Consciousness studies 3 - Lucid dreaming

[Ksihkehe]

Preparation

Lucid dreams are something that many people experience at some time or another. It's just conscious awareness of being in a dream state while it's happening. Like many things that fall under the umbrella of altered states there seems to be a sliding scale to this awareness. Sometimes light lucidity may find you aware of the dream, but still a passive passenger observing events.  Full lucidity will find you making conscious decisions about how to proceed or, as mastery is achieved, altering the underlying fabric of the dream itself. The more control one takes, consciously, the more difficult it gets to remain in the dream state.

First, particularly if you don't already frequently remember your dreams, you need to start increasing your dream recall. There are things you can take like Huperzine A or African dream beans, or whatever. For recall there is no real shortcut though. The best way I'm aware of to do this is to keep a dream journal. It can just be a notepad and pen next to your bed. Some people keep track of them over time and try to find meaning in the noise, but for our purposes just the act of writing them down and spending a few minutes trying to remember them is what's important. Whatever you remember, even if it's just small snippets, should be written down with a reasonable amount of detail. This alone will start improving dream recall for the majority of people that make it a habit. Maybe it will take a week or maybe it will take 6 weeks, but the 5-10 minutes in the morning will begin to pay off for most people.

When you start this process you should take another 5 minutes (or more if you can tolerate it and maintain it) to set your intent for recalling dreams before going to sleep. It's frequently recommended that you have good sleep hygeine as well. That includes things like limiting screen time for an hour before bed, keeping a consistent sleep schedule, and getting some minimal kind of exercise in each day. The five minutes or so before bed also adds to that ritual. In this time you will set your intent. These are things you will either say or think, very consistently, as a mild form of self-hypnosis.

Examples, which are entirely suitable for use as is or modified to your liking:

"The next thing I experience will be a dream"
"I am able to recognize dream states and become lucid with ease"
"I remember my dreams"

Pretty simple. You're just going to repeat these things or something very similar, in your head or aloud, for five minutes or so before bed. Even better, if you can, is to be repeating these things to yourself right up to the moment you fall asleep. If you have a little more motivation and want a little more effect, you can actually write these things down in your dream journal before bed too. It's another avenue for embedding those things in your head, engaging different neural pathways, when you write each down five or ten times each in additional to repeating them in your relaxed sleeping position.

After you start recalling dreams more often this opens up some potential experimentation, even before you beging gaining lucidity. Before going to bed, rather than repeating your simple intent, you can begin adding specifics to see how that information can be smuggled over into the dream state subconsciously. You can add "tonight I will dream of grandma's farmhouse" or "tonight I will dream about seeing the cherry blossoms in Japan". It doesn't matter what, maybe you have a problem you need to solve or a memory you'd like to revisit more viserally than a daydream. You simply add that to your intent and keep at it until you get something out the other side.

These two practices are bookends for your time in dream states. One one side you feed intent and focus and out the other side you receive the the outputs of your subconscious processes. You may spontaneously start having lucidity in some dreams without taking any further steps, but there are other tricks to include during the day to further boost you chances. It's another 5-10 minutes of your time. This is putting your daily investment at 20-30 minutes, give or take. As you practice these things you may find you need even less time and just a few minutes are enough to set intent and do periodic reality checks.

In normal day to day life most people are reacting to their environment. Depending on the person and the day (or even the time of day) they may have very little situational awareness of the world around them as they focus on whatever it is they're doing. This is great when we're trying to focus on a task or get a lot of work done, to be on auto-pilot to some degree. This is not conducive to becoming lucid in dreams. In dreams, without that spark of awareness, we function like we're on auto-pilot. What you need is mindfulness.

The first step toward breaking out of this constant autopilot state is adding reality checks to your normal routine. Anywhere from 5-10 times a day you will begin doing a brief reality check. This is taking you out of the moment you're in and checking a few perceptual channels to see if they're working as we expect in waking life. Perception in dream states tends to have some unique conditions. They're not hard and fast rules, but for a novice they're almost universally true. I'll discuss those briefly, then the reality check process will make more sense.

In dream states the vast majority of people are not able to read. That doesn't mean you can't understand things that are written down, but that you can't read them. If you encounter something written down you may intuitively know what it says, but the act of reading is superfluous. This is the same for reading times on a clock. You may perceive the meaning when you glance at it, but you're not engaging the same mental processes as reading. For me, further scrutiny reveals a swirling mass of gibberish. I have never had words or numbers persist beyond first glance. I can look at something and know it says "eat at Fred's", but if I were to turn back to read that same thing again and examine it there would be either nothing or a nonsensical jumble of letters or symbols.

In dream states time is not linear and contiguous. That is to say there is no direct stream of time to follow. If you gain any degree of lucidity and attempt to recall how you got to exactly where you find yourself, you will have no real recollection. Maybe you find yourself in mall world (it's a thing) and you're in the middle of a large mall. You are aware of the fact that you don't simply appear in places during your waking life, there is a process. You could remember getting off the bus outside the mall or parking your car. You can remember the trip from your home or work to get to the mall. You can remember where you were in the mall prior to where you find yourself. In dreams, this is not the case. Even in recalling dreams in the morning you may find significant gaps between events even though you have the distinct feeling they were part of a series of events, you just can't recall any transitional events between them.

These two things are almost universally true for novices. I have heard people say that they can read fluently and remember everything from their dreams in a continuous flow, but it's rare. I'm not saying it doesn't happen and people don't think they're able to do these things, just that at a novice level it's unlikely or rare. I strongly suspect it's because the nuts and bolts parts of the brain is typically what processes writing and it does it somewhat automatically. When you glance at something the understanding is an autonomous process, but a detailed examination of writing at the visual level requires an active engagement with that part of the brain. That can be overcome, but training for that is much later and beyond the scope of this intro.

