Lucid Dreams

Dreams are essential to our wellbeing. Experiments done with sleep deprivation show that a person will hallucinate to a point where sleep deprivation, make the dream world and the reality around us indistinguishable. In these experiments, the mind went back to normal only after sleep was restored.

Although we may not remember our dreams, we all dream many times throughout the night. We can train ourselves to remember our dreams, what’s more, with practice we can work wonders in our dreaming.

Not just learning to read messages we find within our dream world but by venturing into lucid dreaming.

Studies show that 73% of the population has had at lest one of these dreams in their lifetime and that lucid dreaming come naturally to 5% of us.

Lucid dreams are different from average vivid dreams we may have because within them, we fall into a state of awareness that is close to the state of being while wide awake. In lucid dreaming, everything appears brighter, more colorful and all geometrical shapes seem sharper and clearer than what we see in our wakened state. It produces similar experiences to those described by Shamans when going into Mescaline induced trances.

The most impressive thing with lucid dreaming is that the dreamer can actually control the dream environment. A dreamer can decide where to go, what to do and (to a certain degree) change his / her dream at will. First timers sometimes find the heightened awareness exhilarating whilst others may find this a bit frightening. One thing most agree is that lucid dreams can be a life changing experience where one stops to think about life, death and one’s own soul.

Tibetan Yogi’s are masters of dream-work and meditation. They each spend many years in mastering techniques for lucid dreaming. They claim to use this knowledge to perform amazing psychic feats like; astral projection, doppelganging (where one person can be in two places at the same time), past life regression and even claim to be able to view future life progression.

In these dreams, it can be frustrating to keep the dream from loosing its lucidity as one can slip in and out of this state many times within the same dream. The whole training process for this type of dream work requires determination, patience and above all, self control.

The first step in learning is first to learn to recall dreams. There are many ways to do this, a classic way is to drum the thought of “remembering a dream” into your head, before drifting to sleep and making sure you are ready to write down any dream you may remember upon waking up. This must be done as soon as you open your eyes as it is normally within the first few seconds of waking that your dreams tend to fade away from memory.

The second step is what takes the most determination. You have to question yourself throughout the day, one question; “am I awake or dreaming?” To do this it may be helpful in using a token to remind you to ask yourself this question, like a piece of string around your finger.