Frontiers of the Mind: The Why, What and How of Lucid Dreaming

People are fascinated by the power of the mind. Among the great mysteries that have accompanied humanity through its journey is the power of dreaming – the meaning of dreams and how they are conceived in the brain. Few people, however, realize that it is possible to control one's dreams: to, as the term goes, "lucid dream." One may dream of whatever one wishes and act in the dream as though conscious. This may seem incredible, but few are those who have not suddenly realized, one night, “Hey! I'm in a dream!” Through easy techniques, you can train yourself to have “Ah-ha!” moments like that every night. With practice, you can exercise great influence over your dreams, eliminating nightmares and, if you so desire, using your resting hours to ready yourself for the challenges of your waking life. In this article, I will show you the seven steps to lucid dreaming for the rest of your life.

The First Step: A Dream Journal

Most of us are not born with very good recall of our dreams. We may remember a few details immediately on waking, which drift away from us over the course of the first few minutes of morning. Every once in a while, a particularly pleasant, or horrible, dream will leave enough of an impression to describe it several hours later. But how can we lucid dream if we cannot even remember our dreams?

As with anything, increasing the amount of attention you give your dreams allows you to focus on and recall them better. A time-tested method for doing this is by writing them down. Keep a composition book by your bedside and write down every detail you remember of your dreams as soon as you wake up. Writing something down allows one to recall it an average of 30% better after several hours. Within a week or two of getting into this habit, you will find your memories of dreams are much richer than before.

The Second Step: Positive Affirmation

Another important concept for building strong dream recall is positive affirmation. Positive affirmation is used in psychotherapy and hypnosis to help the mind adopt a new idea, and is simply a statement of what one wants to occur that is repeated over and over. As those who have read some of my other articles may already know, one of the stages the mind passes through on the way to sleep is very similar to hypnosis, a state where your subconscious mind is very receptive to your conscious wishes.

Your subconscious mind is a repository of information about everything you have ever experienced, though so disorganized by conscious standards that most of the information is very difficult to access. During sleep, the subconscious sorts through the day's experiences and adds new information to its memory database. While this goes on, you experience dreams. Since the subconscious is the source of dreams, getting it on your side can only be helpful.

In this case, positive affirmation should be used for two purposes - to improve recall while one is developing dream memory, and to improve sleeping consciousness, the knowledge that one is asleep, while developing dream lucidity. Repeating a simple phrase like "In the morning, I will remember every detail of my dreams" is sufficient to the first purpose. Repeat it ten to twenty times, either in your mind or aloud, while you are lying in bed. If you have to get up to do anything else, repeat the process when you lie down again. The goal is to make your affirmation the last thing you think of consciously before you are asleep.

The Third Step: Developing Dream Lucidity

There will come a point where you can remember at least some details from dreams every morning, and this is good. Since several dreams can occur in a very short time during sleep, and we dream every time we sleep, there is no shortage of them. When you reach this point, it is time to focus on developing your sleeping consciousness.

The most common method for developing dream lucidity is the reality check. A reality check is simply a habit you take up in real life that cannot be duplicated reliably in a dream. Partial lucidity, represented by the strong dream recall that you have already developed, causes this habit to be carried out and identifies when you are dreaming. To make this concept clear, an example should be provided.

In dreams, it is generally considered impossible to read, identify time on a clock, or do any of a number of activities influenced by the left hemisphere of the brain, which is very mathematical and less active in sleep than waking. Therefore, by getting into the habit of checking your watch - then closing your eyes, and telling yourself, "If I am dreaming, the time will be incorrect" before looking a second time - you develop a reality check. During a dream, partial lucidity will cause you to carry out your reality check. When a reality check proves that you are in a dream, the shock often jolts you into more complete lucidity.

A reality check should be performed before going to sleep and after waking up, at the very least. To strengthen the habit, perform the reality check throughout the day. Remember, when performing a reality check, you must stop to remind yourself consciously of the importance of this action. Otherwise, it will not disrupt the dream state when you do it while asleep. A partial list of possible reality checks follows.

The Fourth Step: Reality Checks

Any action which depends strongly on mathematical or spatial skill, or minute details, can potentially serve as a good reality check. The following list is composed of those that I have used successfully in the past. These are effective because of their strong differences from regular reality.

