From time to time, we all experience precognitive dreams, meaning, we see future events of our awakened world in our dream world. We experience a myriad of other experiences in our dream world. How much do you pay attention to your dreams? Since sleep takes up anywhere from one-third to one-half of our lifetime, it makes sense to pay attention to this often misunderstood, but significant part of our lives.
When we lucid dream, we realize we are in the dream state and use our free will to actively direct our dreams as a director would direct a film. Lucid dreaming is exhilarating, empowering, and can help you improve performance in your waking life. Sometimes we experience lucid dreams without initially intending to control our dreams. This can be a fun, amazing discovery.
It is worth your time and effort to induce lucid dreams. Since you’re the writer and director of your dreams you can go on adventures that may not be currently available to you in your waking life that are safer to experience in your sleep. You can travel the world or even go to other worlds, times or dimensions. You can climb Mount Everest without worrying about falling or freezing to death. You can also practice events you’d like to experience in your waking life. As you learn to take charge of your dreams, you gain confidence that carries over to your waking life.
If you’re interested in exploring lucid dreaming, but haven’t experienced it yet, don’t worry. It’s easy to develop this skill. It may not happen overnight, but with continued interest and persistence, you’ll get there. Just try these tips:
Set your intention and mental preparation. Set your intention to experience lucid dreams and build a mental framework that will maximize your success. This requires examining your belief systems. Our belief systems play a key role in determining our experience. As you develop your ability to lucid dream, you will be directly interacting with your thoughts and your belief systems, and you will be able to directly experience first-hand how important it is to manage your thoughts.
Ask yourself:
Maintain a positive attitude and strengthen your beliefs in your ability to experience lucid dreaming, the importance and desire to experience lucid dreaming and be creative with what you want to experience in your dreams and make adjustments as needed.
Each night, tell yourself you’re going to remember your dreams. It may take a few days or a few weeks to do this, but stick with it and it will happen. When you wake up, don’t open your eyes and don’t move. Lie completely still. Images of your last dream may come flooding back to you. Allow yourself time to remember your dreams upon awakening. Don’t start thinking about the day ahead yet. Try to remember what action you took in your dreams, the feelings you experienced and the people you met.
Keep a dream journal. This increases your recall by engraining the idea that dreams are important into your subconscious mind. This is an important step. Record all of your dreams with as much detail as you can. Even if something seems trivial, you should still write it down because it may turn out to be significant when viewed later. Write down not only what happened during the dream but also what you were feeling and what you were thinking at the time. Write your entries in present tense instead of using past tense. This can help with memory recall. Include a date, time (if possible) and a title for each dream.
Become familiar with your dreams. As your dream journal grows and your dream recall increases, naturally you will become more familiar with your dreams. Certain people, places, and activities may be more likely to appear in your dreams. These recurrent patterns in your dreams are your dream markers or signs, and they will be the first stepping stones on your path to lucid dreaming. They also will help you create your own dream dictionary. While there are dream dictionary books out there, the best dream dictionary you can have is one you create yourself because its symbols are unique to your dreams.
Expand awareness in your waking consciousness. The whole process of lucid dreaming is achieved by training your awareness. The idea is to increase our daily awareness in order to benefit from the carryover effects it will have on our dreaming awareness. If you increase your awareness during the day, you will become more aware while dreaming. See the previous post on observation to learn about expanding your waking awareness.
Combine your knowledge of your dreams with what you have learned about your awareness. Keep updated on your current dream markers or signs and dream themes. By linking the two, you will be laying a solid foundation for future lucid dreaming adventures. As you can see, these six steps are all interwoven into one basic process.
