Posts Tagged ‘lucid dreaming how to’

Techniques for Lucid Dreaming

Lucidity Part 3

Your body and mind are the most amazing instruments, and there is so much more music for you to play as you move to a fuller life. And a first step in learning lucid dreaming is to begin remembering and recording your dreams. In doing so you will be taking the first steps into lucidity. In fact remembering a dream is a penetration of the unconscious by your awareness.

Your Dream Creator is in some ways as shy as a deer in the woods, and in other ways as ready to please you as a dog that loves you. It is certainly as old and as natural as the creatures of the forests. Like any creature, this natural part of you is moved by feelings, by curiosity and love. Therefore your first step in remembering your dreams lies in stimulating interest in that usually hidden and natural world within you. Remember that a lot of great art arises from the unconscious in dreams and unbidden inspirations. Sigmund Freud wrote that, “Not I, but the poet discovered the unconscious.” So open yourself again to those things you find moving, beautiful or rouse passions in you, and allow your curiosity to question what more of wonder is still unknown in you. Use the steps in the following exercise to help you remember your dreams and become lucid. (Quoted from my book Lucid Dreaming.)

This directs your attention to the subtle dream process that can so easily be ignored or lost in the welter of waking impressions. But keep your intention playful as you might with a good friend. Don’t let early failures bring difficult feelings. If possible avoid taking sedatives or stimulants before going to sleep – such as coffee, alcohol, tea, cocoa derivatives or a heavy meal.

3) Put a notepad or small tape recorder near your bed so you can record any dream you remember. Dreams melt like snowflakes on your hand unless you record them quickly. This is especially so of dreams remembered during the night. The tape recorder is probably the easiest as you do not have to put a light on or rouse yourself too much to use it.

4) As you start to fall asleep, wonder what strange world of beauty or learning your dreams are going to explore. You dream about five times a night, so you will certainly have a different life in your sleep. Wonder what it is, and determine to ask yourself what you have dreamt as you start to wake during the night or in the morning. What is life telling you in your dreams? Build an image of yourself remembering a dream and recording it.

5) When you wake, do not move or open your eyes. This floods your awareness with massive new impressions and can blast the dream memory away. Tests also show the passage of time, even a few minutes, between dreaming and attempting to remember, causes many dreams to fragment and be lost. So lie still for a while and look backwards into the dimness of sleep. Imagine yourself drifting backwards into the place you are just emerging from. Leave your mind like a keyboard that can be played by subtle feelings and images. Having given time for your dream to emerge, record it right away.

6) Write your remembered dreams into a dream journal, either in a good thick book, or in a computer file. Such a journal is a precious resource. It will gradually develop into a record of your most intimate and whole self. It can become a rich mine of inspiration, of creativity, and definitely of insight into yourself and your endeavours. When you have written your dream, think about it as a drama that reflects your own hidden nature. Ask yourself what the images depict. This is not an attempt to interpret the dream, but a necessary technique to make you aware that dreams are only like a book cover. What is important is what lies underneath.

A computer file has the advantage of being easy to search, so it is worthwhile noting any themes, characters and places that appear.

The Second Steps

An important next step is for you to practice being lucid in waking life. You can do this by visualising, imagining the things that lucidity allows you to do. So try the following:

1. The first thing that lucidity allows is an escape from the little box of your body. Even if you are a great athlete you know there are barriers you cannot cross. But you can in the freedom of the mind. So imaging you can jump so far it becomes flight. Try it, fly! It might take practice but you can do it.
2. You cannot die in your dreams, but you might feel the feelings you associate with dying. So imagine a very tall building and jump off it. If you feel the fear let yourself feel it and see you can survive. With practise there will be no fear. If you like, try a smaller jump until  you get used to it.
3. Your mind is immense and full of creative ideas. So imagine yourself expanding out of the top of your head into the huge space beyond. And as you get the feeling of it explore ideas without the usual barriers you put in the way. Remember that your thoughts are things in this world. So you create your own limitations. So any thoughts such as this is impossible, or “I cannot and never have been capable of this!” are a tremendous brick wall in your way.
4. In lucidity you can travel to the very core and creation of yourself. To do this you need to practise dropping all preconceptions of who and what you are. You need to tense your body and then slowly drop the tension. Ten do it over and over with less tension each time until you can only feel the tension without and movement of your muscles. Then continue into the feeling of dropping, letting go of everything.. everything.

