Though it has been a very long time since I’ve had a heavy compulsion to get into the world of lucid dreaming, it is something I am lately considering getting back into. I have talked a little bit about lucid dreaming before but in this particular post I’ll get more into it. We’ll start by asking, what is lucid dreaming? When you have a lucid dream, you’re having a dream while being aware that it is a dream.

Imagine for a moment that you’re walking down the street, it’s late at night, but the weather is absolutely perfect. You look out upon the streets and it reminds you of the streets of New York, or maybe London, England. The lighting present is such that is gives off a beautiful, soft, orange and blue light upon the street. There are no cars, it’s just you. Again, that weather…not too hold, not too cold. You approach a streetlamp and look up at where the light is being emitted from. Suddenly the street lamp seems to melt upon the ground into a bizarre and mishapen looking puddle. You ask yourself, Am I dreaming? You pinch yourself to be sure; you feel the pain of the pinch. Obviously this must be real, as you can feel the pain of pinching yourself. You squat down a bit to examine the puddle and a face appears within the puddle that seems to be looking around, as if it is trapped beneath a pane of glass. You almost feel compelled to laugh as you think how absurd this entire thing is. Surely, I must be dreaming. You check your watch and the digital readout of the numbers where the normal time normally would be seem to be strange looking linear symbols of nonsense. Realizing after seeing these symbols, you know you’re dreaming.

And at that point, you are truly free to do anything you wish. Yes, I mean truly anything you wish. You can choose to walk away from this face within the melted street lamp puddle to go visit some other setting or do some other activity, or you can also stay and figure out what this face wants, what it’s doing there, or whatever. You have total control now, now that you know that that world you find yourself in is not your present waking reality.

Your mind consists of two parts, essentially, each one operating more on one side of the brain than the other. These two parts are called your conscious and subconscious.

The conscious mind is limited, and yet, could also be seen as the powerful focus that you have over the whole of your massive perceptions that are taken in every second by your subconscious. Your subconscious is responsible for keeping your heart beating, your body functioning, and it is also a powerful information receiving, and information processing device. The human brain, in comparison to the fastest modern computers, operates at least 50 times faster, and not only does it operate at such a greater speed, it also processes the information better and in an entirely different way than any computer processes information.

So what does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that if you want to play games in your dreams, you’ve got a gaming machine that is more powerful than any other next-gen console on the market, any PC out there, and has more possibilities for gaming rules, characters, and realism than anything else you can possibly experience. What’s best – you get direct interaction with all of it!

It is said within a lot of the scientific community that the researchers, neurologists, psychologists – they’re trying to figure out why humans sleep, and none of them are entirely sure. But give me a break, guys! It’s obvious, in my view, and it seems like we’ve already found the answer. We sleep because our mind needs to sort out information that it has taken in during the day, but consciously, we haven’t had time to sort through. And not to mention, as powerful as the subconscious is, it also has a backlog, and needs to take care of things later on as well. Since we’re not conscious while sleeping, or not said to be conscious, the subconscious takes care of all of this mental sorting by dreaming.

This is one reason why people who are deprived of sleep for more than three days start having strange hallucinations. When this happens, it is the mind’s way of sorting out the information, but rather than shutting down, it will simply perform “on site maintenience,” and will start creating what would normally be dream content right in front of your eyes. Your mind is so powerful in its ability to not only recreate settings and convince you of perceptions by manipulating the senses that you can be under the interpretation things are one way when they are, in any possible objective reality, not really so!

So what can we do with lucid dreaming? What is possible? When we are aware we’re dreaming, we have direct access to the language and world of our inner mind. A lot of people do not really understand how incredible this is, or what can truly be done with it! Some people I’ve heard from will even just say, “Oh yeah, I’m dreaming and I know I’m a dreaming…it’s a dream…so what?”

When you have direct access to your subconscious mind, it means having direct access to every single memory, every single experience, everything that your mind has ever processed, ever stored, ever interacted with, anything. Not only that, but your mind is also usually working a number of steps ahead of wherever you think you are at a given moment. If you’re wondering how to get a promotion at work, or what to say to the girl to win a date with her(or whether or not you should even date her), the inner mind, or subconscious, has usually already listened to this chatter you may have thought to yourself during the day, and it has taken the steps necessary to offer you a solution.

But how does it get the solution to you? Unfortunately, the subconscious doesn’t really speak a language that’s as blatant as English or anything we consciously speak; rather, the subsconscious often will find other ways, whether that means shoving a repressed feeling up to the surface, managing to get something through that funnel of conscious awareness, but unfortunately a lot of the time these solutions and ideas just never see the conscious light of day because of how much we squelch, filter, and blatantly ignore the inner mind’s messages. This is not something that we intentionally do, and it is something that everyone seems to do at at least one point or several points, at some time in their lives. Much of the time, the majority of the population really seems to be ignoring the vast potential that awaits in their subconscious mind.

