Control Your Dreams – Lucid Dreaming

Amazing as dreams are, wouldn’t it be amazing be able to consciously control the events of a dream.  It would literally be like living in the ultimate fantasy world during the night and the normal world during the day.  We are all in luck, it can be done with a little practice and it is known as Lucid Dreaming. 

The ideas behind lucid dreaming is that the conscious mind is active during a dream therefore it has been defined as “dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming”. 

Lucid Dreaming is truly something that needs to be practiced, so their are different levels of Lucid Dreaming.  In early stages of being able to Lucid Dream a person will know that they are dreaming while dreaming, but will not necessarily be able to control the course of the dream.  Some people may describe the experience as knowing that you are physically in bed, but your mind is trapped in another place.  I was told that it can be perceived as several minutes to escape out of a dream and wake up out of your dreaming/sleeping state.  In later stages of Lucid dreaming the goal is to be able to have full control of the dream and to be able to do absolutely anything the mind desires.

How to Lucid Dream?

The concept of lucid dreaming seems easy enough, but actually doing it is another story.  Some people have the innate ability to just lucid dream without hardly trying, while others are almost incapable of ever lucid dreaming.  For those of us that can’t seem to lucid dream naturally, here are some of the most common methods used to help enter a Lucid Dream state.

• Wake-back-to-bed – This technique is the most successful resulting in nearly a 60% success rate.  The idea is to go to bed very tired and waking up 5 hours later while thinking about Lucid Dreaming for an hour before going back to bed and focusing on remembering that your are trying to Lucid Dream.
• Wake initiated Lucid Dream – A variation of Wake back to bed can be done by waking up from sleep for only 15 minutes and going back to sleep while focusing on knowing that you are Lucid Dreaming.  This experience may include feelings of sleep paralysis, falling through your bed, or the feeling of going into another dimension.  The biggest thing to remember is to not be scared of the transition, but rather stay aware that after the transition you will be able to control the dream.
• Lucid Dreaming Devices – Because the previous methods rely on being able to keep your conscious mind present while going into a dream state which is naturally disconnected with the conscious mind it is likely those methods will not work without practice.  This is where the idea of a Lucid Dreaming Device comes into play.  A common device is a head band with 2 red led lights which are set on a timer to blink after say 4 hours of sleep.  This light helps alert the conscious mind that you are in a dreaming state.  In a dream, one might see the sky blinking red or the water blinking red because of the LED’s.  This is when your mind would remember than blinking red means Lucid Dreaming.

I have yet to be successful with the first two techniques and plan on trying the third technique real soon.  One of my family members has been able to enter Lucid Dreaming naturally and has told me that they feel scared because they don’t know what is happening.  The biggest thing to remember is to know that it is just a Lucid Dream and that when the fearful part is over, the fun part will begin. 

I will be building this device in the upcoming weeks to test it out and will write an article about the results.

SOURCE: Wikipedia

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