Lucid Dreaming Beginner’s guide 😴

I started exploring Lucid Dreaming (recognizing you’re asleep and dreaming, without waking up) way back in 2005. If you happen to be interested, here’s the gist: You must ask when you’re 100% sure you’re awake “Am I dreaming?” and then you must check. 

“Checking” if I’m dreaming became a habit of presence woven into random moments throughout my day. Whether asleep or awake, truly questioning what I assume to be real brings me into an awareness that I’m aware. Every time I discovered I was dreaming reminded me that my assumptions about what reality even is, are often false. How often must that be true about other things in my waking life?

To check if you’re dreaming, you find something that is always different in dreams from waking. You can try to fly, or you can look at some text or numbers (if they stay the same after you look away and back, you’re probably not dreaming), or you can track your personal dream oddities (“dream signs”). Checking trains presence and dropping assumptions. When I check, I pay more attention to what is, while simultaneously questioning it. The feeling my of body on a couch; the sound of an airplane passing overhead, discordant with the leafblower next door; noticing that “I know” these while also considering “huh? How do i know these? What’s the root?”

Tips for lucid dreams and wakes:

1. Have fun.
2. If you start to lose lucidity, engage your five senses.
3. Waking and dream life go way better with an attitude of surrender. The more you try to change others and the environment, the more likely you are to be frustrated. Instead you can change yourself. Here’s an example: In one early lucid dream I was terrified of a monster chasing me. Remembering I was dreaming, I thought—”that’s me!”—and decided to love and welcome whatever I was rejecting of myself. The world instantly became a Tron-like construct and the monster merged into me and I felt a deep peace. Jungian analysts please feel free to go crazy here :)
   
   

You will often forget dreams, lucid or not. To remember them, keep a journal by your bed and write down your dreams as soon as possible. Begin with a title. Titles help a surprising amount for “dream recall”.

Fun fact: Literally spinning generates a new dream environment, but you’re likely to lose lucidity the first bunch of times you do it.

With love, Jordan