These two things, along with a general break in the flow of your day to day, can be exploited for lucid dreaming. While you're going to be doing these things consciously, what we're really doing is embedding them at a subconscious level. We want them to become automatic. By doing this, we increase the likelihood of engaging that process during a dream state and triggering lucidity. You're looking to trigger that moment when you realize "wait a minute, this isn't right".

So, your reality checks. These can be modified to suit your situation, but the more points you can get in the better. I've used an app called "awoken" to give me random prompts to do reality checks. This is a questionable tactic as a novice as you're training yourself to do these checks when you hear a notification. The app also offers random notifications during your set sleep time as well, with the idea being it will trigger a reality check subconsciously. It sounds viable, but better still is to simply begin doing these checks 5-10 times a day. Having it in your mind and doing it randomly in the midst of other things helps you subconsciously get in the habit of it much more. If you forget, you may need to increase the frequency in which you're doing it for a while. As it becomes habit you can dial it back.

What is a reality check? I have a few things I do. First is I count my fingers on each hand, tapping each on my thumbs as I hold them out in front of me and observe. I do it from one index finger, across to the other, and then back again. I do it a few times and keep an eye out for oddness. I also try to remember how I got to wherever I am. If I've been in the same place for a while I try to recall what I was doing just before, what I did before that, and wherever I was before I got there. If you're in the office and it's the end of the day, you can remember the last time you got up or switched tasks and recall how you got to work that day. I also look for continuity in my environment. I'm looking for oddities or things missing. Finally, I read or look at a clock. I read something, look away, and read it again. If you're in a dream and this triggers subconsciously, you will almost always discover that one of these checks comes back wonky.

This should have you on your way to spontaneous recognition of dream states.

Lessons from sleep paralysis

What happens when you get into dream states? How do you control them?

Here a brief interlude on a sibling of lucid dreaming is appropriate. That state is known as sleep paralysis. Most of the information about this state is pretty vague. In general it's a middle state somewhere between being awake and asleep where the body is still shut off from conscious control by the mind. Often in this state people sense an evil or malevolent presence that may be approaching them or even directly attacking them. There are many accounts, though they tend to be older, of an old hag or equally sinister being sitting on the person's chest and suffocating them. For me it was just a very dark and evil thing that was creeping toward me from some other part of the house. It's not always so well defined and sometimes it's just a general feeling of utter dread. I only recall it being a sensation of a being once. The rest of the time was just dread and panic.

Try as you might to yell, or roll out of bed, or sit up, or anything else, you will usually fail. At times there are even false awakenings, where you believe you have sat up or rolled out of bed just to discover you're still trapped exactly where you were. These experiences are often a result of sleep disturbances (like apnea or a crying baby that needs feeding), irregular schedules, sleep deprivation, stress, or sometimes it's part of a larger hypnogogic disorder. The latter, hypnogogic disorders, can have some scary and dangerous manifestation. It's quite rare though. Some of the alien abduction stories are probably very disturbing episodes of sleep paralysis. There is room to argue that some, like Whitley Strieber, have been influenced by third parties. There is room to argue who those third parties are, who might be tinkering around in people's heads, as well. These events can be highly distressing for people and cause a generalized fear response. Increased heart rate, shortness of breath, sweating, and whatever else can make going to sleep stressful. A vicious circle because that stress contributes to the frequency of disturbances.

Common advice to those experiencing sleep paralysis is to call on Jesus. It seems to work even for people that aren't religious. There's a reason why it works, but without digressing too much I'll leave it at Jesus being a global egregore. Even for those that aren't religious, there is a subconscious recognition of what Christ is meant to symbolize. It's not something that requires executive level functioning in the prefrontal cortex. It's a symbol of something.

For me, not being a Christian, it seemed like a disingenuous thing to call on Jesus. If I was going to call his name when I was in need then I should have been praising his name when I wasn't. It didn't feel right. I relied on a more eastern approach to solving my sleep paralysis and it's a method that also taught me about exerting control over normal lucid dream states. When I was young it came much more naturally, perhaps because I didn't have years of baggage from the real world ingrained in my subconscious. Hard to say, but overcoming sleep paralysis was an accelerated education.

Gaining control of your consciousness

First was recognition. Much like preparing to lucid dream I started with intention before going to bed. I was preparing myself for that state, willing myself to become aware during the episode. Once I recognized the state I also had some intention already set that I would be ignoring that feeling of dread. It has never actually harmed me, so it was easy to embed that in my subconscious. It's not that easy to hold it together the first time. I imagine it like throwing up a wall. As long as you can hold that wall in place it's a barrier. It's a battle of will, but one you have to remain calm for or it defeats the purpose. After long enough practicing, if the episodes don't stop entirely, you will probably find that the wall is unnecessary. This is what it's like when you've tamed the beast in your subconscious. You may even come to take advantage of this state.

Once you've mastered the fear you have options in this state. Often, for a novice, it's just a matter of escaping. You can sit up, grab some water, and return to a -hopefully- peaceful night of rest. Alternatively, you can explore the space. The sleep paralysis state is not at all unlike a deep meditative state. The switch that gets toggled connecting your body to your brain is deactivated. You can try to just drift off to sleep, you can drift through dreams that come naturally, or you can attempt to create entire lucid dream environments. If you are experienced enough, or happen to be lucky, you can find the little hole you need to squeeze through to exit the body. It sounds and/or feels, quite often, like your consciousness is moving against tornado force winds into a tunnel.