These exercises are vital if you wish to enter your dreams lucidly. As you practice you will see the quality of yoru dreams change – and that means you will change.

Link back to Chapters – Link Forward to Chapter 4

Incubating Dreams

 The dream process is quite amenable to suggestion and conscious influence. It is probably most helpful to think of this action as similar to the process of memory. In seeking information from memory we hold a question or idea and the resulting associated memories or information are largely spontaneous. The question held directs what information is taken from the enormous pool of memory.

Our conscious queries can influence the process of dreaming, as dreaming and memory are in some ways akin. Like memory, the dream process will respond to your conscious input, and as dreams have access to our full memory, your creative potential as well as learned skills, such response to concerns or queries are often of great value. A question might even call together scattered pieces of information which are then put together into a new composite, a new realisation. So the process is not only recall of existing memory, but creative. It may also access skills, such as the ability to subtract one number from another.

To make use of this, first consider the query as fully as possible. Look at it from as many viewpoints as you can, talk it over with others. Make note of the areas that are already clear, and what still remains to be clarified. Just before going to sleep, use imagery to put your question to your unconscious resources. Imagine standing before a circle of gentle light – a symbol of your total self – and asking it for the information sought. Then, as if you have asked a question of a wise friend, create a relaxed state as if listening for the considered reply. In most cases, dreams that follow will in some way be a response to what is sought, though not necessarily in the way imagined.

More help in incubating a dream

Many people say they can see their dreams are influenced by the events of the day. Considering that the brain has a complex computing function, few people go on from that observation to stimulate their dreams to solve problems or analyse situations. Especially since a wider range of memories and associations are available to us while we sleep.

People who use this call it dream incubation’. While it does not work every time, the response gathered from reasonable perseverance is enormously rewarding. Also it is quite easy to do. If you want to see what your own internal monitoring system says about your health for instance, decide to ask this of your dream process.

To incubate a dream means to seek earnestly for a dream that responds to a special need or question. This way of approaching the best in yourself for help has been practised widely in many cultures. Some evidence suggests it was first used as a means of curing sterility, and was wide-spread enough to be used by Australian aborigines as well as Chinese and North Africans. It evolved into a much wider application, and in more recent history its various uses range from young women seeking to dream about their future husband, to Amerindian youths fasting in lonely vigil to receive a dream about their inmost character and destiny. Many such approaches, as those used in Ancient Greece in the healing temples of Aesculapius, were felt to be sacred. Individuals were helped to take on a feeling of approaching the divine and humbly seeking help from the highest wisdom. The effectiveness of this is to be found in many historical records.

In today’s world we have no dream incubation temples, and our culture does not often encourage us to take a cleansing fast and vigil to incubate a dream. We may not have learned the humility and joy felt in approaching the sacred. But we can still as individuals recognise that the forces behind nature and our own existence are special and potent. The great cycles of birth and death, or mating and reproduction are to be seen everywhere, and spring from eternal powers. To approach the fount of these with reverence is not irrational. To seek deeper understanding of your own life situation, your health, or your relationship with the whole, can still bring wonderful blessings and change.

But the classical way was to have a cleansing fast and to bathe before going to bed, with the feeling of cleansing yourself. Then as you are ready to sleep ask for help with your question.

