Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams (The MILD Technique)

This article is about how to perform Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams(aka MILD) which was created by Dr Stephen LaBerge of The Lucidity Institute. LaBerge invented this method while at university in order to have lucid dreams on demand. It is very effective and ideal for beginners.

In essence, the MILD technique will train you to increase your self awareness, making it easier to recognize when you are dreaming. It also involves incubating a lucid dream with affirmations and programming your next dream to contain pre-determined dream triggers to prompt lucidity.

As you may already be aware, a mnemonic is any learning technique that aids memory. In this instance, you are planting a cue in your subconscious mind which helps you remember your intention to lucid dream and recognize when you're dreaming.

The following Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams tutorial is aimed at beginners - there are no special requirements or skills needed. It's sectioned in four parts:

1. Dream Recall
2. Reality Checks
3. Lucid Affirmations
4. Visualize Your Dream

How to Have a Mnemonically Induced Lucid Dream

You can perform the first two steps of the MILD technique right now. The latter steps are for just before you go to sleep tonight. It involves meditation and visualization so it works best when you are physically and mentally relaxed and ready for sleep.

Step #1 - Dream Recall

It is especially important that you already have a decent dream recall rate - this means being able to remember and write down at least one dream every morning.

If you can't remember your dreams, then they are probably not very vivid, and so the likelihood of you becoming lucid within them is poor. What's more, if you do spontaneously have a lucid dream, you will not even be able to remember it!

There are some simple and powerful ways to improve your dream recall - for more advice read my article How to Remember Your Dreams - then come back here.

Step #2 - Reality Checks

Throughout the day, ask yourself "Am I dreaming?" and try to distinguish whether you're awake or dreaming with a simple physical action. This is called a Reality Check.

A reliable way to do this is set your digital watch to chime every hour. When it beeps I try to push two fingers of my right hand through my left palm. I also stop to ask myself (and I mean to really consider the question) "Is this real?" When I'm awake, nothing happens, of course. But when I'm dreaming, my fingers go right through my hand!

This causes me to become lucid in my dream - and everything surges into focus. I suddenly become self-aware and conscious inside the dream and am able to control it.

A reality check is a simple way to trigger this moment of introspection. It is deceptively simple. Sometimes I try to float. Sometimes I just look at the palms of my hand (in the dream world, close attention to detail can prompt lucidity). Sometimes I just look at my digital watch (numbers and letters are often jumbled in non-lucid dreams).

You can choose any reality check you like, just be sure that the waking result differs from the dreaming result. By continually checking your waking reality, you are priming yourself for greater self-awareness in dreams. I recommend performing at least 10 reality checks per day, preferably more.

 

Step #3 - Lucid Affirmations

When you are lying in bed tonight, go through some lucid affirmations in your mind. This is really where the term Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams comes from - you are programming commands into your memory, to be recalled later on in your dreams.

Repeat one or many of the following affirmations in your mind:

• Next time I'm dreaming, I will remember I'm dreaming
• The next scene will be a dream
• I will have a lucid dream tonight
• I'm dreaming now

Put real feeling into the words as you chant them in your mind. If you feel your mind start to wander, draw it back to the issue at hand. Stay focused. Repeat the affirmations until you feel like you are about to fall asleep (how long this takes depends on you personally; it may be 2 minutes or 10 minutes). Then proceed to the final step.

Step #4 - Visualize Your Dream

Now we can begin the visualizations; this is my favorite part of Mnemonically Induced Lucid Dreams. But only perform this step once you are deeply relaxed and feel you could drop off to sleep quite easily.

Imagine you are back in a recent dream - but this time you are going to re-live the ending differently. Visualize the scene in as much clarity and detail as you can remember, then look for a dream sign. This is some unusual character, location or object which reveals the dream to be mere fantasy; something you wouldn't see in real life. Then say to yourself "I'm dreaming!"

Although you are just day dreaming (and this is by no means a lucid dream) continue to experience an imagined lucid dream fantasy. Do whatever you would do if this were a real lucid dream. You might decide to fly and explore the landscape, or seek out a dream character.

During this process, you will likely fall asleep. That's ok. The primary purpose of Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams is to have your very last thought before you go to sleep be about lucid dreaming. Mission accomplished! Later the same night (or in the morning) you have a much higher chance of becoming spontaneously lucid.

Occasionally, something amazing will happen. Your imaginary dream world will suddenly merge into a real lucid dream. Your body has fallen asleep but your mind - so captivated by the imagined dreamscape - remained conscious. You'll pop into the landscape and experience the dream with full intensity. When this happens, your MILD attempt has become a WILD (Wake Induced Lucid Dream). Result!

