Lucid Dreaming
May 18th, 2006 by MarkThe first time I ever heard anything about lucid dreaming was when I was a teenager. My best friend, Jason, lent me a blue paperback called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming
According to the book, people can achieve this lucidity either by learning to become aware during their dreams, or by doing various meditation exercises to retain consciousness throughout the entire process of falling asleep. At first glance, it seemed like a bunch of quasi-hippy New Age weirdness. The author, Stephen LaBerge, was a Stanford psycho-physiology researcher, though. I decided that maybe there was something to it and to give it a try. I’m extremely thankful that I did. It’s given me insights into my own way of thinking, and allowed me to accomplish some things that just wouldn’t have been possible any other way.
Fortunately, being as young as I was, it wasn’t that difficult for me to make progress. I started keeping a dream journal after the very first night I read the book. Each night as I fell asleep, I fixed the idea in my head that I would remember my dreams upon waking up. Each morning as I woke up, I grabbed my notebook off the headstand and wrote down as many memories of my dreams as I could before the morning light robbed me of them. Within a couple of weeks, I’d nailed down a few sorts of occurrences that were frequent in my dreams, but extremely rare or completely absent from my waking life. After training myself to do a “dream check” whenever seeing or thinking about those things, it only took a couple more nights before I did a check when I actually was dreaming.
The first time I had a lucid dream was a very memorable experience. It was late, maybe 2AM. It was a little bit chilly, but still warm enough to be wearing shorts as I walked along the sidewalk. I was on Littleton Blvd, headed towards Broadway, a busy road, but there weren’t many cars out. I felt a mild breeze against my face as I looked at an evergreen growing at the side of the road. I saw some sort of movement behind the tree and couldn’t quite tell what it was. I looked closer and saw it was a small child, maybe a six year-old, running away. At first I dismissed it, but at the time I was already in the habit of questioning anything “strange”. I thought to myself, “Why would a six year old boy be hiding behind a tree out here in the middle of the night? For that matter why am I out at 2AM, walking by myself along the side of the road?” It was time for a dream check. I immediately started running through the events of my whole day going backwards from that moment. I was outside because I had just eaten late at IHOP. I was walking home since none of my friends with cars, like Dan or Robb, had been there. At the restaurant, I’d eaten a tex-mex omelette and pancakes. Some of my other friends had been there, too. But where were they now? How had they gone home, and why hadn’t I caught a ride with them? Which friends were there? I racked my brain, but couldn’t remember any of the details for the life of me. That just wasn’t possible. I knew I must be dreaming. It was time for a second test. I looked at my watch. What time was it? It was about 2AM, just as I’d thought. I glanced away. No. What time was it? I forced myself to take a long, hard gaze at my watch. The closer I stared at it, the less stable the numbers on it became. I looked up at the writing on a sign at the side of the road and scrutinized it. Once again, I couldn’t clearly read any writing I wasn’t familiar with. Suddenly, all my senses amplified five-fold. Every hair on my body was standing on end, I felt the breeze ten times more intensely than before, and every star in the sky became sharper and more intense. I was dreaming! Everything I saw before me was a construction of my own mind, and I knew it!. It was overwhelming, and exhilarating at the same time. I looked around in awe, sucked in a really deep breath and woke up.
The first several times I managed to become lucid in the middle of a dream, I was just too excited to stay asleep. After a few months, though, I got the knack and was able to do a fair bit of personal exploration through dreaming. Though I never mastered the meditation techniques that allow people to remain conscious while falling asleep, I did develop my dream sign recognition and my mental control to the point where I could become lucid in four or more dreams per night and stay dreaming pretty much as long as I wanted. Sometimes, while I was in school, I even did things like solving and memorizing particularly a difficult math problem while I was asleep, and then writing it out in my journal after I woke up. Other times, I used my lucid dreaming as extra recreational time. Interestingly, I’ve always felt pretty much equally refreshed from my sleep either way.
For one reason or another, I allowed my habit of keeping a dream journal to slip away over the years. Maybe it was because it was a bit weird, and I was too self-conscious back then. Or, maybe it’s just due to how badly I’ve messed up my sleep schedule. In any case, I only have about one or two lucid dreams a year now, and I can’t hold on to them so well anymore. Aside from staying up too late, waking up to an alarm clock contributes to the problem, too. So do a lot of factors. I think it’s time to stop letting them, though. I’ve decided to start keeping a dream journal again.
:
May 18th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
I always enjoy useful tips and tools that you show in your blog. But the “lucid dreaming” might be difficult for me to try to experience. I have never had it even though I usually have several dreams a night. It seems to be very interesting, but I would like to hold back from having a lucid “horror”dream !