 Further information about incubating dreams

To apply this the first step is to recognise that the unconscious processes of your own mind and body, of your transcendent self, are not like a machine into which you can drop a coin or press a button and out pops a can of coke. The unconscious can be helpfully likened to a person. It is intelligent, responsive, is moved by meaningful communication and relatedness. To gain the help of this potent power in yourself, you need its co-operation. To ask a question of our enormous self, if asked with feeling and seriousness, not just a throw away question, creates a response.

Example:  I have given weak readings when I felt spiritual and calm, and probably elitest and  some great readings when I have been irritated or pissed off with someone who I  didn’t like in the first place or who “I” thought was asking the “wrong” questions. I learnt that we all seem to carry around all sorts of very subtle preconceptions that can block the clarity of the message. I once gave a rather lengthy and detailed message to a woman and not one bit of it made sense, she then went home and was  complaining to a close friend what a useless psychic I was, until the friend recognized that the reading applied to her.

I think the less control we try assert over all the conditions the better the reception, or control/interference. Yet another factor to be taken into account, particularly when discussing precognition; I must admit there are times when I bowled over by this stuff…..

A frivolous question that does not connect with the important issues of your life will not easily get the attention of your unconscious. The more important the question is either for your own welfare or work, the more likely it is your unconscious will explore the issue and present a response in a dream.

When you have a reasonable respect for what you are approaching, define your question. Write it carefully as a letter to your unconscious and place it under your pillow. Expect a reply as you would expect a response from a good friend. Your unconscious is your best and loving friend. It knows you intimately as no one else does. When you wake, pause and let any dream flow into awareness. Record it immediately in some way.

On waking in the morning, before even shifting your position, ask yourself what you have been dreaming. If they are not captured in this way, dreams are often flooded out of memory by the impressions of body movement, sound or vision.

Lucidity – The New Frontier

Lucidity Part 5

Sleep is a strange country. In it we lose sense of self in unconsciousness. Or dreams take us into realms of extraordinary experience in which we are still largely unaware. But throughout history there have been individuals who have described a different meeting with sleep. They wake up in what is usually a dark, unconscious world. Or in the midst of a dream they realise the situation and relate to the dream in a new and dynamic way. See Answer to Critics

This condition, usually called “lucid dreaming” holds in it enormous possibilities and advantages unavailable in normal sleep or dreaming. To understand these possibilities and something of what takes place in lucidity, it is helpful to realise that during sleep our sensory input is largely switched off, and while dreaming the voluntary muscles are paralysed.

Usually we enter this sightless, soundless, immobilised world of sleep unconsciously. But what would it be like to travel that deeply beyond sensory input, that deeply into the substrata of the mind and bodily functions with awareness? What would it be like to enter sleep with critical faculties, with active curiosity, and some ability to direct what we found? What would it be like to carry the bright torch of personal awareness into the depths of the usually unconscious body and mind?

Well, for some it is like an exploration of an archaeological dig, except it isn’t dead bones or fragments of a long past we find. But living experiences of the different levels of our past. See Levels of Awareness

Here is a frontier a few people have crossed. Like the frontiers of sea and sky that past generations conquered, this frontier of the mind holds enormous treasures and benefits. However, unlike the frontiers presented by the exploration of the oceans and space, the crossing of this frontier is open to us all if we are courageous enough to go on such a journey. See Archetype of the Search for Self

If we use the image of a large building to represent the mind and body, the upper levels above ground depict waking awareness and physical activity. But beneath ground level, in the place of sleep and the unconscious, there is far more space than above ground.

In these further spaces of the mind people have found access to the motivations, fears and responses that lie behind their waking success or failure. They have a gateway to the roots of creativity and innovation that can enrich their everyday life. The processes of our body, usually beyond control, can be influenced to improve health.

As one lucid dreamer described, “I literally woke up in sleep, and I could observe how my body was dealing with a chest infection, and how a rigid attitude I had was creating tension in my neck, and thus interfering with the healing process.”