Tips on Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams

During the 1970s, when Dr Stephen LaBerge was developing the MILD technique, he found that certain interruptions in regular sleep patterns improved success rates. These included waking up to have sex, vomit or meditate. This led him to conclude that: wakefulness, interjected during sleep, increases your chances of becoming lucid.

So, in order to have more lucid dreams with MILD, you may want to wake yourself up in the night and bring yourself to full consciousness for a few minutes. No need to induce vomiting! Simply spending 20 minutes reading about lucid dreaming works fine. As you return to sleep, perform the MILD technique.

Another way to exploit this principle is to practice MILD during afternoon naps. I find this most effective if I am a little sleep deprived from the night before, so it's easy to fall asleep during the afternoon. However I don't advocate forced sleep deprivation; simply make use of this principle if you happen to be particularly sleepy in the day.

For step-by-step tutorials on lucid dream exploration, check out The Lucid Dreaming Fast Track, my digital course for beginners and beyond.

source: http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/

Dream Induced Lucid Dreams (The DILD Method)

A Dream Induced Lucid Dream (DILD) is any dream in which you become spontaneously lucid. Your lucidity is prompted by the unreal nature of the dream. You'll consciously recognize that something is out of place (from talking animals, to oddly-colored scenery, to deceased people seemingly alive and well). The realization creates instant lucidity and your dreamworld suddenly becomes real...

DILD lucid dreams are more frequent than contrasting WILDs. In a laboratory study of 76 lucid dreamers, almost three-quarters were dream-initiated, and only one-quarter were wake-initiated. And those are probably skewed figures. Lucid dream researcher Dr Stephen LaBerge notes that WILDs in the lab appear much more common than those experiences at home.

So, in your quest to become a lucid dreamer, the most useful trick up your sleeve will be to understand how to induce DILDs with frequency.

How to Have a DILD

There are many types of Dream Induced Lucid Dreams - and so, many ways to create the crucial moment of self-awareness within the dreamstate.

Proficient lucid dreamers often have spontaneous DILDs without deliberately incubating them. It becomes natural - automatic, even - to comprehend when you are dreaming. Sometimes a non-specific cue, such as entering an unfamiliar locale, will trigger your inner awareness: "Of course! I'm dreaming!"

However, beginners need to spend time entraining this mindset and habitually looking for dream signs and other "reality tests". In time, your dreams will present the opportunities for you naturally - and it is your task to act on them.

One example is looking at a piece of text in a dream. As the conscious brain lies dormant during sleep, your written language skills are severely depleted. It becomes very difficult to read text - and if you can, the words don't remain constant. So, the next time you dream of reading a newspaper headline, you may just wonder, "Am I dreaming?" Make sure your next action is to look away, then look back and read it again. As the words will almost certainly change, you have valid evidence that you are dreaming and your lucidity will surge and intensify.

Other popular ways to trigger a Dream Induced Lucid Dream are: reality checks, meditation and dream incubation, and Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams (MILD).

Below are summaries of 8 popular DILD methods, in alphabetical order, with links to my full tutorials on this website. You don't need to learn every single technique here to experience a DILD - simply pick the ones that appeal to you the most and show them your commitment over the next few weeks.

8 Popular Types of DILDs

1. Cycle Adjustment Technique (CAT)

Developed by British lucid dreamer and author, Daniel Love, the Cycle Adjustment Technique involves adjusting your daily wake-up time to naturally influence your body's chemistry and increase your consciousness during morning REM sleep.

2. Dream Signs

Everyone has dream signs, it's just that lucid dreamers tend to recognize them more. A dream sign is any type of clue that exposes the dream as unreality. Increasing your awareness of dream signs creates spontaneous in-dream lucidity...

3. Meditation and Dream Incubation

Meditation is an excellent primer for lucid dreaming, because it hones several different skills conducive to lucidity. Here are two easy breathing and guided meditation techniques to improve your visualization skills and self-awareness. Through visualization you can incubate your desired dream themes.

4. Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams (MILD)

Dr LaBerge's famous MILD method combines several individual DILD skills described here: dream recall (journaling), reality checks, affirmations (self hypnosis) and visualization. He created it while at university to have lucid dreams on demand.

5. Reality Checks

To perform a reality check while you're awake means to question your conscious experience, even though you know quite obviously you're awake. But to question it inside the dreamworld creates a whole different revelation.

6. Self Hypnosis

It has myriad applications in the world of personal development - and self hypnosis can help lucid dreamers too. Through meditation and affirmations, self hypnosis produced some of my very first Dream Induced Lucid Dreams.