Now, it is important to understand that while lucid dreaming does give us direct access to the subconscious, it is also still an entire experience which we have in the perspective of our conscious mind. In other words, we do not experience the information presented by the subconscious the same way the subconscious really presents the information to itself. We get to see some of that information directly, but the way we interpret while in the dream state is still limited by our conscious abilities, because that’s just kind of the fact of the matter – we can’t be conscious unless we perceive through the conscious, or so it would seem. Of course, there is a lot more to that idea, but we’ll get into that in other posts.

Say, for instance, you have a dead relative you’ve not seen in years. With lucid dreaming, you can go and talk to that person and because your mind can show you a reality almost 100% reminiscent of the one you experience in your waking world, having that conversation could easily be completely realistic. This is an example of how we do not use anymore than a tiny fraction of our brain. Lucid dreaming is one way to tap into that extra 90%-99% that we do not even begin to get anywhere close to using the majority of the time.

Or how about flying? There’s something a bit more fun, right? Ever wished you could fly? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m one of the people that knows exactly what it feels like. And I gotta tell ya – it’s amazing. Though sometimes, strangely enough, I’ll have trouble steering every now and then. I don’t know why that is. Still, it’s one of those things you can explore, and maybe you’ll have better luck with the steering while flying than I have.

If any of this interests you, I would encourage you to begin looking into it all. In addition to a number of books on the subject, I’m going to list some steps that will allow you to get a start onto exploring this area.

1. Start keeping a dream journal.

Perhaps one of the most important steps in getting started with lucid dreaming is keeping a dream journal. Some of you are probably thinking Well, I don’t even dream at night. Well, the fact is, every night you sleep you dream, the problem is dream recall. To improve dream recall, you should first start keeping a dream journal. Every single time you wake up, just go ahead and jot down into a spiral notebook or actual journal whatever you can remember about the dream. No matter when you awake, whether it be in the middle of the night right after having the dream, or in the morning, always jot down whatever you can possibly remember, even if it’s only tiny fragments or hints of feelings, as well as the date and time in which you woke up after having and remembering the dream.

2. Start doing reality checks.

Reality checks are tests you conduct to test whether or not you’re actually in waking reality. Start making a habit of asking yourself Am I dreaming and then following it up with tests to see if you actually are. I should mention here that at the beginning of this entry, I talked about pinching yourself. Pinching yourself is not a good reality test, because you can pinch yourself in a dream and it will feel entirely real! So you’ll have no way of determining if that is the truth. One thing you can do is to start thinking about the logic of whatever situation you find yourself in at any given time. Think about the logic and mechanics of whatever it is – does it all make sense? Even this, can sometimes fail, but as you practice you are likely to get better at it. The best way, I’ve found, is to take a piece of text, read it, and then look away, read it again, and repeat. If you do this several times, and the text changes any one of the times you’ve looked back – you’re probably dreaming. Or try flying. If you float off the ground even for a short moment longer than usual, congrats – you’re likely dreaming(not just be sure that you don’t test this in dumb situations like off skyscrapers, you moron). There’s all kinds of reality checks you can do, and some of them are often more effective than others.

3. Take note of your ‘dream triggers.’

Throughout many people’s dreams, there’s usually certain recurring elements that happen from time to time, and these often are large signs that the person may be dreaming. So as you take down your dreams and write about them in your journal, with the greatest amount of elaboration you can possibly bare to write, you might begin noticing that maybe there is a person in your dreams whom does not actually exist in your waking reality – maybe they only exist in your dreams, literally, and everytime you see that person you can know you’re dreaming. These dream signs can become your ‘lucidity triggers.’ When you see some of these things, you know you’re dreaming.

4. When you become lucid, always remember to re-lax.

Relaxing and staying calm in the moment of achieving lucidity is always an important factor, because one of the most common beginner mistakes in lucid dreaming is getting too excited the first time you gain lucidity, and then waking up from the excitement. You don’t want to put a shock to your system. Yes, you’re lucid, yes, it’s wonderful, but remember to relax…Relaxing, staying calm, enjoying the moment with a gentle solitude, solace, and soothing wave of relaxation the first several times around will also be a good head start to putting you into the habit of keeping that relaxed state going, allowing you to maintain lucidity for a longer period of time.

These are just a few tips and pointers to get you started into the world of lucid dreaming. Also check out this Dirty Mechanism forum thread to contribute and read links on lucid dreaming. The best book, from my experience, to start with is from the very guy who proved lucid dreaming exists scientifically, Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming.

So until next time, happy dreaming, oh, and why not ask yourself right now: Am I dreaming?

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