I have read a few books on near-death experiences(NDE) before. A famous nonfiction writer in Japan interviewed many people who thought they had NDEs, and he analyzed and reported the stories in a professional manner. I imagine that there might be some relation between lucid dreamings and NDEs. Just guesswork.
May 18th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Wow, that’s awesome. I learned about lucid dreaming in high school, and I really wanted to learn to do it, but I never taught myself to recognize that I was dreaming, so I never succeeded. It’s definitely worthwhile, though…
May 19th, 2006 at 2:10 am
Kanwa-san,
If you learn how to dream lucidly you’ll be able to control your dreams. You won’t have any bad lucid dreams, unless you choose to actively go out and “look for trouble” in them. I haven’t really had any NDEs except maybe one close call with hypothermia from swimming across a lake that was too cold. I didn’t have an out of body experience or anything like that, just whole body shivers followed by a long long sleep once I made it back.
May 19th, 2006 at 2:59 am
John, if you still want to do it, it only takes about 10 minutes each morning after you wake up to write down your dreams, plus five or ten 20 second distractions a day to do dream checks. I’ve never met anybody who couldn’t learn how, yet. All you have to do is keep a log of your dreams for a couple of weeks and find something that occurs frequently. It’s better if you can find something that doesn’t occur often in your waking life, but anything will do.
Let’s say you notice that you frequently dream of going to coffee shops. Then, make a habit of checking to see if you’re dreaming every time you’re in a coffee shop. The easiest way to do that is by asking yourself if you’re dreaming while looking closely at a digital watch, or reading and focusing on individual words. If you’re dreaming, you won’t be able to do it. Once you make a habit of doing these dream checks, it’s only a matter of time before you’re in a coffee shop, do a dream check, and find that you really are dreaming.
I really recommend that book I mentioned in the post, too.
May 19th, 2006 at 9:25 am
How interesting… I don’t normally remember any of my dreams. For all I know, I don’t dream at night. But I doubt that. Can you think of something I can do to try to remember my dreams. I feel like I’d wake up, grab the notebook and stare blankly until I decided to get into the shower.
Also, when I was young and having bad dreams about monsters and Darth Vader and what not, I remember getting fed up and deciding to take over my dreams. I figured it was crazy that I was creating the dream and I was getting scared. Then when I was having a bad dream, I forced myself to solve the problem. Probably by using a gun or something. I can’t recall too clearly now. I do, however, recall that it worked!
May 19th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
Mike,
I’m sure you’re having several dreams a night; pretty much everyone does. Not being able to remember your dreams is a pretty basic roadblock to learning how to have lucid dreams, though. I was able to remember my dreams just by deciding I would and telling myself I would each night before I went to sleep. I was a lot younger, though. For one reason or another, men tend to remember fewer dreams than women, and adults remember fewer than adolescents, who in turn remember fewer than children do.
I’m sure you can do it, though. If you’re interested, pick of a copy of the book. I really recommend it.
May 20th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Mark,
Thanks for the advice. The technique you describe for recognizing that you’re dreaming is slightly different from ones I’ve read before, so maybe it will work better for me. The only problem is I don’t think my dreams have a common theme… but I guess I’ll have to write them down first to know for sure. I don’t have too much trouble remembering my dreams, normally.
I’ll probably be talking to you about this more in the future. You can be my dream coach!
May 30th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Hey Mark, I made a dream journal about 10 years ago. Would right down everything I dreamt as soon as I awoke. I find that many of those dreams I can still recall today. I was amazing to see how my dreams and reality differed. I rembered the first time I had a lucid dream. I was running down a path , and I don’t know who was chasing me or why, but I stopped a stood there realizing I was dreaming, and decided that if I was dreaming then that also meant I could do what I wanted, so jumped up in the air and flew. It was an excillerating feeling, but the odd thing is remember having other lucid dreams in which I wanted to dream but wasn’t able to. Sadly I stopped keeping a dream journal, and haven’t lucid dreamn’t since.
Maybe I should start to keep one again.
May 30th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
Also, listen to the Queensrych song Silent Lucidity.
October 16th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
The Lucid Crossroads now has a Chinese translation.
December 28th, 2006 at 8:02 am
I used to write a dream journal as well. It’s been an on and off thing. I used to keep one for every night, but I have since stopped. From time to time, I used to post about my dreams, but when a blogger tried to psychoanalyze me through my dreams, I stopped doing that as well.
I have experienced lucid dreaming on and off during the years. It isn’t unusual for me to be able to seize control of my dream and make it do what I want it to.
Most recently, I have dream learned about riding a motorcycles with a manual tranny.