Another lucid dreamer said that this new state is like a wonderful play area, or a gymnasium for the mind and emotions. This enabled him to stretch or enlarge his abilities, his perspectives, in a way that was difficult in waking life.

In brief, some of the possibilities of lucidity are:

1 – The ability to do the “housework” of your mind and emotions, cleaning up old conflicts, unhelpful responses and habits that generated in childhood.

2 – The possibility of working with the processes of healing in the bodymind and thereby enhancing your health.

3 – The unconscious has long been recognised as being a major resource used by great artists and musicians. So lucidity opens this treasure house of creativity.

4 – The unconscious is the generator of helpful hunches, of intuition and wider perception. This is partly because it holds the whole library of our memories and experience. It also creates new patterns of connectivity between previously unconnected pieces of gathered information. So lucidity brings a new sense organ.

5 – Quantum physics has begun to show that the roots of our being are not in the atom — the material object that led to our view we are only a body that lives and dies. The new view suggests that the very foundation of our being lives beyond time and space. In fact many lucid dreamers appear to experience or explore this condition. This enables them to witness events away from their sleeping body. Out of body and near death experiences are part of lucidity

6 – Real scientific research has helped to clarify how lucidity can be accessed. There are clear methods one can use to reach toward this personal experience of crossing a new frontier into an enlargement of our world and our abilities. This need not remain something only experienced in sleep.

See: Life’s Little Secrets; Techniques for Exploring your Dreams; for further suggestions Dream Yoga and Lucid Dreaming

Link to List of Chapters – Link to Part 6

Lucidity – Awake In Sleep

Lucidity Part 4

Sometimes in the practice of deep relaxation, meditation or sensory deprivation, our being enters into a state akin to sleep, yet we maintain personal waking awareness. This is like a journey into a deeply interior world of mind and body where our senses no longer function in their waking manner, where the brain works in a different way, and where awareness is introverted in a degree we do not usually experience. It can sometimes be a frightening world simply because we are not accustomed to it.

In a similar way a measure of waking awareness can arise while dreaming. This is called lucid dreaming. During it we can change or wilfully direct what is happening in the dream in a way not usual to the dream state.

“Only a handful of psychical researchers studied lucid dreams and many people associated such work with the paranormal or occult. Orthodox scientists who studied sleep were not interested. They argued that lucid dreams could not possibly be real dreams at all; that the very idea of awareness during a dream was a contradiction in terms. So their theory went, lucid dreams must be occurring in brief moments of wakefulness or in the transition between waking and sleeping – but not in the kind of deep sleep during which rapid eye movements (REMs) and ordinary dreams usually take place. In other words, lucid dreams were not really dreams at all.

How could the dreamers of lucid dreams convince them otherwise? After all, when you are in a deep sleep and dreaming you cannot shout, ‘Hey! Listen to me. I’m dreaming right now.’ The muscles of the body are paralysed. You cannot even move a finger.

The breakthrough came when sleep researcher Keith Hearne, at the University of Hull, realised that, of course, not all your muscles are paralysed. In REM sleep, the eyes move. So perhaps a lucid dreamer could signal with eye movements. It was just over 10 years ago that Alan Worsley, a lucid dreamer, first managed this crucial trick. He decided to move his eyes left and right eight times in succession whenever he realised he was dreaming. In the sleep laboratory, Hearne had him connected to a polygraph and could see the string of extreme eye movements clearly recorded in the middle of REM sleep. So the doubters were wrong. Lucid dreams are real dreams and do occur during REM sleep.” Quoted from New Scientist vol 178 issue 2397 – 31 May 2003, page 26

 Example: ‘I had backed my car into a big yard, a commercial area. My wife, two of my sons and I got out of the car. As we stood in the yard talking I realised there was a motorbike where my car should be. I said to everyone, ‘There was a car here a moment ago, now it’s a motorbike. Do you know what that means? It means we are dreaming.’ Mark my son was now with us, and my ex wife. I asked them if they realised they were dreaming. They got very vague and didn’t reply. I asked them again and felt very clearly awake.’ William V.