Write a favorite proverb, joke, or other phrase on a standard-sized note card. Keep the note card in your pocket. Throughout the day, refer to the note card at random intervals. This is a strong reality check because, unlike checking your watch, this has no other purpose than to establish whether or not you are dreaming.
Look down at your shoes. Close your eyes, think of another pair of shoes that you own, and look again. In a dream, you are about as likely as not to find yourself wearing the other shoes. A standard means of changing what is happening, once you are in a dream and lucid, is to look away from the scene and look back. Anything your attention is not focused on is subject to change.
Try to fly. In the waking world, it is, of course, impossible - and I don't mean that you should flap your arms on the street corner to give yourself a reality check. In a dream, you will be able to fly, sci-fi spaceman style, by looking up, stretching your arms skyward, and blasting off. You may imagine that you have jets on your shoes or back. In polite company, this can be disguised as a stretch - it will still work if you are, in fact, dreaming.

The Fifth Step: Other Methods of Lucid Dreaming

Other methods of inducing lucidity often take ingenuity above and beyond the reality check method. A brief overview of more detailed methods follows.

LaBerge's Mnemonic Induction Technique: A big name for a big leap forward in the science of lucid dreams, a method developed by Dr. Stephen LaBerge of Stanford, California in 1980.
In the LaBerge method, one wakes up fully from a remembered dream, distracts the mind with another pleasant, low-impact activity such as very light reading, a walk, dusting, or what have you. On waking fully, the practitioner goes back to bed.
Lying in bed, the practitioner uses or old friend positive affirmation to remember that he or she was just dreaming, and when a similar dream happens in the future he or she will remember it and realize that it is a dream. In the beginning, it is easier to induce lucid dreaming through a series of short naps, as so, than during a regular sleep period.

Other methods based on LaBerge: Recently, Dr. LaBerge has invented devices to remind the sleeper he or she is dreaming while awake. This is done using a helmet or controlled environment where light pulses of certain length and intensity will bombard the sleeper at intervals. The sleeper is conditioned to react to these pulses by realizing they are asleep. If you have a clock that can be set to play sounds below the threshold that normally wakes you, but still audible to the naked ear, you can try to develop a routine for yourself based on the same principle.

Waking Induction of Lucid Dreaming: Some individuals with experience in meditation or hypnosis have claimed the ability to maintain consciousness while their body is falling asleep. Meditation brings on a state much closer to sleep than normal waking consciousness, yet sensation is not interrupted. By recognizing hypnogagia, the partially-awake state where thought slows and muscles relax deeply just before sleep, it is possible to induce lucid dreaming while still awake, cautioning yourself at the last moment that "I am about to dream."

It is also possible to use positive affirmation to awaken yourself after every dream period, which works wonders from the point of view of cataloging your dreams and increases the chances of lucid dreaming due to interruption of your sleep pattern. However, I do not recommend it, as, on the whole, you will get less sleep.

The Sixth Step: Maintaining Lucidity

By this point, you probably have a good grasp of what lucid dreaming is, unusually strong dream recall, and more than a little experience in dreams of varying lucidity. However, a brief word about maintaining lucidity once you've reached it. With nightly practice, your lucidity will grow sharper and sharper. However, there are a few techniques for ensuring you do not slip back into sleep unconsciousness after initially realizing you are in a dream.

Focusing: Focusing on objects that would have intricate detail and texture in reality is one way to push yourself into the dream and keep from fading out of consciousness. Manipulate your environment and pay attention to a small aspect of your dream rather than the big picture. After a short time, you can return to dreaming.
Turning: To restate, turning sharply in one's dreams often forces a change of scenery, and this can re-engage your attention if you are slipping in and out of focus or, conversely, if your dream has led to a situation that you simply don't want to be in. Notably, in a lucid dream, it is even easier to jolt yourself awake than under normal circumstances.

The Goal: Lucid Dreaming and How to Use It

After a few months of practice, any healthy person can lucid dream on a regular basis. Because lucid dreaming pushes the boundaries of knowledge in neurology and psychology, it would be folly to try and recommend the "best" way to make use of your lucid dreams. It is possible to fly like a bird, converse with yourself, or significant characters in your mind, to get answers to questions about your behavior or motivations. Fully lucid dreams are good for rehearsing skills that you have in the waking world, or trying out different solutions to problems. Because time does not pass in the mind in the same way it passes in the physical, waking world, it is possible to extend these sessions far beyond what is normal during our conscious hours. There are even claims about lucid dreamers who have experienced decades in the course of a single night!

However you use it, there are two things to remember about this advanced stage of lucid dreaming. First, once regular lucid dreams have set in, your dreams are likely to become lucid more often with time, not less. Second, since all the events occur completely in your mind, there is no possible danger to you. Enjoy your newfound freedom, and happy dreaming!