I call my method an eastern technique because within Taoism is a concept that is a very good metaphor for how to successfully exert control in altered states. It's called wu wei, which means non action. Doing without doing. As discussed in parts one and two the prefrontal cortex performs executive functions. The prefrontal cortex also gets in the way of our experience in altered states. So, when exerting control in these states we're looking to use a different part of our brain to make decisions. We are doing without doing (in the prefrontal cortex at least).

How do we do that?

The subconscious is where we need to build a set of tools. In sleep paralysis calling on Jesus works because pretty much everyone in the west has it already formed in their subconscious. It doesn't matter if you're an atheist or if you don't believe in Christianity. It is an egregore, a cultural monument that resides in our subconscious just by merit of constant exposure. It's not necessarily a power egregore, especially for those that aren't believers, but power isn't that important here. Calling it up bypasses the executive function and also puts the subconscious onto another task. It's a wrench in the gears of whatever is happening outside the conscious control of your mind. It's you exerting control.

How you build your tool kit and what you call things in it is up to you. I don't have names for things in a broad sense, but do name specific detailed tools. Taoist practitioners call the energy lower dantien, Hindus call it the name of one of the chakras or prana, and I'm sure other system call it other things. This is located in the region between the navel and the groin, a center for the consciousness field. I can debate that this is not set in stone and we have the ability to move that around if we wish, but for most people it's easier to go with one of these systems that feels right. Since they're existing and within your sphere of awareness, they're an existing egregore. There is less work required to build it from scratch that way. It's effectively crowdsourcing your egregores.

Once you've named or recognized this center in either a sleep paralysis state, a lucid dream, or some other altered state, the next step is to shift your consciousness there. For me it was simply a matter of drawing in my awareness to just that point. I didn't try to move my consciousness, rather I pulled all of my awareness and focused into that spot. All that awareness wasted on fearing the approach of some evil entity, I turned it back and brought it into that center. What we're doing in this process is detaching the brain and the consciousness, a purely cognitive separation. We can't just unscrew it like a light bulb, so we are simply severing the cognitive association of your perception and the brain. You will be seeing, feeling, and acting on the dream world, from that center spot. If you can't find it, you keep drawing that awareness in until you do.

Recall that physics exists in the physical world. You need not worry about physics in the realm of the mind. There is no seat of consciousness in that space,  but our persistent memory of being tied to a body is deep. There are neural pathways constantly being lit up by the data coming in from the body, so it's a very deep association both on a psychological level as well as on a neurological function level. This process will require and facilitate neuroplasticity. There is no important electrical impulse coming from the eyes, no scents coming through the nose, not to you in your dream state. There is no real need for you to perceive yourself as attached to the organs responsible for those perceptual tools in the waking world. So you draw your awareness where you want it, outside your brain. Probably close to your core, but it's not that important.

That is your home base. During sleep paralysis you retreat there and are walled away from the old hag. During lucid dreaming if you oversteer and begin waking up, you can retreat to that space and let whatever is happening cool down. In lucid states this is easier if you close your eyes or get into a resting position, though it's not necessary. You're just trying to shut down any kind of executive function. This is just the first and most important tool for it and should be something you prepare for during waking hours. Just sparing a moment for it, remembering how it feels, and when to do it, is enough preparation to make it accessible. Ultimately, you want it to be an automatic thing. It's something that you don't need a bunch of planning and processing for in the moment that it happens. It's like a mental version of martial arts, removing executive processes when a fist is flying at your face.

Practicing and egregores as tools

I will use what is probably one of the most common things people try during lucid dreams. When people try to fly in lucid dreams they often describe having limited success and having to do swimming motions to get even that. It's because we have no subconscious association with vertical movement except our experiences swimming. It's a very deep association too. Even people that can't swim, though inefficient and often fatally so, have an embedded idea of how to move vertically in water. Bypassing executive functions and reaching into the subconscious bag of tricks works some, though poorly because of even subconsciously there is a big difference between swimming and flying. In the moment in which we're trying to fly, running through a series of actions from the top down prefrontal cortex control, we fail at most attempts.

If you want to fly in lucid dreams then you should be creating a subconscious tool to use to do it. You have your dantien, root chakra, or whatever you may call your center, and it's the source of energy projection. Like everything else, flying needs to be an automatic reflex if you want much success with it. So, part of your pre-sleep ritual or even a spare few moments when doing realty checks will be turned toward connecting your center with the source of energy for flight. You can add whatever shortcuts or cues you wish. It can be motions, a phrase (up up and away!), or just a connection built on repetitive shifting of your awareness to it. This will eventually become accessible at a level that doesn't get in the way of the altered state.

You don't have to do all this. As you get better at it you will become better at improvisation. Still, having a tool kit helps you in these situations too. Long before I learned most of this I had lucid dreams where I had very good control of flight, but once I thought about what I was doing I was swimming to stay aloft. If you've ever tried to think of your phone number or zip code and for whatever reason it didn't flow right out, then you're stuck trying to remember it consciously and the numbers are there but you just can't put them together right, that's sort of how doing things in altered states is. You want it to flow. If you need to think on it too much, if you aren't experienced, you're going to forget how to do it or probably wake yourself up trying to figure it out.

It's a bit paradoxical, doing without doing. The trick is to flow effortlessly.

You can also create things to access in your dreams, though this can be considered a crutch. You could have a favorite coin or stamp or whatever. Through conscious intent, building an egregore of that object in your subconscious, you can do whatever you wish. Attaching your ability to fly to that coin adds another layer of automation. You reach into your pocket and find your limited edition Mickey Mouse key chain, you have created within the egregore for that key chain an ability to fly, there is only subconscious thought required to do so. It's another layer that might help in the early stages, though in the end the goal should always be clean and direct as possible. Adding an object can complicate it, but if you're having trouble then it's a good set of training wheels.