William’s is a fairly typical lucid dream, but there are features which it does not illustrate. During the days or weeks prior to a lucid dream, many people experience an increase in flying dreams. The next example shows another common feature.

 Example: ‘In many of my dreams I become aware that I am dreaming. Also, if anything unpleasant threatens me in the dream I get away from it by waking myself.’ Alan LBC.

Lucidity often has this feature of enabling the dreamer to avoid apparently unpleasant elements of the dream. The decision to avoid any unpleasant internal emotions is a common feature of a person’s conscious life, so this aspect of lucidity is simply a way of taking such a decision into the dream. Some writers even suggest it as a way of dealing with frightening dreams. Avoidance does not solve the problem, it simply pushes the emotion deeper into the unconscious where it can do damage more surreptitiously. Recent findings regarding suppressed grief and stress emotions, which connects them with higher incidence of cancer, suggests that suppression is not a healthy way of dealing with feelings. See The Healing Experience

Another approach to lucidity is that it can be a sort of playground where one can walk through walls, jump from high buildings and fly; change the sofa into an attractive lover, leave ones body, and so on. True, the realisation that our dream life is a different world and that it does have completely different principles at work than our waking world is important. Often people introvert into their dream life the morals and fears which are only relevant to being awake in physical life. To avoid a charging bull is certainly valid for waking life. In our dream life though, to meet its charge is to integrate the enormous energy which the bull represents, an energy which is our own, but which we may have been avoiding or ‘running away’ from previously. Realising such simple differences revolutionises the way we relate to our own internal events and possibilities. To treat lucid dreams as if they offered no other attainable experience than manipulating the dream environment, or avoidance of difficult emotions or encounters, is to miss an amazing feature of human potential.

 Example: ‘In my dream I was watching a fern grow. It was small but opened out very rapidly. As I watched I became aware that the fern was simply an image representing a process occurring within myself which I grew increasingly aware of as I watched. Then I was fully awake in my dream and realised that my dream, perhaps any dream, was an expression of actual and real events occurring in my body and mind. I felt enormous excitement, as if I were witnessing something of great importance.’ Francis P.

It is now acceptable through the work of Freud, Jung and many others, to consider that within the images of the dream lies valuable information about what is occurring within the dreamer, perhaps unconsciously. Strangely though, it is almost never considered that one can have direct perception into this level of internal ‘events’ without the dream or without dream interpretation. What Francis describes is an experience of being on the cusp of symbols and direct perception. Considering the enormous advantage of such direct information gathering, it is surprising it is seldom mentioned except in the writings of Corriere and Hart – The Dream Makers.

 Example: ‘After defining why I had not woken in sleep recently, i.e. loss of belief, I had the following experience. I awoke in my sleep and began to see, without any symbols, that my attitudes and sleep movements expressed a feeling of restrained antagonism or irritation to my wife. I could also observe the feelings were arising from my discipline of sexuality. Realising I did not want those feelings I altered them and woke enough to turn toward my wife.’ Francis P.

After the first of his direct perception dreams, Francis attempted to use this function again, resulting in the above, and other, such dreams. Just as classic dream interpretation says that the dream symbols represent psychobiological logical processes which might be uncovered by processing dreams, what we see in Francis’ lucidity is a direct route to self insight, and through it a rapid personal growth to improved life experience. Such dreams provide not only psychological insight, but very frequently, a direct perception of processes occurring in the body, as the following examples illustrates.

 Example: ‘Although deeply asleep I was wide awake without any shape or form. I had direct experience, without any pictures, of the action of the energies in my body. I had no awareness of body shape, only of the flow of activities in the organs. I checked over what I could observe, and noticed a tension in my neck was interfering with the flow and exchange of energies between the head and trunk. It was also obvious from what I could see that the tension was due to an attitude I had to authority, and if the tension remained it could lead to physical ill health.’ C.

