Lucid Dreaming

Has anyone ever experienced lucid dreaming? I have a couple of times and it is a pretty interesting thing. I have read online about certain tips and tricks to more easily allow yourself to realize you are dreaming. Off the top of my head the most important trick is to always keep a dream journal. This allows you to more vividly recall your dreams and remember them since most people always tend to forget their dreams as soon as they wake up. If you are able to remember your dreams more clearly you are able to better realize when you are actually in one.

 

I have always been able to recall most of my dreams. I also have lucid dreams. When I was younger I would sleep walk and talk. In fact one time I was babysitting and walked right out of the house in the middle of the night. I have been told that I have said some pretty funny stuff when this has happened. I have had instances where I will just suddenly scream and then blabber on some craziness. Once I told my son he was ruining gym and to give me back my sneaker. I have no idea what that was about.

I always thought that lucid dreaming was what happens when the brain goes into a REM state before we hit a full alpha or beta sleep cycle, like when you power nap and dream in a matter of a few moments. This has always scared me a bit because I have feared falling asleep while driving or something like that. Last night I was dreaming about socks in the roadway. Mine were the green ones, but there were other ones. I think that this is from me sorting laundry earlier. Lucid dreaming does make me wonder about guys like Edgar Cayce, I guess many of the things he said have been proven facts. Maybe what I was dreaming is really where socks go when they escape the dryer?

 

I read recently that we have short dreams throughout the night and they last longer the more we sleep. We usually only remember the most recent dream before waking.

Some people are more capable of remembering their dreams, because there is more activity in a certain part of their brain than in people who can't remember their dreams.

When you wake up suddenly you are less likely to remember a dream than when you wake from it slowly.

 

I had to train myself a long time ago to wake up when dreams get a little too weird. I do know when I am dreaming and in some of them I actually have a lot of fun. Example: I love it when I fall from great heights in dreams. It's nothing more than the end of a dream and I love the intense adrenaline rush. But, with others, for some reason I go into a sort of paralysis. During the paralysis I do not breath and am quite aware of the fact, so the quicker I wake up from the guilty dream the better off I am because the effects are somewhat lessened.

Perhaps this might be a job for my friend Peter R. to weigh in on.

 

I am sure Peter could make some great tales - always true - about some of the dreams he has had!

 

Usually in the morning, I can tell that I am still having a dream, but if it is a good one, I can manage to return to it.

 

I have heard that mornings are actually the best time to do this sort of thing. I'm not sure of the science behind it but it has something to do with the brain activity. I have read that it is easiest to achieve lucid dreaming by setting an alarm to wake up, recall your dream, then return back to sleep.

 

The Tibetan Buddhist monks actually have a technique that uses Lucid Dreaming. They call it Dream Yoga. They use it for a higher purpose though. It's part of their path to Enlightenment.

 

Coming back on this thread reminds me of one of the lucid dreams that I had once. I had been playing with the idea of astral projection for awhile but never was fully able to accomplish it. One night after trying and failing to astral project I fell asleep and began dreaming. During my dream my body began to vibrate and I thought to myself that I was about to project out of my body. As the sensation grew more intense I then suddenly realized that I was dreaming. Since I knew I was dreaming of course I proceeded to run and jump so that I could fly. After a few seconds of flight I felt myself waking up and after that I woke up and I don't believe I have had a lucid dream since that time.

 

This has reminded me that I often used to fly in my dreams. It would start with me walking without my feet touching the ground and no-one would notice what I was doing I went on to make huge leaps with very little effort and I would end up soaring into the sky. It was an amazing experience, even if it was not real.

I must have had that lucid dream regularly, and I clearly remember enjoying the dream, but I don't seem to have had it in recent years or don't remember having it.

 

I tried doing it a couple times ever since hearing about this on the Internet, but I kept forgetting to be persistent, and I would give up after a failed night. I would sure love to start doing it, it sounds amazing!

 

I've experienced dreams that were positively psychedelic. This, I'm pretty certain, was due entirely to the anti-malarial tablets that I had to take every day for two years when I worked in East Africa. They tended to come in glorious technicolour and feature a variety of strange events, including a train that was also a plane, a gorilla composed of steel wool and many other decidedly weird people, places and events. Not that I would recommend taking the tablets unless necessary - they left my liver feeling pretty wrecked!

 

Unawares yes, I did experience this type of dreaming. I still rememeber that I was attending my final exam of high school and I was sitting on a chair in front of the commission and I started talking about the question (which I wasn't even have asked ahaha) and I was trying to answering them but suddenly the president of the commission stopped and me and said I had failed my exam then I just realized that this can't be true and just woke up from dream. It was both cool and good to be honest.

 

As far as I can remember, I had some lucid dreams experiences when I was younger and unaware that lucid dreams exists.

However I was later very interested to learn more on this topic, particularly by the time the turn of the century was approaching and there was an increasing spiritual awareness.

I even found software to maintain a lucid dream diary, and was up to date with new discoveries in this field.

Curiously I began to stop having lucid dreams at the same pace I was learning more about them, and none of these in the present decade.