our lives sleeping, so why not use that time to do something useful?There are some preparations necessary for the lucid dream to occur.The first and probably most important step is to train yourself to remember your dreams. Even if you have a lucid dream, what good is it to you if you don't remember it a few hours later? Get yourself a notebook and put it beside your bed before you go to sleep. Before you drift off into the dreamland, use autosuggestion to help you remember the dream in the morning. Picture yourself writing it all down in the morning the second you wake up. Convince yourself that you will remember it! It is best that you let yourself wake up naturally, without an alarm. That way you have the biggest chances to remember a dream fully. When you wake up, give yourself a few seconds and try to recall what you were dreaming that night. Don't move much! Once you review the dream and remember it fully, write everything down, to the last detail. It will help you remember even more about your dream if you engage yourself in some intensive thoughts about it. Keep journaling your dreams for a few weeks, until you feel comfortable enough with that practice and it becomes a regular habit. It is possible to attempt lucid dreaming sooner, but it will be much easier if you practice dream recall for a while.The more you read about lucid dreaming, and work on it, better it will sink into your subconscious. Try visualizing yourself waking up in a dream few times a day and use autosuggestion before you go to sleep. There is neat trick that can help you get there faster. You have to create a trigger that will inform you that you are dreaming. Is there something that occurs often in your dreams, like running away from someone, or falling suddenly? Meditate about it and visualize yourself becoming aware of the dream once this trigger occurs. If you manage to recognize the trigger in the dream, it will almost certainly become lucid. Even if it's for a few seconds, if you have made the first "waking" within the dream, it becomes much easier from now on.Remember that feeling of waking within a dream well and visualize, visualize, visualize during the day.You can also do "reality checks" every once in a while. Ask yourself if you are awake during the day to make it a habit. If you stick to it, you will start asking that in the dream to. You can also try looking at the digital clocks or reading text. In a dream it is often unreadable or it doesn't make sense. Try reading a paragraph of text and then looking again at the same portion of the text. If it changes, you are not awake. You can also test the laws of physics to confirm you are dreaming. Try running through a wall, or flying! All these little mind tricks can help you wake up inside your dream. Make your own arsenal of tricks and practice as much as you can.There are some very interesting ways to utilize lucid dreams. If you are a programmer or a writer, go looking for that piece of code or text you need to make your project fantastic. If you have fears, go confront them. The worst thing that can happen to you is waking up. If you just want to have some fun, go flying around the neighborhood or bungee jumping without a rope. Your imagination is your limit!
