Lucid Dreaming | The Probabilist . com

Lucid Dreaming October 28, 2006

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Consciousness, Creativity, Dreams, Entertainment, Weird, Abilities , trackback

Within this entry you’ll find a description of what lucid dreaming is, why I’ve found lucid dreaming as an intriguing project to take on for you to follow and how you can start developing this ability yourself. If all goes as I’ve intuitively planned, then this subject will evolve into a series of self-development and serve as a guide for others to walk the same path as well. So, at this present moment I perceive this to be at an experimental phase and I’m eager to just see how it all plays along.

Lucid dreaming is the ability to know that you are dreaming and consciously control yourself and the dream according to your imagination and skill. You might never have experienced it, maybe a couple of times in your life, once a month or perhaps even whenever you choose to. Supposedly anyone can learn this skill and the stuff you can do will depend on your experience. However, some might never have considered it as something they’ve learned, because they’ve always been able to.

While lucid dreaming you aren’t bound to the same laws of physics as in the waking world so you might progressively develop your skills for instance as following - flying, warping, manifesting what you want, using superhuman strengths, lucid dreaming within your lucid dream, dream spinning, talking with your subconscious, passing through solid objects, shape shifting, the sky is the limit. The more you practice, the better you get. Even though it is a far different alternative reality, it can be sensed as just as realistic as the one you’re in now. However, lucid dreaming doesn’t guarantee 100 % control of everything within the dream. Some people might encounter unknown forces that still defy and limit the lucid dreamer from exercising their power or free will.

Ok, so the pros and cons then? You have to sleep, so it might as well be put in to some use, whether you consider this as a useful or a useless ability. The body and mind needs the REM phase of your everyday sleep and through lucid dreaming it can be exercised into an even more productive natural process we all go through, whether you remember it or not when you wake up. What about risk of becoming addicted and gradually neglecting the waking life? It doesn’t sound very likely. If you’ve found this site and read this far you’re quite certainly interested in your conscious reality and how to improve that, so practises like these are mainly means to improve that reality. Besides, you can’t force your mind to sleep all the time anyway.

My take on lucid dreaming is that I haven’t yet stumbled upon a potential downside of it. So whenever I discover something like that, there just isn’t a rational excuse not to try it, whatever it is. So as you can read between the lines, I’m not an accomplished lucid dreamer, but I wish to be. I’ll be going through the steps that enable one to start lucid dreaming and write later on what I’ve experienced to be working well and what in my view has not.

At this point I’ll just write a list of issues to consider and when I’m better able to address which ones are more or less important I’ll get back to them.

Start remembering and recording your usual dreams.

Focus on the abnormal happenings in these dreams.

Regard them as triggers so you can notice them in your dreams.

Keep your eyes open when tired to catch yourself falling asleep.

Stay calm when you experience a lucid dream so you don’t snap awake.

Try not to think about your physical body which is sleeping.

Think of what you want to dream in advance before you fall asleep.

I have been able to fly several times and steer myself slightly, but I haven’t recognized myself as being asleep. Yesterday when dreaming I noticed that I was in a pattern of being hunted. It’s one of those dreams where the bad guys are after your life and no matter what you do they’ll keep coming for you. I recognized it, stopped and turned around, thought about my body which was lying in bed and then everything started to fade away and I gradually gained ordinary consciousness. This was the second time I’ve come this far so focusing on the dream and not my body is the next step I need to work on to become a lucid dreamer.