Example: Taken from CompuServe files – contributed by Oliver W. Markley. First appeared in Whole Earth Review, Fall 1991:

 It was as though the dream I had been watching was a movie, and instead of looking at the screen on which it was being projected, I somehow began looking into the lens of the movie projector. As I did so, the energy of my gaze ‘melted’ the movie that was passing through, which in turn allowed my gaze to penetrate deeper into the movie process, seeing where the movie came from. I knew that I was about to get an answer to some of my deepest questions about dreaming: What is the true nature of dreams? Where do they come from? What function do they play?

I was somehow able to see first the more superficial levels of dream process within myself, and then deeper levels, until the depth of my gaze revealed processes so alien that I was no longer able to understand them. At this point I returned my attention to the need to record the dream, and woke up. There were five categories of dreams in all. The function of the first type of dream process I saw was pure entertainment.

The second reviewed current concerns and unfinished business, and the attempt to find solutions to problems therein.

The third process involved the reception of guidance from higher wisdom sources within the mind. At a superficial level, this guidance dealt with the concerns of the second type of process; but at a deeper level, it dealt with topics that came along with the guidance process. These topics seemed to concern the future, and the evolution of the mind and soul both individual and collective.

The fourth type answered a question about the familiar assertion that ‘most of us use but a small part of our mental capacities’ (some ‘experts’ say we use only about 10 percent, others that it is as small as 2 percent). I had often wondered about this, thinking that in nature, if things don’t get used, they atrophy. If we have all this excess mental capacity that we aren’t using, why doesn’t it atrophy?

The fourth mode seemed to be some sort of gymnasium, with a range of mental, psychic, and spiritual exercises to keep the brain/mind fit.

The final type of dream content was totally surprising. As I penetrated deeply into my internal dream process, what I found can perhaps be best described as being visited by aliens.’ The ‘foreground’ resembled a resort hotel, a place for sightseeing and recreation. It was benign and human-feeling, although the visitors were anything but human! As I explored more deeply, however, things got so alien that I couldn’t understand them in the lucid-dream state.

As I reluctantly turned back from this journey, I realised that I had an answer to yet another question about dreams that had long puzzled me: ‘Why are our dreams so highly symbolised? ‘

I now understood why the deeper reaches of dream life must be camouflaged by symbols: the self-protective belief systems which dominate waking life are simply unable to accept the alienness of deep dreaming process; symbolic camouflage artfully bridges the gap.

This last category of dream represents what I call ‘the L-Squared dream,’ a lucid dream in which the dreamer is lucid about the process of being lucid. To become lucid in this way, it is helpful to imagine having a miner’s lamp on one’s forehead, a metaphoric ‘truth beam’ that reveals the underlying truth of whatever is involved.

An effective way to develop lucidity is to frequently consider the events of waking life as if they were a dream. Try to see events as one might see dream symbols – what do they mean in terms of ones motivations, fears, personal growth? What do they suggest about oneself? For instance a person who works in a photographic darkroom developing films and prints might see they were trying to bring to consciousness the latent – unconscious – side of themselves. A banker might feel they were working at how best to deal with their sexual and personal resources. A person working with children who are in some way injured or deficient might be trying to heal their own inner child. In this way one might actually apply what is said in this dream dictionary to ones outer circumstances.

The second instruction is, on waking, at a convenient moment, imagine oneself standing within ones recent dream. As you get a sense of the dream environment, realise that you are taking waking awareness into the dream. From the standpoint of being fully aware of the dream action and events, what will you now do in and with the dream? Re-dream it with consciousness. For example the things you run from in your normal dreaming you could now face. See: Techniques for Exploring your Dreams; The Waking Lucid Dream; for further suggestions Dream Yoga and Lucid Dreaming

 See also: processing dreams; Lucidity- The New Frontier; Creativity: The Lucidity Institute.

Link to List of Chapters – Link to Part 5