7. Subliminal Induction of Lucid Dreams (SILD)

Subliminal stimuli affect you below your threshold for conscious perception. We decided to see if it was possible to induce lucid dreams subliminally by creating two animated videos giving rapid-fire lucid dream triggers. See for yourself...

8. Wake Back To Bed (WBTB)

This is another sleep cycle adjustment technique. It involves create a period of alert wakefulness in the early mornings, before returning to bed. This promotes greater consciousness in your dreams and improves dream recall.

Final Thoughts

Do some people DILD naturally, without even knowing it? You bet.

Sometimes readers tell me they have been lucid dreaming their whole lives, only they didn't know it was called lucid dreaming, and they assumed that everyone dreams that way. This is a startling admission. Natural lucid dreamers? You'd think they'd be shouting from the rooftops! But when you grow up with the ability to have DILDs without effort, it becomes routine. You take it for granted.

Similarly, although you may have spent decades experiencing only non-lucid dreams, it is possible to entrain the mindset to have multiple DILDs a week. The more you practice, the more DILDs you'll have, and soon it will become second nature. Your dreaming mind will present you with multiple cues and moments of lucidity, and it will be your choice to embrace them. The Dream Induced Lucid Dream, like all the techniques described on this website, is a totally learnable skill.

source: http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/

How to Have More Lucid Dreams with Prospective Memory

Even though many people start out with the same background in dreaming, it is clear that some take to lucid dreaming much more easily than others. Why is this?

Many of us perform intuitive mental habits in our waking lives, and these can translate very simply to lucidity in the dream world. This gives some people a very distinctive headstart in their lucidity practice - and they don't even know they're doing it.

You could well be doing it yourself right now.

There are a number of practices and naturally occurring habits that fit this description but in this instance I'm talking about prospective memory: the forward-thinking ability to remember to remember.

The Little Voice of Recall

If you can remember to do something at a set time during your waking day without writing it down... then it's much more likely that you'll remember, when dreaming, to ask yourself: "Is this a dream?"

This if course is the basis of the reality check method - but how often do you perform reality checks in your dreams? Is it nearly enough?

By improving your prospective memory, you could remember to perform reality checks frequently - perhaps even on a nightly basis, leading to nightly lucid dream adventures.

Having good prospective memory is like hearing an alarm going off inside your head just when you need it. It shouts with an inaudible voice: REMEMBER TO DO THAT THING, NOW! It appears to come from nowhere, but in reality this is your unconscious returning a pre-arranged memory cue. Remarkably, as I'll show in a moment, it is often linked to an internal brain clock which boasts an accuracy that is almost to-the-minute.

Here, I'll show you how to improve your prospective memory and make your lucidity induction come more naturally. First, let's look at some common examples of prospective memory and see what you may already be doing.

Prospective Memory in Daily Life

I think that a natural prospective memory is more powerful among people who are highly conscientious and organized. The more you consider or worry about the consequences of forgetting to do something, the more motivated you are to remember.

We inadvertently train ourselves in prospective memory when we make formal appointments without writing them down, plan to catch a plane which requires good time planning, or do the weekly food shop without a shopping list (with those pesky sporadic purchases we have to make an effort to remember).

Here are some more examples of prospective memory in my daily life, and what I've observed about the nature of this curious mental trait.

• Taking a contraceptive pill - A lot of women are well practiced at this. At 6pm every day (or often just before) a mental alarm goes off in my head which reminds me to take my pill within the essential 3-hour window. I never programmed this alarm intentionally, it just happened after years of having a real alarm go off on my phone. Eventually I began pre-empting the phone alarm so I no longer needed it anymore. "Take your pill!" Says the little voice in my head. Sometimes I wake up in the night thinking "S**t I didn't take my pill!" And I go flying downstairs in the middle of the night in search of my handbag before realizing I took it on time as always. Yup, the effect can become so powerful that it wakes me up out of my sleep!
  
  The consequence of not taking this pill is so potentially huge that the alarm is extremely reliable; it's only ever once failed me in more than a decade. In fact, my prospective memory to take my pill is so strong that the alarm continued to go off in my head at 6pm every day while I was pregnant with Fox. So for nine months straight, even though I had zero need for this prospective alarm call, the effect persisted and I couldn't shut it off.
• Making an appointment - Sometimes I'm too slack to keep tabs on a diary, but ironically motivated enough to commit dates and appointments to memory so I don't forget them. Once again I'm relying on my prospective memory which has become so strong it can kick in weeks after making the original appointment. It flags the event with increasingly intensity during the lead-up. Of course, we are nearing the territory of having something "in the back of your mind" - the difference with prospective memory is it kicks in without having the memory anywhere near your conscious awareness.
• Waking up at a certain time - As a teenager, I used to set my alarm for 7.30am on school days. It was pretty weird, then, when I started to wake up at 7.27am just minutes before the dreaded alarm call, thereby saving myself the shrill audible horror of another day beginning... This, I understand, is actually quite common and it's thanks to that internal brain clock I spoke of earlier that tracks time through the night, even when we are asleep and unconscious. Remarkable.
  