Learning to think differently to navigate this space will improve your success with other avenues of exploration of altered states as well. Deep meditation and waking induction of lucid dream states requires more of the same kind of discipline, though once you're getting to that point you've already probably got a feel for it. I find that mild altered states help me embed things into the subconscious for later use, which is in the same wheelhouse as hypnosis. At some point, with practice and experience, it would be expected that you can gain a much more unified and harmonious relationship between the different aspects of your brain. With disciplined practitioners even their normally autonomous bodily functions can be altered by this unified consciousness. Raising body temperatures, slowing heart rates, and other physiological processes, can be tweaked using these methods.

That's about all there is for increasing the frequency of dream recall and lucid dreaming. Another method that is a more disruptive to people is having two sleep periods per night. You essentially just set and alarm for 2 or 3 hours before the time you normally wake up. When you get up you can do whatever as long as you remain ready to go back to sleep. Maybe you just sit up for a few minutes, maybe you have a drink of water. You then do your brief ritual and head back to sleep. There are reasons for this method related to sleep cycles, but it's not that exciting. In general it seems to help, but it's disruptive for many people. I have difficulty sleeping so any sort of waking up is often the end of my sleep for the night. I almost forgot this method entirely because it's s incompatible with my sleep needs. I can only say that it does seem to work.

You can add more to your ritual before sleep too. You could make it a full blown meditative session with some 110 Hz over some earphones (or 105 and 115, in left and right ear respectively, for a binaural effect at 110). For most people this is too relaxing for right before bed, but if you typically have difficulty falling asleep this can be a two birds with one stone activity. You get into a state more suitable for sleep and you do your lucidity prep. Eventually, you'll find what works best for you if you put in some sustained effort. The reality checks are effectively no different than a mindfulness exercise, so they have the same sort of beneficial grounding effects. Each part can be adapted to fit your particular needs or goals, both in the cognitive spaces and in physical reality. At advanced levels these subconscious tools, like martial arts practice, can be used in waking life to control emotional responses or even physical ones.

Conclusion

This is probably the most stripped down, yet informative and inclusive, guide I've seen to lucid dreaming. You can find lists of things to do that have been copied on down through the years from other sources, but they're often just hearsay. You can find whole books about the experiences people have in lucid dreams and OOBEs too. The former usually lack much depth and guidance beyond the very bare bones and the latter is not very helpful for those that are looking to experience it themselves. There are places people often find themselves that sound like the same place other people have been. I think these are egregores of a cultural nature. They're shared spaces in that respect, like mall world. Mall world is an abstract idea that exists in our heads of what malls are. It's was a common enough thing, a shared experience for many of us, that it becomes a shared egregore. Just like Jesus is an egregore, a thought form within the subconscious. Another common one is a large government or institutional type building of impossible scale, maze like. Again, this is just a common enough thing that it becomes an egregore. It is a similar, but not exactly the same, destination in dreams for many people. People write about these places, but it's not much help for those looking to experience things for themselves.

I don't pay much attention to rules or what people say isn't possible in these spaces. There are probabilities, but few certainties. It is probable that you can't read in dreams and that's a useful tool for reality checks, but it isn't certain. For anything that doesn't apply to you, there are other tools to compensate. If you don't need any of them, you don't need this beginners guide. I doubt you would need anything I can offer if that's the case, rather you need discipline and practice to gain further mastery. I am most definitely not a role model for either, so I'm not chastising anyone.

It is possible to totally exert control over lucid dreams to reshape the entire thing down to the ground it all appears on and the plants growing out of it, the people existing, everything. In my experience, this is very difficult to do consciously. The results were like a poorly rendered image of everything. I have had great success with remembering a place from memory and just closing my eyes to move there, but a totally custom world on the fly was not fruitful. Small things and using the existing structure of the dream is pretty easy and within grasp. The more you go with the existing flow of a dream the easier it is to maintain. Easiest of all for large scale control is having locations already waiting for you to call up, with the power of the subconscious rendering the dreamscape itself. You don't have to worry about every leaf on every tree, you just recall the memory of that place and the rest is done without having to think about it. This can be a real place from memory or a place you've spent time and intent creating.

I hope this helps anyone looking to start exploring on their own. Lucid dreams are probably the easiest starting place for exploring altered states. Once you have experience with it then it becomes easier, though not easy for most people by any stretch, to start working on other altered states.

[19Bones79]

This sounds like good, actionable information. 

Thank you for the time and careful consideration you put into the effort. 

[FCD]

As a person who frequently experiences this phenomenon, I think I can provide some relevant input.

I have what are referred to as "lucid dreams" fairly frequently.  There are a couple of things which clearly distinguish them from regular dreams.  Ksihkehe is right when he states that part of the whole process is beginning to remember / recall your dreams.  This definitely helps; I know it did for me.  I didn't start doing it because I had any idea of lucid dreaming, but rather because I would have these very cool dreams and then I'd forget about them 5 minutes after I woke up.  Then I realized that by practicing remembering my dreams also helped my dream state when I was dreaming.

So, one of the first things you'll notice with lucid dreaming is...you can read things in your dream.  Prior, in my experiences dreaming, when I would see something like a sign board or a piece of paper with writing on it (in my dream) I would be unable to read what it says.  It just looked like gibberish. After some research, I discovered this was because there was nothing there in reality (in my dream).  But, as I developed my dream state, suddenly there was actual writing on things like sign boards, notes and books, etc.  This was one of my first breakthroughs. Kind of in parallel with this I would try to make myself consciously (in my dream) try really hard to read what something said.

