Hey all, i was womderin' if any of you here actively practice lucid dreaming. Lately i've been trying in order to figure out some new moves on my bike. I have a dream about ridin' i recognize it's a dream sometimes but most of the time i realize when i wake up. I'v heard of people using some sort of cue to enter a lucid state. For those who practice this, do you have any tips that would allow me to achieve a bit more than accidental lucidity? Thanks for any help! Peace
get in the habit of turning lights on and off every time you enter a room..this habit will bleed over into your unconscious state and since dreams have a hard time with wide ranges of light intensity its usually a good cue. You can also get into other habits Like reading things twice (the first time it could be garble but you dont even know/care because you still somehow understood the meaning, but a second glance at the sign/book/paper usually cues you into the dream). You can also get in the habit of looking down at your hands and turning them palm up and palm down a few times and just sort of agnologing them...dreams oftentimes even in first person still dont bother creating hands, since you arent looking at them...also your brain knows exactly what your true hands look like, theyre one of a kind and you've been looking at them from day one, so oftentimes when you look down in a dream and the hands dont look familiar, this can cue you. I'd also suggest you look into an herb called "Calea Zachatechichi" (calea, or dream herb for short). Traditional native use involved smoking a rolled joint of the herb, drinking a tea made of the herb (very unpleasently bitter) and also sleeping with the herb under their bed/pillow. Its shown to promote very lucid dream states in large amounts as well as lots of auditory hallucinations...give it a try
Thanks nubbin, you answered a few questions i didn't think to ask also. You said light intensity can be used as a trigger, should i add a 15 minute light cycle to my nightstand lamp at the approximate timeframe i would expect rem to happen? I'll look into the herb also. Thanks
I have no tips, but since you mentioned it, I have to share my lucid dream! Lately since I haven't been smoking, I have very detailed dreams. I dreamt I was doing matrix stuff! Fun fun.. fun.. Started off just running around shootin people (I was on a mission or SOMETHIN) in some office building. Then I was like, "hey.. what am I doin.. oh hey.. I'm dreaming.. weee" and started doing 0 gravity stuff and.. yeah.. I should start trying to intentionally have lucid dreams. They're fun.
"I've been dreaming, I've been dreaming I was lucid. Blood was seeping, it was seeping from my pores. Who'd believe that it was all my own decision?" -Davey Havok Sorry. I just love that song, so I had to post some lyrics
I've had them before but only randomly. Where can that herb be found, common places or is it tough to come by.
Ater reading "The Teachings of Don Juan" as a teenager, I successfully used the "look at your hands" technique described in the books and by Nubbin. If you haven't read or heard of them , check'em out, they were written by Carlos Castenada, and I beleive there are 5 books in the series. I was also able to "stop the world" as described in the books, very mind expanding stuff, similar to meditation really. Good luck with the dreams.
It's the abilty to control your dreams. If you are in control then you're having a lucid dream. Generaly you have to realize you're dreaming to be able to control it, and I guess realize that you can control it. Looking at your hands when you're awake is supposed to help. I think the reason is that you'll look at your hands in your dream out of habit but you'll notice that they look different and that might trigger the realization that you're dreaming. Then there is the Calea Zachatechichi or dream herb, that is supposed to help lucid dreaming, I have yet to try it but am activly searching for it.
During lucidity you can do anything, you are god of your own world, lawnmower man. If you really achieve lucidity you can do stuff like fly, morph anything, go anywhere, if you can imagine it, it becomes real, and even more because your dreaming mind will help fill in the blanks. I'm intersted in using lucid dreaming to practice some real hardcore aggressive biking in my mind before i go out and huck a 20 foot cliff, etc, that way i can have a better chance of working out the visualization on the crazier stuff. If i can "ride in my sleep" i think i can translate more skill to the bike in the real physical dimension. Peace
That shit is crazy!! After reading it I might look into it So wait whats this thing about looking at your hands?? Just look at them a lot and recognize them???
yea i still don't quite get the hand thing either, from what i gather, if you look at your hands a lot while you're awake (aside from being accused of being on acid) when you dream and you look at your hands and theu don't look "quite right" then it will supposedly trigger lucidity by realization that they're not your "real" hands. i've been trying to me what seems like the most simple an direct route to lucid dreaming, before bed i tell myself repeatedly that if i am riding my bike i am dreaming. I used the trigger of that last night to enter a very brief state, right near the end of my dreams i was riding and was "in control" I want to practice having longer lucid dreams with better recall. PEace
strange thing happened last night.... just as i was falling asleep, i started talking alloud a whole load of preachy shit about the world today as i see it. then when i'm asleep and in rem, i had the longest continious flow of dreams i've ever had, many of which i was able to control. one was about swordfighting (i guess i crave Soul Calibur 2 more than i thought), then one about being on the programe hard talk speaking to ... cheny i think it was, then a dream about...... oh crap... i can barely remember the rest... anyways, there were at least 8 dreams in a row as i was i an almost awake state of mind.
