Lucid Dreaming - #1

Picture by molesarecoming


LUCID DREAMING


Format: 1 week experiment

Goal: Make some progress in the area of lucid dreams. Determine whether progress can really be made on this in a week.

Goal met? Yes!

Terms you should know:

Lucid – awake

Lucid dream – a dream in which the dreamer knows

s/he is dreaming. Sometimes the dreamer will be able to control what’s happening in the dream

Reality check – doing something that will determine whether or not you’re dreaming. In this case, turning on and off a light switch to see if the light changes and trying to put my hands through walls

Dream journal – a written record of dreams

REM cycle – a normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid eye movement (Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REM_cycle )

Binaural beats – humming sounds; different tones in each ear combine to create a resonance that alters brainwave patterns

So here’s what happened:

I got started on this challenge quite by accident: I had a lucid dream. I’ve been interested in this for a while and have been doing occasional reality checks for the past month or so. (This particular one involved my turning off a light, saying “Am I dreaming?” out loud and then turning the light back on. The theory is that if you do this enough in waking life, eventually you’ll do it in a dream and it will wake your conscious mind up.) In this dream, I looked at the sun, said, “Am I dreaming?” and looked back. It had changed considerably. I went through a second of “Wait. That’s not normal. So I am dreaming. I’m dreaming? I’m dreaming. Holy crap, I’m DREAMING!” which was exciting. If you get really excited over discovering you’re lucid, you tend to wake up, so I did something I’ve heard keeps you in dreams, namely spinning and trying to change the surroundings. I spun around and thought “Ocean,” and it worked! When the world came back to rights I was near the ocean. Unfortunately I was also standing at the very edge of a cliff, which freaked me out. I lost lucidity at that point but woke up going, “Wow, so that was cool…”

Over the next couple of days I started keeping a dream journal. I’m horrible at keeping these usually, as it takes a long time to write down my dreams, but it does help dream recall so it was worth it. I also went crazy on the reality checks, which actually didn’t seem to help much, except to give me this weird anxious feeling while I was dreaming. I’d actually think, “Okay, now when I sleep, I need to focus on having a lucid dream” while I was dreaming, without ever putting the pieces together, haha.

On Day 4 I did have a lucid dream induced by binaural beats (see below). It was brief and hazy but I was aware I was dreaming and did manage to control the dream. I love flying in dreams so I decided to fly, and ended up teaching some other people how to as well. That was kinda cool! J

Day 5 introduced a problem, however, which screwed up the rest of the week. I came down with a horrible cough and it’s been interrupting my sleep. I couldn’t properly time when I’d be likely to be in REM sleep (which is when dreaming happens) so I didn’t know when to put on the binaural beats.

What I learned: You can totally make progress on this in a week! Less than that, even, and without using thought- and time- consuming techniques. I used intentions, reality checks and binaural beats alone and made a ton of progress. Two lucid dreams in a week and several more non-lucid but vivid dreams is a huge jump forward from the remembering-one-dream-per-week-if-I’m-lucky pace I normally crawl at.

Try this:

1. Keep a dream journal.

2. Visit http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com . It’s a fantastic resource and will tell you everything you need to get started, much more than I could cram into one blog post.

3. Download some binaural beats and put them on a CD or MP3 player. You will need headphones to use these. Simply put, binaural beats are sounds that make your brain start mimicking certain brainwave patterns. Listening to beta waves (which mimic your normal conscious functioning brain) will actually wake your consciousness up while you’re dreaming. You can find some great free ones at http://healingbeats.com and http://www.jetcityorange.com/meditation/binaural-beats.html .

4. Have a clear intention. The more excited you are about having lucid dreams the easier they’ll come to you… at least that’s how it worked for me.

Once you’ve started having lucid dreams you’ll also be able to start playing around with them. You can learn to control your surroundings, do things that aren’t possible in real life, and generally be Super(wo)man.

Next challenge: Simple Manifestations (and maybe some big ones)