  Over the years, I found the effect so fascinating that I used to test my prospective memory with various challenges. "OK," I'd say in my head as I got into bed the night before, "it's 11pm now and I want to wake up at 5.30am and record one dream." That would happen. Then I'd set another mental alarm for 90 minutes later, in the attempt of coinciding with another period of REM sleep. The timing of REM is never that predictable but I have used this technique to significantly improve my dream recall.

So, prospective memory certainly has its uses for lucid dreamers.

Prospective Memory and Reality Checks

Of course, there's one other huge application for prospective memory in my life and that's doing reality checks. I need to remember to test my reality habitually through the day, so I can remember to do the same in my dreams.

Sean Kelly, the creator of Lucid Academy, recommends improving your prospective memory by committing to do reality checks every time you see a certain object, like a cat or a lock. Choose something you might see 5-10 times during your daily routine, rather than something that appears 20+ times, as that would be overkill. Then, every time you see that object, do a reality check.

Ask yourself, "am I dreaming?" Now, you have to really mean it and fully probe your self awareness in your environment. Don't just say "nope" and move on. It should be a deep, thoughtful exercise. If you're not entirely sure what that means, check out how to improve your self awareness as this will help define meaningful reality checks and awareness of your self.

To be habitually self aware in waking life means to be more self aware in your dreams. 

Anchors and Mnemonics Devices

If you want to go all-out with the prospective memory technique, you can expand on this concept with methods straight out of NLP (or Neuro-Linguistic Programming). An anchor is, an Sean Kelly described, a link that reminds you of something. So here we have linked cats and locks to reality checks.

Sometimes, even with a solid, well-defined anchor in place, you may completely forget to do your reality check. You may get home and realize you actually saw two cats on your walk and completely failed to test your reality. No problem. You just need to set up a simple mnemonic device.

A mnemonic device is a memory cue that is visually intense and sparks the imagination into life. Think of a perfectly normal cat. Now, imagine it's carrying a giant oversized cardboard check on its back, struggling to bear the load which guarantees to pay Mr Cat the princely sum of $500,000.

You've just mnemonically linked "cats" and "checks" together in your mind using surreal imagery. So the next time you see a cat, you are more likely to recall this funny image, which in turn reminds you to perform your reality check. Bingo.

But we needn't be so literal. You can imagine that cat exploding, or walking on chopsticks, or running up and jumping into your arms and licking your face. (It depends on your personal relationship with cats.) As long as the cat's doing something surreal and unexpected, it creates a more powerful memory that will grab your attention and trigger that prospective memory cue.

Oh - and the next time you dream of a cat, be prepared for it to explode. That should trigger your reality check nicely. (I'm really a dog person.)

Final Thoughts

The good news is, developing your prospective memory does get easier.

"We are attempting to create a continuous thread in the subconscious mind," says Sean, "that is always present in the background, waiting to be activated at the appropriate time. As we work with this type of memory it becomes easier, because we create a groove in the subconscious mind."

Soon, this "groove" makes your prospective memory quite instinctive - so you're not even thinking about it anymore. And I'm confident you can reliably program your first reality check anchor within a few days. Also be sure to give the alarm call method a shot - because when you can wake yourself up with your brain's internal clock, you can then realize its true power...

source: http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/

How to Improve Your Self Awareness

Self awareness: the mental ability to recognize who and what you are - namely that you are distinctly separate from other people and your environment.

This knowledge enables you to consciously realize your own personality, feelings and desires - allowing you to have abstract thoughts about who you are, and things you have done in the past or will do in the future.

Humans have a high capacity for self awareness - though we are discovering that more animals qualify for self awareness too. It's especially helpful in lucid dreaming; converting the passive dreamer into a consciously thinking individual, with the power to explore and manipulate their dream world at will.

To be habitually self aware in waking life means to be more self aware in your dreams. This will produce many more lucid dreams because you'll be able to recognize when you are dreaming (that it is a separate place from waking reality). What's more, those lucid dreams will be more vivid and intense, more malleable and long-lasting, thanks to your heightened sense of self awareness.

Developing a more self-aware mind set doesn't happen overnight but can have a significant impact on your lucid dream life over time.

