A lucid dream is something that has to be experienced in order to be fully understood. One cannot tell another accurately what it feels like have your consciousness run around your head while receiving no outside input. It is an experience directly with the raw construct of what makes you you, the set of memories and experiences that have shaped the same mind that interacts with the outside waking world. To imagine this ultimately unique experience for every individual is nearly impossible so in order to level the playing field I will tell you how you too can lucid dream and experience for yourselves what I am talking about.

There are several methods in order to get to the point of experiencing fully self-induced states of lucid dreaming and each one works on its own or in tandem with others. The first step to lucid dreaming is in fact just remembering dreams, since even now while you are sleeping you may be experiencing lucid dreams but you have not noticed since you haven’t remembered any of your dreams from the previous night. In order to get your dream retention up there are several proven techniques you can use. The first and probably most well known is keeping a dream journal. A dream journal is pretty much what it sounds like, a notebook or a recording of dreams that you have remembered. Whenever you wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night and you have a decent recollection of a dream that you just experienced write or recite your dream (order is usually less important then content) to the best of your knowledge. It often helps if you are just waking up to try to go over your dreams while still in an end stage of your sleep cycle as it can help you remember more clearly and more of the dream then if you just wake up quickly and try to rush to write everything down before it fades. The second part of dream retention comes from your pre-sleep routine. Before going to sleep it is important to prep yourself before entering into a dream state. By repeating a phrase like “I will wake up and remember my dreams completely” is a common way to put yourself into a state of mind where your brain will be prepared to retain dream memories rather then just purge them as is usually the case. The actual phrase that you repeat isn’t really important so long that it sends your brain the message that the dreams that it is about to experience is important information that it should retain.

It takes some practice and patience to get your dream retention up to a reasonably high level (An unreasonably high level is retaining up to 5 dreams a night which is possible with proper practice though going though such an experience, while interesting is not recommended by the author as it is extremely exhausting) you can advance to the next step of the process. There are two roads that one can follow here in regards to what one wants to do with their newfound ability to remember their dreams. One such avenue is merely taking the dreams that they have recorded and analyzing them as an insight into the inner workings of your mind. The other path to follow is that of lucid dreaming. Now once you have been able to remember your dreams for a reasonable amount of time you may experience lucidity by accident. Typically I myself would experience lucid dreams about once every 3 months before training myself to the point of consistently experiencing lucidity once a week. If you do experience lucidity by accident in this process it is an invaluable asset to help train yourself to experience lucidity on a more consistent basis. The reason its is so invaluable to know what a lucid dream feels like is because training yourself to produce lucid states is almost entirely based upon learning a certain “feel� to your dreams and being able to recognize it while you are dreaming. While this is very hard to describe and mostly based upon personal experience (everyone dreams differently as well) there are more concrete ways to promote lucid dreaming.

Most methods to promote lucid dreaming involve training yourself to distinguish between the waking and sleeping world so that once in the sleeping world one can point to certain familiar signs and determine that you are in a dream reality rather then in the waking world. What this entails is asking yourself throughout the day “Is this reality?� and going through a checklist to determine weather or not you are dreaming at the time. The easiest way to “reality check� is to look at a piece of writing (I find that something that you are holding works the best) look away, look at the writing again see if it has changed, if not look away and look back again. If the piece of writing has not changed by the third time you have looked at it there is a 95% chance that you are in the waking world and you are not dreaming. Once you have determined that you are in fact not dreaming the second step is to ask yourself “what would it feel like if I were dreaming right now?� Try and place yourself in a dream state with your current situation and surroundings and ask yourself “How would it be different?’ “How would I feel if this were a dream?� and try to do as much as you can to place yourself in a dream state that you have become familiar with while learning dream retention.

Once you have questioned reality enough in waking life you will soon find that in a dream you will come to a point where you question the reality of the situation, weather just by feel or by trying to read something twice and not getting the same thing when you look back (believe me it changes and usually keeps changing every time you look back at it, pretty fun). Once this has happened you have achieved some form of lucidity in your dream however having control is another thing entirely. I have certainly have had dreams where I have been aware that I was dreaming and had little to no control over the direction or setting of the dream along with dreams where my lucid control has been near complete. Once you begin lucid dreaming control is the next step in becoming an avid lucid dreamer.

Control over lucid dreams is something that is hard to teach and is something that I have gotten better with only through experience. The reason that lucid dreaming interests so many people is because of the control it offers over the raw mental construct that makes up our minds. The amount of control you can exert is directly related to how “real� the created experience feels to you as well as how long you can maintain a lucid state for. In the beginning the hardest thing for most people is staying asleep once they achieve lucidity as it is our natural reaction to wake up once we have realized that we are asleep. Again the only advice that I can lend in this respect is to learn how to “feel� a dream in reality and you will be able to better accept a dream state as something that you can exist in while being conscious. Once you have gotten better at recognizing dream states and actively allowing yourself to lucid dream you can experiment with whatever you want in terms of how you use your newfound ability. The first inclination is to act our all your fantasies (your dreams if you will) in the lucid state and yes this is extremely fun and healthy however there are other alternatives to using lucid dreaming. One such alternative is using lucid dreaming to work out specific physiological problems or facing fears in order to overcome them.

No matter what you use your dream experiences for just being more aware of your dreams will change your daily life. Remembering your dreams allows you to access a huge part of your life that your brain normally disregards as useless information (as it constantly does in the waking life as well) allowing you access to a well of information about yourself as well as the chance to experience an entire other half of your life that most people are almost oblivious to. So whatever your reasons, be they just having fun (and oh boy is lucid dreaming fun) or actually trying to make yourself a better person I wish you luck. Happy Dreaming!

Warning: If you are planning to try lucid dreaming let me warn you of a few extremely frightening but totally harmless events that may and probably will happen to you if you lucid dream for long enough periods of time. The first is sleep paralysis, you can experience this outside of lucid dream experiences but lucid dreaming can induce such states as well. Sleep paralysis occurs on a daily basis and is the mechanism that prevents our bodies from responding to the signals that are produced during our REM sleep cycle and essentially paralyzes our bodies except for our eyes. As such our eyes can open during a REM cycle so that we are able to see while we are still dreaming. During such experiences the common experience is a sense of extreme fear especially of an ominous, nebulous presence in a room. Also experienced commonly are auditory hallucinations usually of things like footsteps or doors opening ect. The most frightening part for most people is usually the fact that they are unable to move and are conscious and I can tell you the whole ordeal is not a very pleasant experience. The other less malicious warning I will give is that of false awakenings. False awakenings usually occur while lucid dreaming for a longer period of time. After a long lucid dream one can wake up within the dream and not realize right away that they are still dreaming. This can lead to very confusing states of lucidity where one does not know how real the dream situation is since one believes that they are awake in reality. This usually leads to nothing beyond confusion and unsettling feelings but all the same it is something to watch for.