I recently discovered a series of podcasts discussing dreams and how powerful our sleeping time is for our waking life on “The Velocity of Now” show with Thomas Sheridan. They do not specifically address lucid dreaming, but touch on the importance of dream time in our lives. The links are below:
The Velocity of Now - July 8, 2015 with Thomas Sheridan
The Velocity of Now - July 15, 2015 with Thomas Sheridan
The Velocity of Now - July 22, 2015 with Thomas Sheridan
When we lucid dream, we realize we are in the dream state and use our free will to actively direct our dreams as a director would direct a film. Lucid dreaming is exhilarating, empowering, and can help you improve performance in your waking life. Sometimes we experience lucid dreams without initially intending to control our dreams. This can be a fun, amazing discovery.
It is worth your time and effort to induce lucid dreams. Since you’re the writer and director of your dreams you can go on adventures that may not be currently available to you in your waking life that are safer to experience in your sleep. You can travel the world or even go to other worlds, times or dimensions. You can climb Mount Everest without worrying about falling or freezing to death. You can also practice events you’d like to experience in your waking life. As you learn to take charge of your dreams, you gain confidence that carries over to your waking life.
If you’re interested in exploring lucid dreaming, but haven’t experienced it yet, don’t worry. It’s easy to develop this skill. It may not happen overnight, but with continued interest and persistence, you’ll get there. Just try these tips:
Set your intention and mental preparation. Set your intention to experience lucid dreams and build a mental framework that will maximize your success. This requires examining your belief systems. Our belief systems play a key role in determining our experience. As you develop your ability to lucid dream, you will be directly interacting with your thoughts and your belief systems, and you will be able to directly experience first-hand how important it is to manage your thoughts.
Ask yourself:
- Do you think you can do this?
- Do you think dreams are important?
- Do you really want to have lucid dreams?
- Do you know what you will do when you become lucid?
Maintain a positive attitude and strengthen your beliefs in your ability to experience lucid dreaming, the importance and desire to experience lucid dreaming and be creative with what you want to experience in your dreams and make adjustments as needed.
Each night, tell yourself you’re going to remember your dreams. It may take a few days or a few weeks to do this, but stick with it and it will happen. When you wake up, don’t open your eyes and don’t move. Lie completely still. Images of your last dream may come flooding back to you. Allow yourself time to remember your dreams upon awakening. Don’t start thinking about the day ahead yet. Try to remember what action you took in your dreams, the feelings you experienced and the people you met.
Keep a dream journal. This increases your recall by engraining the idea that dreams are important into your subconscious mind. This is an important step. Record all of your dreams with as much detail as you can. Even if something seems trivial, you should still write it down because it may turn out to be significant when viewed later. Write down not only what happened during the dream but also what you were feeling and what you were thinking at the time. Write your entries in present tense instead of using past tense. This can help with memory recall. Include a date, time (if possible) and a title for each dream.
Become familiar with your dreams. As your dream journal grows and your dream recall increases, naturally you will become more familiar with your dreams. Certain people, places, and activities may be more likely to appear in your dreams. These recurrent patterns in your dreams are your dream markers or signs, and they will be the first stepping stones on your path to lucid dreaming. They also will help you create your own dream dictionary. While there are dream dictionary books out there, the best dream dictionary you can have is one you create yourself because its symbols are unique to your dreams.
Expand awareness in your waking consciousness. The whole process of lucid dreaming is achieved by training your awareness. The idea is to increase our daily awareness in order to benefit from the carryover effects it will have on our dreaming awareness. If you increase your awareness during the day, you will become more aware while dreaming. See the previous post on observation to learn about expanding your waking awareness.
Combine your knowledge of your dreams with what you have learned about your awareness. Keep updated on your current dream markers or signs and dream themes. By linking the two, you will be laying a solid foundation for future lucid dreaming adventures. As you can see, these six steps are all interwoven into one basic process.
I recently discovered a series of podcasts discussing dreams and how powerful our sleeping time is for our waking life on “The Velocity of Now” show with Thomas Sheridan. They do not specifically address lucid dreaming, but touch on the importance of dream time in our lives. The links are below:
The Velocity of Now - July 8, 2015 with Thomas Sheridan
The Velocity of Now - July 15, 2015 with Thomas Sheridan
The Velocity of Now - July 22, 2015 with Thomas Sheridan