Ever wondered what it would be like to fly; to be able to just jump up in the air, and take off, effortlessly gliding around buildings, and up in to the blue skies above?
Ever wondered what it would be like to walk through walls, or go back in time?
Strangely enough, all this is possible through the bizarre art of lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreaming is the art of becoming conscious of the fact you’re dreaming, while you are dreaming. What most people don’t realise that the dream world seems every bit as real and as vivid as waking life, but without any of the troublesome limitations of the physical plane. All the five senses are stimulated and anything and everything is possible, and once you gain lucidity you have absolute power to shape every little detail of the experience; with God-like abilities to create, do, change and destroy whatever (or whoever!?) you like. If you’ve seen ‘The Matrix’ movies, it’s very much like the ‘construct‘.
The first step in learning the art of lucid dreaming is to develop sufficient dream recall to enable you to remember your dreams when you awaken. Stephen LaBerge, a Stanford University professor and one of the leading figures in lucid Dreaming research advises keeping a “Dream Journal”, where you jot down a few notes when you first wake up regarding the content of your dreams from the night. When I tried this exercise, I found at first I remembered very little about my dreams, but over time I gained much greater recall of my nightly adventures and eventually started remembering multiple dreams from different sleep phases in the night; and once you reach this point, the fun part starts – learning to Lucid Dream.
As dreams are so realistic, you probably only rarely, or possibly never, noticed that while you’re dreaming that you are aren’t really awake; therefore in order to “wake up” within a dream, you must first learn to recognise when you are in the dream state. After keeping a Dream Journal for a while, most people notice some recurring themes, situations or people; these are unique to you and are known as “Dream Signs”, once you recognise these within a dream they can be used to remind you that you are indeed dreaming. For me, my deceased father, and a farm I lived on as a child show up fairly regularly in some way or another, and since I am very unlikely to encounter these in waking life, if I see either I can be pretty certain that I am indeed I’m dreaming.
Sometimes seeing a Dream Sign is not enough to convince you that you are dreaming; therefore you need to test the reality around you. Contrary to popular belief, the old trick of pinching yourself doesn’t actually work, because if you pinch yourself within a dream, it feels exactly the same as if you pinch yourself in real life! Fortunately, even though the dream world is very realistic, it does have some unique anomalies which will allow you work out whether you are actually dreaming. One such anomaly is the instability of text; within a dream if you were to read words in a book or on a sign, then look away, and look back; the words will have changed. Also, electronic devices never seem to work quite right within a dream, although I find I always have a plausible explanation why they won’t work (but perhaps that’s because of my technical nature); also things such as light switches don’t work; and oddly teeth occasionally seem to fall out.
By looking for one of these anomalies, you should be able to determine the state of reality around you, and determine whether you’re dreaming or awake. In his book ‘Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming’ LaBerge suggests getting in the habit of performing reality tests regularly throughout the day in your waking life, so that you do it automatically while you are asleep. While there are many methods people employ, I’ve personally found the simplest method is to simply squeeze your nose; if you’re dreaming, you can still breathe completely normally, if not, you are awake! As peculiar as this activity seems, once you get in the habit of doing this, it surprising how often you perform the test to find out you are actually asleep in bed and having a dream.
People like to do all sorts of things in dreams, for me I like to fly; although I have to confess, due to the overwhelming feeling of “realness” I still get nervous when I fly too high as I feel as though I could plummet toward the earth at any given moment. For me, Lucid Dreaming is an exhilarating way to spend my night hours, but for others Lucid Dreaming is a slightly more practical exercise, and they use the experience to enrich their waking lives. I heard an interesting story of a woman on a weight loss program who would lucid dream at night and gorge on all the things she deprived herself of during the day, the taste is exactly the same, only dream food contains no calories. I’ve also heard other stories of people overcoming fears such as public speaking by facing them in the safe environment of their dreams; in such a limitless environment, the possibilities are endless.
While lucid dreaming, often you will want to change the “scene” in which you find yourself, whether that be location, scenario, who you are or the people you are with. I’ve found the most effective technique for this is called “spinning”, which is simply sticking your arms straight out (in the dream world), and spinning like a top while thinking of the new scene you wish to arrive in, in my experience this always seems to work pretty well. In addition to changing dream scenes, the spinning technique can also be used to prolong the experience if you feel lucidity fading, as it sometimes does, or if you feel yourself starting to wake up.
In addition to the few methods I’ve outlined above, there are many methods which can be used to manually invoke a lucid dream, the easiest, and the one I’ve had the most success with is known as the Wake-Back-To-Bed (WBTB) Induction. The WBTB method simply is to set an alarm clock to wake you after six hours of being asleep, when the alarm goes off, sit up in bed and read about lucid dreaming for about a half hour, then simply go back to sleep. I’ve found with this technique, I nearly almost slip in to a lucid dream when I go back to sleep.
Like all things, lucid dreaming requires a lot of practice, although many people (myself included) seem to have one shortly after hearing about it for the first time. While I’ve never spent the time and effort to be a master lucid dreamer, it certainly is one of the most unique, interesting and exhilarating things I have ever experienced.
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