Next, I learned (over time) that I could actually control my actions in a dream.  What I mean by this is, previous to this point I was always just a casual observer in a dream, unable to control any of the events which were going on.  So, for example, if something bad was happening, I'd just be standing there getting hit by a bus, tossed off a cliff, or whatever.  After I realized that I could control my actions, I could duck or run to save myself (in most cases).  This didn't happen right away; at first it was very gradual.  Sometimes I could get partly out of the way, or sort of duck (or whatever), and then over time this ability matured.

The next thing I experienced was the ability to re-join a dream (like if I sort of woke up or something).  When I first noticed this it would be like if the dog on the bed kicked me or something and I slightly woke up.  I'd fall back asleep thinking about what I was dreaming about before I woke up, and the dream would continue from where I left off.  This is where trying to start remembering your dreams when you are awake comes in very handy.  Again, this ability took time to mature fully.  Im at the point now where I can wake up completely, even to the point of getting up to go to the restroom in the night, and then lay back down and resume a dream I was having prior to waking up.  I'll often have dreams where things are unresolved, some journey, or problem or some such.  I can fall back asleep and pick up where I left off.

I think around the same time in this process I realized I could consciously control what was going on inside the dream.  Interestingly, I could "rewind" situations I wasn't satisfied with and replay them over and over until I get a satisfactory outcome.  This was a major breakthrough.

I've actually done a fair amount of research into this subject since I developed some of these capabilities.  One of the other really cool things I was able to do early on was what I call "soaring", where I can kind of fly around (in my dream).  What's interesting here is, I can't do it all the time; I can only do it on certain occasions.  But even more interesting is, I have a level of consciousness (in my dream) to always test whether I can 'soar' or not, and how I do this is by jumping off of something (even like a step or a box) (in my dream).  If I will myself to go up and forward, and I actually do go up and forward, then I can 'soar', but probably 60% of the time I just land on my feet (in my dream) and I know I don't have the ability in that particular dream.  But I always test it in almost every dream I have, because when I can do it it's really, really, cool.  I love those dreams.

I don't know what the soaring thing means, but I don't try to understand it too much and just enjoy it when I can do it.  I've found I wake up completely exhilarated and rested when I have a dream like that.

There's no grand meaning to my dreams, not like some quest or something.  They do seem to have a purpose, and most of them are semi work or life related.  The best part of all of this is I have, for the most part, been able to all but eliminate dreams which would be described as 'nightmares'.  You know, the dreams where you fall off a cliff or something like that.

So here's another interesting factoid about these dreams.  I don't have them all the time.  I have them more often than not, but not always.  For one thing, sometimes I don't dream at all.  Other times I just have a normal dream where I am just an observer, unable to have any control over anything.  And then sometimes I will have these completely lucid dreams where I can control, actively participate, control my actions, have conversations and have complete control over what is going on.

I'm not into any paranormal kind of stuff, and I don't think this is some kind of super-ability.  I personally think anyone can develop these things, it just takes time.  For me, the big leap forward was starting to really concentrate on remembering a dream after I woke up.  I would practice this by recounting my dream to my wife.  We had some good laughs with this because as we all know some dreams can be pretty disjointed and crazy, but that was the fun of it.  I'd just try to remember every crazy detail and tell her about it.  Then I started writing them down.  At one point I thought there might be some super important hidden message in these dreams.  I have yet to find any 'super-important', life changing, meaning in any of them, but the best part is now being able to control what happens.  And when I say 'control what happens', I don't mean it like I am in absolute control of every element, but rather I am in control (reasonably) of my own actions for better or worse.  And, with the exception of the 'soaring' ability, I don't have any other special powers or abilities.  When I can do the soaring thing, I pretty much push everything else in the dream out of my mind and just concentrate on that alone simply because it's so absolutely cool to have that ability.

I know everything I've written here probably sounds completely insane, and I hope y'all can believe me when I say..."I am NOT insane!".  I am just recounting an ability that I have developed while dreaming.  And again, I don't think it is some special power; I really just think it is a function of concentrating on dream content after you wake up.

I am happy to try to answer any questions anyone might have about this subject.  I really do feel like I can provide some input.  I don't know if my process would work for anyone else, but I am more than happy to share what I know.

Thanks,
FCD

[FCD]

Some additional thoughts and comments...

1. Pre-sleep - I don't have any specific pre-sleep ritual which works better than any other.  I just lay down and conk out.  I do have to get comfortable on my side generally because if I lay on my back my wife keeps waking me up because I snore.  And, the best, most comfortable position for me is putting a small pillow between my knees and calves (years of football and other sports and the surgeries that go along with all of that are tough on these old bones).  But other than just getting comfortable, there's no other special preparation.

2. Trying - I never 'try' to lucid dream (if that's what I'm really doing).  I have a very difficult time falling asleep to begin with, so trying to do anything only means I'll never be able to fall asleep.  I've been cursed with a very active mind, and when I lay down at night my mind immediately drifts to the most worrying, unsolvable, and frustrating thing going on in my life at the moment.  When this happens, I'll just toss and turn for hours.  I hate this, but I can't help it.  So, I have to really just try to wipe my mind clean as much as possible, and then hope I can fall asleep before I start thinking about work.

3. I do not take any sleep medications.  Even though my doc has prescribed several of them over the years, I just can't take them.  First, they don't work for me...until the next day.  I'll take one, not be able to fall asleep, and then the next day at about 9am I can't even keep my eyes open.  And, if I try to nap, then I'll sleep for 6 hours.  So, sleep aids re a no-go for me.