Here are five ways to improve your self awareness and become a more thoughtful observer of your reality, both while awake and while dreaming.

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."~ Anais Nin

Self-Awareness Exercise #1

Observation

Let's start with a simple observational exercise in self awareness.

Go to a quiet place - indoors or outdoors - where you can be left alone for a while with no distractions. Sit down and take some slow, deep breaths. Allow everything to slow down while you attune yourself to the environment.

Focus on what's going on around you, as opposed to what's going on inside your own head. Most of us go about our days jumping from one distraction to another and pay little attention to our surrounding environment. Instead of ignoring the background noise let's tune it in and see what it's doing.

Look at any inanimate object that catches your gaze and that you can see clearly. Study its shape - is it flat, straight, jagged, curvy, round? And the texture - is it rough, smooth, rippled, soft, hard, solid? Notice how it is hit by the light; whether it is light or dark, dull or reflective, colorful or bland.

Now get a sense of its depth and position in space. Is it real or imaginary? In your mind's eye, isolate it from its environment completely. Imagine what exists behind the object in the space you can't see. Did it ever look different? How was it created? What will it eventually become?

Without even touching the object we now have a much more profound awareness of how it appears to us in waking reality.

This will come in very handy when you're dreaming tonight.

By paying close attention to even the most blandest objects in your environment you are picking up on subtle but important clues that distinguish dreams from reality. To instinctively analyze the same object in your dream tonight would almost certainly yield a lucid dream.

Repeat this exercise with more features in your environment whenever you have a calm, reflective moment. There are no limits: you can do this exercise with a mug or with a cloudless sky. Test yourself.

For lucid dreamers, the palms of your hands are a good observational target simply because your hands are your own; they are always present in the dream world and provide the realization that you have a body - a self.

You can study your environment with any sense (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch... and beyond: temperature, pressure, weight, and so on). Use all your senses -- or use sight alone to retain your complete focus on the experience.

Sometimes though, different objects trigger different senses (eg, birdsong, distant thunder, the smell of home cooking, the touch of grass underfoot) so focus your awareness in the manner most conducive to exploring the object at hand.

Self-Awareness Exercise #2
Imagine The Impossible

This exercise is based on a well known lucid dreaming technique called reality checking or reality testing.

Take any object from the first exercise (eg, a glass of water) and, having studied and experienced it in full, now imagine the impossible. With your eyes open and looking directly at the glass, visualize it melting into the table.

Now imagine it shattering as if spontaneously fractured by a high pitched sound.

Imagine it levitating and floating an inch up in the air.

Now imagine the water coloring itself with a deep red dye.

There are countless ways to imagine the glass of water changing in unlikely or impossible ways. All these sorts of surreal events happen in dreams and by imagining them and analyzing them in reality, we trigger a level of awareness that causes us to ask the question: "This can't be real - am I dreaming?"

This exercise provides a training ground for us to stop sleepwalking through our day, study and observe our reality, and question whether it is real or not.

And when you determine your world isn't real, you become lucid...

Here's a classic lucid dream reality check that involves the hands. After studying your palms in detail as per the first exercise, try pushing two fingers from your right hand through the palm of your left hand.

 

Now imagine the impossible: pretend to see your fingers passing right through your palm. How does it look? How does it feel? How is it possible?

 

In a dream, simply expect your fingers to pass through your palm, and they will... By imagining the impossible you are teaching your mind to expect the impossible, which is essential for your reality check to prove false in the dream world.

Self-Awareness Exercise #3

Observe Your Self

The first two exercises explore our perception of the external environment. Now we'll enhance our self awareness from within.

Practice this during meditation. If you don't meditate, try this while falling asleep tonight (it's about the closest thing without calling it meditation).

If you want to start meditating on a regular basis (and I recommend you do for lucid dreaming) try listening to brainwave entrainment specifically designed to aid lucid dreaming practice.

When you are fully relaxed, lying down and with your eyes closed, focus your awareness within and ask yourself: what does it feel like to be me right now?

Just as we did with the first exercise, start with very basic awareness, such as the physical sensation of lying in bed. Is the mattress soft or firm? Are the sheets cold or warm? Rough or smooth? Does your body ache or are you completely comfortable? Do you feel heavy or light?

Then move inwards. Take some deep breaths...

Do you feel calm or stressed? Why is that?

Can you remember a time when you were MORE calm or MORE stressed? What did that calm/stress feel like?

How would you describe the feeling if you were talking to an alien who had never experienced it before? Are there different layers to this feeling? Is it tangible? Can you move it around, build it up, or sweep it away? What might it look like if you could see it?