That's a good site, i've been there. I thought i posted it n this thread already tho. I musta got stoned and forgot. Since I last posted in this thread i've had some success in lucid dreaming. I've been keeping a dream journal but i have more problems with recall than really realized. It's like i THOUGHT i knew what i dreamed about but when i try to record it i have nothing to say. I remeber things about my dream that no words exist to describe. I realize that the best i can do is a few words about them. It's not that i don't remember 'em, it's just that if i tried to describe them it'd take me a week of typing just to get the idea down. My dream journal contains entries for every day since i started but most i log as "no recall" simply because i can't put it into words, even pictures. But' since i've been actively trying to incoroprate lucid dreaming i've discovered a new dimesion to the dreamstate. I haven't broken through to total dream control yet but i have had several precognitive dreams, which unfortuantely i have no way of knowing really are precognitive until the actial event happens, usually a few days later. Also they're not significant precognitive events, just simple things like a specific sequence of common actions that i dream about and will happen. I had a dream that as i dropped my pen off my desk at work a certain person walked in, sat down, and asked me a specific question under circumstances that were unique enough to be near impossible to be chance, yet so ordianry that it's not unexpected. I haven't had any really useful preccognitive dreams as i said, but i have achieved brief moments of lucidity. I realize i'm dreaming but i still can't break throuhg the control barrier, usually because when i realize it's a dream (my dreamsigns are bikes and biking) i'm more interested in riding and just flowing with my bike than trying any dream control. Instead of trying to fly or other common lucid dream fantasies i just go into my riding mind, which to me is complete purity and a highly elevated state of consciousness. Maybe it's possible that i AM controlling my dreams but i don't recognize that i am, kind of like when i ride in wakestate i don't control my relaity, i just flow with it and go into my ridetrance where i just zone out and mediatate as i let my body ride and flow energy. It feels the same when i ride in wakestate or dreamstate, i get the same feeling, like i don't know what or why i'm doing it' all i know is there's a deep primal need to ride. Also i've been waking up from my riding dreams completely out of breath and soaked with sweat, with "riding muscles" tight and pumped. A side effect of trying to improve recall is remebering things i'd rather forget, or never have seen in the first place. What's funny about it tho is the dreams that are truly disturbing to me are the ones where nothing significant happens, where it's just another mind numbing experience, like uneventfully driving somewhere, going to an ordianry place like a store, etc. just everyday shit. I used to have a recurring nightmare that i drove like a mile down the street to the store, and when i was there i saw a few people i know and said hi. nothing unusual happens, yet it fucks me up, there's something ominous or evil hidden in the mundane. Now that i actually say that and read it back i realize that may be what the percieved evil is the complete uneventfulness and that EVERYTHING is just tepid in emotion, like there's no reality beside autonomously doing what it is that we do, and that there's nothing more to life than consumerism. Something else that i find odd is that i never seem to have sexual dreams, or at least none that i can remeber. I sometimes have dreams of girls showing/telling me that they want to, but it never goes any farther, these dreams just dead end and seem to trail off into other dreams that are non-erotic. I'm not really looking to increase or improve sexual dreams, but i've always found it odd that even when i was sexually active i still never had dreams about it. I'd dream of my girlfriend all the time but never once in a sexual context. I just thought that's kinda strange, but then again i'm strange myself. Someday if i ever have money when the herb shop in town is open i'm gonna pick up some calea z. and try it. Peace
i was in a bad dream a few days back where my condition, a jaw muscle disorder, went completely sideways. like my mouth wouldn't open and my jaw started to deteriorate(sp). this is some pretty scary stuff, but just when i was in a panic i realized that it was a dream and i woke up. after this i had a pleasant dream. kinda crazy.
the movie waking life is all about lucid dreaming. in that movie, one of the people that the main char talks to says that one way to check to see if you are dreaming is try to adjust light levels (flip a light switch)....because when you are dreaming you wont be able to change light levels. yah if you havent seen that movie.....you should check it out. waking life.