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Best Way to Utilize Sleep Time - 3 Great Ways to Learn Lucid Dreaming
By Abhishek Agarwal Published: 06/01/2009
Best Way to Utilize Sleep Time - 3 Great Ways to Learn Lucid Dreaming
Are you aware that you spend nearly a third of your life sleeping? Don't you think it would be wonderful if you could utilize this time to solve problems, cure yourself, gain creative inspiration, or have fun? The great news is that you can utilize sleep time to the fullest. You don't have to snore the night hours away. Lucid dreaming enables you to use your sleeping hours as creatively as possible.
Lucid Dreaming Defined
Lucid dreaming is the ability to stay awake as you dream! While your body is asleep, your conscious mind is fully aware that you are having a dream. What's more, you can even control the events of your dream, given that you have gained enough expertise in lucid dreaming.
If you have never had a lucid dream in your life, you don't have to despair. You can easily train your mind and body to have a lucid dream. Just follow these time-tested and proven techniques of inducing a lucid dream.
1. Improve Your Ability To Remember Your Dreams
Natural lucid dreamers can remember their dreams very well. In fact, learning to recall your dreams is the initial step to learn how to have lucid dreams.
If you cannot remember your dreams, you can train yourself to remember them; however, it is a time-consuming process and requires a lot of patience and will power on your part.
2. Keep A Dream Journal
Keeping a dream journal facilitates better dream recall. Write down the details of your dream or whatever you remember of it immediately after waking up. Don't put it off until later in the morning. This is because you will forget even the little that you remember if you fail to write it down immediately.
The practice of keeping a dream journal teaches your mind to recall your dreams better, and you will find yourself able to recall your dreams better and better as the days go by.
3. Reality Checking
This technique trains the mind to identify a dream. The idea is to develop a habit that might find its way into your dreams. Make it a point to ask yourself every now and then whether you are dreaming or awake. You might repeat this pattern in your dreams and suddenly realize that you are having a dream, a realization that will make the dream lucid.
You can do the reality checking in two ways.
A. Write a few lines on a sheet of paper. Take the paper out every now and then and read what is written on it. Ask yourself if the writing has changed or if the words make sense. If you cannot read the writing or if it has changed in some way, you must be dreaming!
B. As you are drifting off to sleep, imagine that you are having a dream. What would you do now? Imagine that you are able to do whatever you want...fly, jump over a building, meet your favorite celebrities, and so on. This practice teaches your mind to recognize dream stuff. Your imagination might find its way into a dream, and you will immediately recognize it.
Most techniques of initiating lucid dreaming follow a basic pattern. They all aim at training the mind to think in ways that might be repeated in dreams. If they do, your brain immediately recognizes that these are dreams.
You will take a long time to master the art of lucid dreaming. Learning lucid dreaming is like opening the doors of a brand new world. You then stand the chance of tapping into the rich sources of your unconscious mind to find answers to questions, gain inspiration, overcome phobias and anxieties, and many more