4. My dreams aren't usually connected to something which is currently going on in my daily life.  They usually deal with an experience in my life, but not necessarily anything current.  The subject of a dream could be something which happened 10-15 years ago or even longer.

5. I haven't completely been able to eliminate what some might consider to be 'nightmares', although mine aren't really as bad as some people's.  Generally when I have something which might be considered a 'nightmare' it usually involves some kind of international travel.  I have done an incredible amount of international travel for work, and there are real-life nightmare situations in that kind of travel which are too many to count.  Inevitably, any such bad dream like this usually involves my passport (which I have a deep seated fear of losing at the worst possible time...mainly because I know someone (a colleague) who this happened to (in Thailand), and it really was a real life nightmare!)

6. There are some downsides to this type of dream.  For one thing, they are hyper-realistic.  So, I've had times when I had to consciously think about whether something was a dream or if it really happened.

7. Oh, and something I forgot to mention in my post above.  This is actually a big one!  One thing about lucid dreaming is the ability to have a dream inside of a dream.  Sometimes it's more than just that; it can be like 3 layers deep.  So, (in my dream) I can wake up from a 'dream', but I'm still asleep dreaming.  And, I can consciously wake myself up from a dream inside of a dream (most times).  So, just as an example; I can dream that I lay down and fall asleep, and then begin having a dream, but in my dream (inside of the dream) I will also lay down and fall asleep.  Now, I'm two dreams deep.  Something can go wrong or sideways in the inner most dream, and I can kind of shake it off and 'wake up', but I'm still dreaming, inside of another dream.  I had one situation (and this really was a nightmare) where I woke up from a 2nd layer dream, and then woke myself up from the next layer up (but I was still dreaming).  I could have sworn that I had woken completely up, but I still had the top layer to wake up from.  In this particular dream for some reason I'd been accused of a crime I didn't commit and I was going to go to prison.  So, in my dream I was saying..."Well, this isn't a dream, so I'm really going to prison!", and in my head I believed I was.  So, when I really did finally wake up (from all dreams) I was like...holy shit, that sucked!!  So again, there are some negatives to this kind of dreaming because it's pretty powerful, and sometimes it your brain can get away from you while dreaming.  I really don't like these kinds of dreams.

8. I've never sleep walked or had any kind of a confused conscious state where I was up and moving around but still dreaming.  If I am dreaming, I'm laying down.  If I get up, I am not dreaming.  I know this sounds silly, but if you understood what this dream inside of a dream, inside of a dream, inside of a 3rd dream, was like you'd understand why this is an important clarification.  So far, 3 layers is the most I've ever experienced, and very candidly, I don't want to experience more!

9. None of these lucid dreams (if that's what they are) are something I try to do (as noted above).  The reason for noting this again is because this is a different reason.  Because I don't try, the dream content is whatever it is.  In other words; I don't sit down and try to suggest to myself what to dream about.  They just happen.  There's no will involved.  I don't necessarily want them, but I don't reject them either; they just happen.  And, I don't really consciously realize (in my dream) that it's a lucid dream.  I do realize I can control things and so forth, but I don't think to myself..."okay, well this is a lucid dream".  It's not like that.  I'm not sure how to describe this better.

Lastly, from all I have read this is a uncommon phenomenon, but as I noted earlier, I don't think it is any kind of paranormal capability.  I rather think it is just a matter of contemplating your dream state in more detail than most do, and over time you just wind up developing this ability.  And really, at the end of the day, nothing profound ever seems to come out of these dreams (although, I have come up with some pretty good ideas for fiction novels from some of them!).

[TokenLiberal]

I used to lucid dream a lot, not so much anymore, I sort of lost interest. At first it's fun and interesting but talking to people is boring once you realize you're just talking to yourself, and things generally lose their magic over time. It turns out dream life is not so interesting when there are no stakes and you're alone. Now, whenever I become lucid during a dream, I just pursue sensory experiences (sex, usually) because at least then you're actually feeling something.

[NobodySpecial268]

Thought I would place a few field notes here on a young lady who experiences lucid dreams. The case is ongoing.

As a child, she had a series of prophetic lucid dreams which turned out to happen, followed by a lucid dream where she was kidnapped. The kidnapping did not turn out, as she simply did not turn up at the location and won't step foot anywhere near there ever since.

The second set, that we know of, was of a nightmare nature. That has been tracked down to a deceased person of a religious persuasion, who was subsequently 'sent' for her efforts. This occurred over the last few days, and the results of the 'sending' should become clearer over the next few days. Ideally, the young lady should be left alone.

It seems that the religious person was able to trigger lucid dreaming in the target, but we can't figure it out yet.

The other interesting item is the fact that in a lucid dream, the dreamer can use her phone, as long as she does not look at it.

The young lady concerned is rather private and only occasionally shares these experiences. Apart from the lucid nightmare, she thinks these things are normal and not worth mentioning to adults. Suffice it to say, we are very careful in our investigations and our questions.

I'll post any developments.

[NobodySpecial268]

Some progress.

Preface: Ethics . . .

In many cases, people think in terms of discovering the trigger to lucid dreams, the switch to turn on lucid dreaming.

Now this is something, should it be discovered, that would cause a lot of trouble. It is not difficult to understand that there are people who would trigger lucid dreams in others for nefarious purposes. In my post above, the deceased nun was one of those people who triggered a lucid nightmare in a kid to induce trauma. Suffice it to say, the nun picked on the wrong kid, and was dealt with accordingly. The deceased nun's fate suggests quite clearly that we need ethics.

That doesn't mean we should give up on lucid dreaming.

