What is lucid dreaming?
What is Lucid Dreaming?
Normal dreaming means that you are not aware of the fact that you are dreaming and that all experiences during the night in the dream state are completely out of control. You have no choice, no awareness, thus you can’t make decisions. All runs like in a movie. Lucid dreaming means you are aware that you are dreaming during your dream. You realize that you are within a dream and this gives you great freedom to do and to experiment whatever you want to. For example in a scary situation you know that it is just a dream and you could start hugging a monster.
There are different stages of awareness in lucid dreams, usually you are not as fully aware as during the day. Sometimes you realize that you are dreaming but it is like a far away thought and your dream continues uncontrolled as any other dream.
There are many ways of learning it, for example the reality check: several times of the day you make a check if you are dreaming or not. After a while this habbit is done automatically during sleep and you may realize that you are dreaming.
You can also imagine intensively during the day that you are in dream.
Another method is to concentrate on the idea and the wish of lucid dreaming before you go to sleep and writing all remembrances into a dream diary.
But the most efficient way to bring consciousness into the dream state is to bring consciousness into the emotions during the day. If you suppress your feelings and emotions during the day and distract yourself as much as possible you cannot expect conscious dreaming. Because you are already unconscious during the day and the night is like a reflection of the day. If you feel all the feelings deeper and deeper and become more and more aware of all emotions, perceptions and feelings than you raise your level of awareness in the daytime. And this will automatically lead to a higher state of awareness in the dream state.
Finally, you can even enter the lucid dreaming state without any loss of awareness directly from the wake state. You have to stay conscious during “you” fall asleep. In fact you let only your body fall asleep while you stay fully awake. When you go to bed try to stay conscious as long as possible while your body falls asleep. This needs lots of practice, you have to balance between the wake and sleep state.
A very advanced level of lucid dreaming is when you have so much awareness during the dream state that you are able start meditating in the dream. This means you don’t do anything with the dream, you let all go and return to yourself. Then all dreams will sooner or later disappear and you enter an even higher state of consciousness.
Having said this the most important thing is to find out the motivation behind the wish for lucid dreaming. This is far more interesting. Why you want this actually?
And at last a warning. If you are not settled in your life, having stability on many levels like money, job, friends, family and mental health I would strongly advice to stay away from these things. Yes it is fascinating, I have done it myself but it will not help you in any way. Remember, it will not be of any real help. Instead it brings you in contact with dimensions and experiences no doctor and no psychiatrist in this world is familiar with and could help you.
Just sitting in silent meditation is far more powerful and will bring much deeper results of healing if done on a regular basis over some years. This meditation will sooner or later also lead to lucid dreaming states but it will happen automatically without any direct effort and at the right time when you are ready.
It has a reason why we are imprisoned in this body during this life time. Look at that from which you want to escape with lucid dreaming.