Direct your focus to whatever emotion or state of mind you feel is strongest and probe it in every way you can think. Like manipulating putty in your hands, try to manipulate any feeling (happiness, peace, amusement, boredom, even pain) to get a better understanding of how it affects your experience of reality.

To be self aware in the philosophical sense is to recognize your feelings as they occur, to understand the impact they have, and perhaps even put them to an effective use.

 

When dreaming, this improvement of your self awareness will help you to recognize unusual or extreme feelings and thereby trigger lucidity.

 

For instance, it's quite common to have your first lucid dream via a vivid nightmare which triggers lucidity. The feeling of intense fear from being chased or attacked (or whatever your nightmare fodder) can provoke the realization: "I must be dreaming!"

Self-Awareness Exercise #4

Visualize a Dream Scene

This is a lucid dream technique that invokes a stronger sense of self awareness.

If you spend every night visualizing a dream about riding on a giant water slide made of ice cream, you'll actually dream about it sooner or later. For accomplished lucid dreamers it happens quickly because it's second nature.

Children who lucid dream frequently use this method intuitively. They'll go to sleep thinking about the amazing Candyland they just witnessed on TV and it'll suddenly become their next dream reality.

Not knowing any better, they assume everyone does this...

The technique of "daydreaming yourself to sleep" is straight forward in its essence but there are tricks to enhance the process and make it more effective.

So what's the best way to visualize a dream scene so it plays out sooner?

First, visualize in vivid detail, engaging as many senses as possible. Trick your brain into believing that the experience has actually happened.

To your brain, the neurons fired during the experience of eating a gourmet burger are exactly the same neurons fired when you vividly imagine or dream of doing it. And since our dreams are mostly replays of real-world experiences, we can program our dreams by simulating real-world experiences in our minds.

Tonight as you fall asleep, put your awareness inside a desirable dream scene and explore every element with your senses. Don't worry about planning the sequence of events so much as setting the opening scene.

To enhance the visualization further, attach an emotion to it. You are more likely to dream of an event if it was particularly emotional.

Unfortunately, negative emotions seem to penetrate our dreams more easily. Horror movies can so easily trigger nightmares in some people, but for most it takes extreme situations like grief or trauma to noticeably penetrate our dreams. The effect can be powerful and even lead to recurring nightmares. This all supports the theory that dreams are a psychological healing ground.

Nonetheless, many lucid dreamers incubate using only positive emotions, such as a deep desire to experience a particular dream event. There is no need to spook yourself or re-live bad memories for this exercise.

Here's an example of an effective incubation: visualize that you are standing on top of the Empire State Building with someone who means a lot to you. It is night time and the city it lit up. Observe the world below before jumping, weightless, into the air and soaring over the city. Fly!

Self-Awareness Exercise #5

Practice Self-Awareness in Dreams

So far all the exercises take place in the waking world.

This one is for when you're next inside a lucid dream.

Using a combination of outside observation, reality checking, and exploring your own inner awareness, you're going to maximize your self-awareness when lucid.

From the moment you become lucid, start exploring your dream world. Look around you, turning 360 degrees slowly, before selecting an interesting target. It may even be your own hands.

Study the object in detail, scrutinize its shape, texture, color, and so on.

Then expect it to grow or shrink (it will!)

Push your awareness into the object and observe it from the inside.

Expect the impossible... then see it happen.

Now ground yourself by observing your own thoughts and feelings within the dreamworld. Are you happy? Excited? Playful? Can these feelings become tangible?

Of course! You are dreaming...

There are an unlimited number of ways to probe your lucid dream world, to see how it reacts to you and vice versa.

By staying lucidly focused and in the moment you'll enhance your lucidity as you go, significantly prolonging your lucid dream and thereby training your mind to have more lucid dreams in future...

source: http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/

Keeping a Dream Journal

Keeping a dream journal is an important part of lucid dreaming. Fortunately, it's easy and fun - and ultimately improves your awareness of the dream state, making it easier to wake up in dreams.

The average person has five sleep cyclesper night. At the end of each cycle, there is a period of REM sleep. Most people dream for 100 minutes each night. The closer it is to morning, the longer your REM sleep becomes.

So you are more likely to remember dreams as you wake up in the morning - the best time to write in your dream diary...

Find a Lucid Anchor

If you have trouble remembering dreams, you can use a lucid anchor. Anchoring comes from the fascinating branch of psychology called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). Just before you go to sleep, choose an object that you can see clearly from your bed. This is going to be your anchor.

My anchor is a picture of a big grizzly bear stuck on the wall. I look at this picture when I go to sleep, wake up during the night, and first thing in the morning. When I look at it I think "I will remember my dreams".