The alternative approach is to work out the rules of lucid dreams, and the origin. Understanding rules may improve our own progress into the realm of lucid dreams.

In the lucid nightmare scenario, and maybe also some of the sleep paralysis events, there is a consciousness other than ours in control.

In the lucid dream scenario, there is also a consciousness other than ours in control.

That is until we can behave responsibly. That is my opinion, anyway.

The difference is one is kind and considerate and the other is not.

Both use a similar principle.

On the cell phone, appearing in lucid dreams.

* Within the lucid dream, the young lady had her cell phone from normal life.
* The phone would disappear if she tried to look at it, and return to her pocket.
* There was one contact on the phone.
* This contact could be called.
* The contact would then appear within the lucid dream as a familiar face.

Comment: This is a 'help line' mechanism.

On boundaries in lucid dreams.

* Early in my teenage years, I had a lucid dream where I woke into the dream and found myself in my bedroom. When I tried to open the bedroom door, I was returned to my normal waking self.

Comment: This is a 'sandbox/playpen' mechanism.  Clearly, by trying to open the door, that triggered an end to the lucid dream. The door was probably for later, and after one was ready to explore. The mistake was to go striaght for the door.

The principal is easy to understand, both in the lucid nightmare and the lucid dream. The principal is consciousness is nested. There ars intellegences other than our own involved. At least in the beginning.

   

The dreamer is nested within another consciousness. The other consciousness provides the "playpen" because it is a potentially dangerous world out there.Those of bad intentions, and providers of lucid nightmares for example.

So the idea goes that if we appreciate that something/someone is the creator of the closed space within we lucid dream, we can learn.

[FCD]

I can't turn them on or off intentionally, or at least I haven't figured out how to do that yet.  Well, sort of.  I'll explain...

Normally, they just happen or they don't, but in almost all cases I have to do what I call "testing" to see if it's a lucid dream or not.  So, in a way, this is almost kind of a 'switch' in and of itself, but I digress.

How I 'test' to see if it's a lucid dream is to stand on something (in my dream).  Something like a box or a chair, or a rock...whatever is nearby in my dream.  I can usually tell even before this because just the act of controlling my actions to get to the box or whatever to stand on is different than most 'observer' type dreams where you have no control.  Anyway, back to the test...

Once standing on a box or a rock (or something) I jump off of it.  If I can do this, then it's a lucid dream and everything I do after that (in the dream) I am in almost full control of.  Oddly, there are certain things I can't control, and I don't always know what these things are.  BUT (as noted above), I can actually rewind a dream to play a sequence over again.  So, as an example, if something pops out of the blue and hits me, I can rewind the dream enough to play that sequence again and I know to duck (or whatever).  This is pretty handy!  LOL! 

I'm really glad you posted the pic of the Russian Matryoshka dolls because that perfectly describes another thing I was talking about above...namely, a dream inside of another dream.  This is nightmare territory when this happens.  Not always, but it's a good recipe for one.  I can't recall one which wasn't a nightmare of sorts though.  Often pretty terrifying too.  Mine don't involve monsters or anything silly like that, but more often some really awful life experience (which, thankfully, has never occurred in real life...at least not fully, some close though).  The Matryoshka dolls describes this experience perfectly, and that's just what it feels like coming out of a dream like that (i.e. like you're transitioning from the smaller ones inside to the larger ones outside, with the outermost one being awake or reality).  I don't particularly care for these types of lucid dreams.  Even though I am in control of my actions, the circumstances are such that they are generally pretty unpleasant.  (i.e. Jail, or someone dies, some horrible thing happens, lost passport, etc.)

Here's something weird for you.  When I first noticed the lucid dreams was one time when I was sick.  I'd taken Nyquil and that stuff will give you crazy dreams anyway.  But I'd had this lucid dream, so I just chalked it up to the Nyquil.  This was before I learned how to really 'pay attention' to these types of dreams.  So, I was kind of half-in, and half-out, of a lucid dream, if that makes any sense.

I was in SE Asia at the time working.  I had to take a trip down to Sydney, Australia in the near future.  Now, this is really bizarre!  Actually, maybe I should put this in a post of its own.  I think I'll do that.  So, that's all for this post.

[FCD]

Bizarre dream experience (very)

I was scheduled to take a trip down to Sydney, Australia from whee I was stationed in SE Asia (Malaysia).  I was super sick (flu), but there was no changing the plans, I had to go. 

I remember getting on the plane.  It was about a 6 hour flight, so I OD'd on some Nyquil and just hoped I'd get a little better when we landed.

Next thing I knew, I woke up inside someone's house.  I had no idea where I was (not even what country).  I'd been in about (7) countries in about as many days, I was exhausted, and I was sick on top of that.  Where the fuck was I?  I didn't know.  I was in a bed.  It was definitely someone's house, but I'd never been there before; I knew that much.  I remember the first thing I saw as my eyes focused.  Shag carpet.  Green shag carpet.  I hadn't seen green long shag carpet since the 70's, but here it was.  I immediately jumped up, and said out loud..."Where am I?".  No one answered.

I cautiously opened the bedroom door and looked around.  There was no one there.  The house was empty.  Okay, I must be dreaming, right?  Nope!  This was no dream; I was awake, and how I knew this was my left knee hurt (old football injury, surgery, etc. ).  Definitely not a dream!  You don't really feel pain in a dream, at least I don't.  But I literally had absolutely NO idea where the hell I was.  I was wearing some gym shorts and a T-shirt.  I knew I never traveled dressed like that, and clearly I'd traveled somewhere, but where, I had no idea.  I ran to the bedroom and yanked open the closet.  My suit was hanging in the closet, so I fished in the pocket and grabbed my passport.  This is when I got REALLY scared.  As I looked in my passport I had an exit stamp and a work visa cancellation in my passport, but no entry stamp from another country.  There was only one possible explanation...I must have returned to the States!  I was seriously worried at this point because there's no way I would have knowingly done this!

