What lucid dreaming means is that you know you’re dreaming and that you can control what you’re doing in the dream. It might seem hard at first, but with patience and practice, it can be done. Here are five lucid dreaming techniques that will help you experience lucid dreams during your sleep:
Sometimes it can be harder than one thinks to understand that you’re in a dream and not reality. One way to make the distinction is to closely examine your surroundings to see if things don’t look quite right, or if things generally seem a little “off”.
Perhaps you’ve dreamed of a familiar place or person, and their appearance seemed to have something wrong with it or had something strange about it. So being attentive to details like this is how we can set up a foundation upon which we can construct our strategy to be able to lucid dream whenever we want.
How do musicians get really good at their instruments? Repetition. This is what we’re gonna be going for with lucid dreaming as well. Except that, we’re not going to be repeating the practicing of playing an instrument. No, instead, we’re going to be repeating the process of looking at items.
In this way, we’ll easily be able to tell the difference between dreams and reality. A great example to be would be to look at a digital clock – and I mean really look at the clock. Pay close attention to the tiniest details of every digital clock you come across in your daily life – the one in the car, the one at work, the one you see when you wake up. Picture the numbers and the displays when you close your eyes. Think about these digital clock displays as much as you can.
Once you’ve thought often enough about the digital clock, it will start to appear in your dreams. However, despite how much you will have analyzed and obsessed over the appearances of the various digital clocks you’ve looked at, the one you see in your dream will look somewhat strange. Something will seem “off” about it when you see it – and that will trigger the realization that you’re dreaming.
This is because when you’re inside a dream, your brain doesn’t paint a one hundred percent accurate picture of the world. I mean, you don’t really have to use the digital clock specifically to get this concept; any mundane object you see a lot will do.
For some people, this could take the form of looking at a body part, such as their hands, or an action, such as pinching their skin. Whatever it is, once you’re in the dream, it will look and feel different and weird.
As long as you’ve picked just one thing to focus on, and you focus on that one thing multiple times a day, it will start to come into your dreams. This object will be your link, your trigger, that tells you that you’re in a dream, and not in reality.
The example I talked about above shouldn’t actually take too long to show up in your dreams; maybe only a couple of days if you really focus and commit. However, this is only the first step, and unfortunately, things get a little more complex from this point on.
You see, even if you realize that you’re dreaming, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have any control over what’s going on. This, of course, is how the vast majority of people dream. However, since you’ve already taken the step of realizing you’re dreaming, you’re on the path to lucid dreaming.
So, with regard to the digital clock example, that was just the beginning, to get you to the point where you realize you’re in a dream. To further this process, another dimension needs to be added. Let’s explore lucid dreaming techniques to help you with that.
So, instead of merely just looking at the digital clock, action needs to be done as well, something ritualistic. This means you need to do exactly the same action, every time you look at the clock. It could be, for example, scratching one of your arms. So, when the clock enters your dream, guess what else is gonna happen in your dream? Yep, you guessed it – you’re going to be scratching an arm in your dream too.
The thing here is, people have misconceptions about lucid dreaming – the misconception being that you can do whatever you want in the dream. It doesn’t really work like that; once you’re in a dream, it can be very hard to do any random thing you feel like. This is why, like I talked about above, you need to premeditate your actions.
Think long and hard beforehand about what you want to happen in your dream, and keep reminding yourself about this goal.
Still, don’t think that this limits your possibilities. In fact, there are endless possibilities in the world of lucid dreaming. A popular desire is to be able to fly in your dreams – and this can be done, with enough premeditation. So you’ll go through the motions with, for example, the clock strategy I talked about above, except that when you observe a clock in real life, you’ll say something like, “it’s time to fly,” to yourself.
If you do this enough, your subconscious will start to associate the clock with flying, and voila! In your dream, you’ll see the clock and fly.
That’s it for the lucid dreaming techniques. I hope that you’ve learned something and that you’ll give this a genuine shot. It really is worth it. Also, make sure you share your lucid dream techniques and experiences with me.
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I have been a lucid dreamer for 62+ years with the purpose of #1 being able to go to sleep (my body resting) and #2 seek to solve or explore problems. #3 review complex events and/or systems with anomalies. To this day, by promoting the idea that what was envisioned had to have a sound basis in reality. As a child, once the flashlight was taken away from me) I found I could review books that I had read and in fact study them with understanding being the goal. Today, at 67, I look back at a concept in Theoretical Physics, an understanding of a pattern in the search for Prime Numbers, a design on a magnetic engine, a U.S. Pat. for reducing emissions on internal and external combustion, and a host of problems solved in the everyday work and living environments. Luid dreaming is more than just dreaming, it is for me a way of life and well worth the effort.