The phrase acts as a trigger for my subconscious brain to relate to. It reminds me to focus on my dreams and plants a subconscious intention: to associate the bear with remembering dreams. And I look at that bear multiple times each night.

How To Keep a Dream Journal

How to keep a dream journal may seem obvious. But there are a few things worth remembering. So here we go... 

Step 1 - Find a notebook or journal specifically to record your dreams in. Keep it within arm's reach of the bed. Dreams fade quickly on awakening so you need to write them down as soon as you wake.

If you get up, walk around and start talking about other things, it will cause motor neurons to fire in your brain. This is what "overwrites" the memory of the dream. So be ready to jot down a few details first thing.

Step 2 - Note down the date of your dream. Then write down everything you can remember. Write everything in the present tense (eg "I am walking down the street when a frog jumps out of the bushes"). This helps with remembering dreams by putting you in the moment.

Step 3 - Identify dream themes. Think about the location, characters, sensations, sounds, objects and emotions of the dream. Underline key themes that may help with interpreting dreams (eg, "the frog is sad because he knows adrought is coming").

You may want to analyze the themes and fully interpret your dream. Otherwise, continue to write down all the memorable details in your dream journal.

Anything that you can associate with established neural patterns is also important (eg, you feel protective over a puppy). This may be a dream symbol or concept that represents a real life issue.

Step 4 - Don't worry about spelling, punctuation and grammar. As long as you can read it back later and it still makes sense, you are fine.

Step 5 - Sketch any strong images from the dream. It doesn't matter if you're not an artist. A sketch is just to help you visualize the dream later on.

Step 6 - When you have finished, jot down any major life issues that are going on right now. For instance, you may be suffering from a broken heart. Over time, you will be able to link your subconscious dream symbols with real life issues.

Step 7 - Give the dream an appropriate title. Nothing flashy, just something to remember it by. If you became lucid at any point in the dream, write "L" for lucid in a circle by the title. Identify what caused you to become lucid (unless it was a WILD).

 

Dream Journal: FAQ

How often should I write in my dream journal?

Write down your dreams whenever you get the urge. It doesn't have to be every day - a few times a week is usually enough. (But obviously, the more you remember, the better.) Sometimes you won't feel bothered because real life just seems more important. A wise choice! In fact, I would be worried if you did put your dreams before real life.

How can I improve my awareness of dreams?

If you have difficulty remembering dreams, your journal may look a little bare. Don't worry. Start by writing down little snippets - anything at all - and watch your dream recall improve over time. Try listening to self hypnosis recordings which remind you to remember your dreams. It may help to sleep in for an extra half hour on weekends. Just before you wake up, you are flirting on the border of consciousness and REM sleep. This is the best time for remembering dreams... and having lucid dreams!

How can dream themes help me become lucid?

Finding common themes and symbols will also help you create lucid dream triggers. Over time, see if you can find any recurring themes, such as running away from something. Remind yourself to become lucid every time this happens. The next time you are running away from something in a dream, you may be pleasantly surprised by a conscious realization!

"Dreams digest the meals that are our days"

~ Astrid Alauda

Your Lucid Dream Journal

Let's not forget that the main reason for keeping a dream journal is to have lucid dreams! These can be recorded the same way in your normal journal.

Make sure you mark them as lucid dreams and describe the moment you became lucid (if it was a Dream Induced Lucid Dream, or DILD). Decide what it was that made you realize you were dreaming. This could be a useful trigger for having lucid dreams in future.

Then go on to describe your lucid dreams in as much detail as possible. How you felt, how you achieved greater clarity, and how long you thought the experience lasted for in real time.

For step-by-step tutorials in lucidity, check out The Lucid Dreaming Fast Track, my digital course that shows beginners the fastest way to lucid dreams.

source: http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/

How To Remember Your Dreams

Do you know how to remember your dreams?

Does it come naturally to you - or do you use specific techniques to boost your dream recall?

To lucid dream, it's very important that you can remember at least one vivid dream per night. This increases your self-awareness while dreaming, and most importantly, it means you can actually remember your lucid dreams.

The following techniques will teach you how to remember your dreams more frequently, even if you are terrible at remembering dreams - or think you don't dream at all. Trust me, you do! The average person, sleeping for eight hours per night, will experience 100 minutes of dream time.

Make Time for REM Sleep

If you are continually sleep deprived, you can give up on lucid dreaming right now. For lucidity to occur, your brain should be relaxed and well-rested. What's more, you should have a good eight hours of sleep underway before you can enjoy long periods of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep in the morning when lucid dreams are more common.