Holy Shit!  Where am I?  Then it got worse.  I decided to look out the window.  I was in an apartment building, 2nd floor was my guess.  Outside on the street were parked cars, but not just any old parked cars.  They were all cars from the 70's and 80's.  Fords, Chevy's, Dodge's.  My Gawd, I must be in some sort of time warp!...I thought to myself.  (This is a true story, mind you)  Okay, what next?  I walked around the apartment and it was seriously like I was in the 70's.  All the appliances were dated, drapes, carpet, everything.  I looked in the frig (don't ask me why I thought this would help, but it actually did).  Inside the frig was the usual stuff and there was a jug of milk.  I grabbed the milk and looked at the date.  It was still fresh, and the date was about what I expected.  Whew!  Okay, at least it's not a time warp (seriously, this was the stuff going through my mind).  My heart was pounding.  Then, I spied a telephone book sitting on the table.  I grabbed it and frantically opened it up to the middle and flipped through it.  "Smith", "Jones", "Johnson" were the names I was seeing.  "Maple St", "Main St.", "7th Ave", were the streets.  WT actual F???  Where am I????  What I should have seen was names like "Xi" and "Shaolin" and "Gnu", and none of the streets should have been familiar.  Honestly, at this point, I was about ready to have a nervous breakdown.  I'd never had one before, but figured that must be what it's like.  To save myself from having a straight-up heart attack, I sat down on the couch to catch my breath and just relax for a moment.  I wasn't in imminent danger, so I had a minute to sort this out.

I kept looking at the phone book for clues.  My world got even darker when I saw the phone numbers.  Instead of being (7) digits, they were (8) digits (i.e. xxxx-xxxx, not yyy-yyyy).  FUCK!  Where the hell am I?

By this point I had all but freaked out.  I knew two things (and ONLY two things); I had my passport, and I had my wallet.  With those two things I could go anywhere.  I could call a cab, get to the airport, and buy a plane ticket back to the States (...and check myself into the crazy people's asylum!  Because this engineer had clearly lost all his marbles, gone over the edge, and gone completely insane! LOL!  Not really.)  But this is seriously what I was thinking...if I didn't get some answers pretty damn quick.  This 'mystery' had gone on WAY too long!

On the coffee table was a remote control for the television (circa 1975...LOL!)  I picked it up and flipped on the TV.  When it came on I saw the "ABC" logo right before a commercial break.  I was in the Twilight Zone sitting there.  The commercials seemed normal, but just slightly 'off', but I couldn't place why.  Then the programming came on.  It was a morning show.  It didn't register at first, but then I looked at the logo in the bottom of the program.  It said..."Good Morning Sydney" (the equivalent of Good Morning America).  HA!  I'm in Australia!  Whew!  Now at least I knew what country I was in.

Now the pieces were starting to come together.  In the pocket of my shorts was a key, but no idea what it went to.  I walked to the front door and discovered the key unlocked the front door.  Okay, clue #2, check.  I must have let myself in.  Then my cell phone rang.  It was in my pack in the bedroom.  I missed the call, but there was a message.  "Hope you found the apartment okay, and hope you're feeling better.  Make yourself at home.  I should be back in town tomorrow and we can go over the project then.  Cheers!" 

Long story short; I'd arrived in Sydney, sick as a dog, taken about (3) shots of whiskey at an airport bar, taken a cab to a colleagues apartment, and crashed.  The key to the apartment had been left under the mat, and that was the key in my pocket.  This was in 1993, and back then the city of Sydney was like walking back in time to the 1970's.  Everything there was vintage (which was really cool).  The phone book was just the phone book for a suburb of Sydney, so I didn't recognize this.  And the names were names just like you and me, along with the street names.  The milk jug and the TV gave it away.

BUT...that night, although feeling better, I wound up re-living the entire event, this time much darker and more sinister, in one of my first lucid dreams.  The dream inside of another dream kind, like the Matryoshka dolls kind.

And I've always wondered if it took an event like that to trigger the ability to dream like this.  An experience which is not a dream, but is so dream-like, that you can't immediately sort out dream-state from reality, and if that does something to your brain making it capable of having things like lucid dreams(?).  I don't know, but one thing I do know is...I will never forget that experience!  I've had people tell me it sounded like a bad drug experience.  It may well be, but I've never taken drugs like that, so I don't know.  I'm sure the Nyquil had something to do with it though, so maybe there's something to that.

And lastly, as I've previously stated, I don't always have dreams like lucid dreams.  Probably about once every 2-3 months I'll have one, and they're usually when I'm really, really, tired or unwell.  Not always, but mostly.

[NobodySpecial268]

Good on yer for posting your lucid dream FCD. My own LD (Lucid Dream) experiences are very far and few between, and rather I learned to dream while awake in normal awareness as an overlay over my waking consciousness. Which is different to most people. So it's interesting to get other's perspectives and experiences, as I'm kinda responsible for a young lady's welfare in her LDs.

The young lady here describes her LDs in very surprising detail, too. When she visits with her mom next time, I'll ask her about testing her dreams.

You had a key, a cell phone, and a passport. My young lady also has the cell phone. These props seem to be important. We need more information here, like more posts of LD'ers experiences.

It was always annoying when over on ATS folks would dismiss experiences like this as "obviously Nyquil induced" - armchair experts . . .

It sounds like the LD's programmer is rather familiar with the 1970s. I wonder if that was intentional.