The first dream of the night is the shortest, lasting just a few minutes and sandwiched between phases of deep sleep. You're unlikely to remember any of this dream. The second dream cycle occurs about 90 minutes later and is a little longer in length. But it's not until your fourth or fifth REM cycle (from around six hours onwards), that you experience long phases of dream sleep ranging 45-60 minutes.

So if you only sleep five or six hours per night, you are depriving yourself of those extra long phases of REM sleep, which are important for processing memories and new information, as well as the therapeutic side of dreaming (such as coming to terms with emotional trauma). What's more, most of my lucid dreams occur from 6 am onwards, and the longest and most lucid dreams occur during lie-ins beyond 8 hours.

If your lifestyle doesn't cater to this from Monday to Friday, at least allow yourself a REM rebound on the weekends. Give yourself an extra two hours of sleep and that will be prime lucid dreaming time. If you can't afford to get up late, try going to bed earlier and schedule yourself at least 8-9 hours of sleep once a week.

Quick Fire Dream Journaling

Now that you are getting sufficient REM sleep, here is a much more active way to remember your dreams. It involves a dream journal.

Tonight, set your alarm clock to go off after you've had 4.5 hours of sleep. This should rouse you during a longer REM sleep phase, producing immediate dream recall. (Dream experts agree that we tend to only remember dreams when we awaken directly from the dream. If we go straight on into a deeper sleep, the dream is lost forever.)

Have a notebook by your bedside and when your alarm goes off, immediately write down all the details of the dream you were having. If nothing comes to mind, it's likely you weren't dreaming, so just relax and lay quietly for a few minutes and think about what you'd like to dream about next. When dream journaling, write in the present tense and underline unusual characters, symbols, scenes, plots, themes, or emotions. Then set your alarm to go off in 90 minutes' time and go back to sleep.

Repeat this trick every 90 minutes until you get up for the day. By morning, you should have written down four or five detailed dreams. This is an amazing technique that significantly boosts my dream recall and I strongly recommend it. Your efforts to wake up every 90 minutes will be rewarded with strong memories of vivid dreams - and of people, places and plots that you had no idea were running through your head.

Meditation and Self Hypnosis

When I first discovered lucid dreaming, self hypnosis was the key to improving my dream recall and planting the subconscious intention to have lucid dreams.

Using meditation and self hypnosis as you fall asleep at night are great ways to improve your dream recall and induce lucid dreams. All you need to do is fully relax and then command your subconscious mind to give you more vivid and memorable dreams.

Hypnosis is nothing spooky or mysterious, it's simply a relaxed state of mind in which you find yourself very suggestible. You can't get stuck in a hypnotic trance, and you can't scramble your brain while you're in there. Particularly with self hypnosis, you are in control of every suggestion you place inside your highly suggestible mind.

Dream Supplements

Dream supplements and herbs are taken primarily to increase dream intensity - and one obvious side-effect of this is enhanced dream recall. Dream herbs likeCalea Zacatechichi produce intensified dreams in which you have greater self-awareness. You will wake up in the morning with highly memorable dreams to report, and occasionally, lucid dreams too.

You can take such herbs from time to time to help produce intensely vivid dreams and test the full range and power of your dreaming mind. However, this is an optional extra and I wouldn't suggest that anyone needs to take such pills in order to become a better lucid dreamer. Experimenting with dream supplements is entirely up to you.

Drugs and Alcohol

Many prescription drugs, as well as marijuana and alcohol, alter your sleep cycles, effectively suppressing REM sleep and decreasing your dream time.

However, if you sleep for long enough, the effect of the drugs will wear off and you'll experience a REM rebound. Most people can relate to this after a night of heavy drinking; after a long deep sleep, you experience significantly longer REM phases giving way to intense dreams and even nightmares.

I can't say I've had any memorable lucid dreams this way, so I don't recommend taking drugs or alcohol to become lucid. It just doesn't work. In fact, drug abuse can really stall your lucid dream life.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to remember your dreams is absolutely essential if you want to learn lucid dreaming. Every lucid dreamer should keep a dream journal in which they record multiple dreams per week. It also helps to sketch some dream symbols and scenes when you feel the urge.

It was only when I started writing down and sketching my dreams that I could remember my dreams going back years. If I don't write them down, however, they disappear in minutes or hours and the magic is often lost forever. That goes for some lucid dreams too.

Your dream journal is also an ideal place to record your lucid dreams. I clearly mark every lucid dream with a capital L in a circle so I can flick through and quickly recall all my conscious dreams over the years.

As lucid dreamers, we are embarking on fascinating inner journeys - and those journeys of discovery are definitely worth documenting.

source: http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/