WARNING: While I've never had a bad experience doing this, the very nature of the experience implies that doing this could lead to a nasty 'trip'. I don't want anyone to have a bad experience associated with dreaming, if things start to go bad, unlike drugs, just pull out of it and WAKE UP. Always realize that all of this will just be you dreaming, nothing bad is really happening to you, any monsters, or whatever you see are nothing more then figments of a very grumpy mind. Don't worry, we've all got monsters in our heads, but if you're finding that on a given night or what-not that it's turning out bad, just calm down and try to go to sleep the natural way... without getting lucid. You're likely to do just fine. But the below can be fun if you're looking to add a hobby to your life between 3-8 AM or if you simply wish to learn more about your body as you go to sleep... or if you just really like TRIPPY experiences. That is, if your body is anything like mine, when you try a WILD, it WILL be trippy. EXTREMELY TRIPPY.
Furen (post: 1511002) wrote:You just sometimes realize you are dreaming, and just take over, altering physics and what you say and do. You can't really activate it.
This. Except altering physics would be really difficult. You can try to train yourself to do it, mostly by keeping a dream journal (revealing in it's own right) and then focusing that you're going to have a lucid dream at night... then hope you remember while you're dreaming. What do you have to remember to do? Check things, look at a reflection, your hand, a watch, letters... If you check your hand for instance and you have 12 fingers... here's your sign
. If the watch keeps changing time every time you look at it, or you can't read the words on the newspaper... same. Welcome to the dreamworld, where upon inspection, nothing makes sense even though everything seems detailed enough to be real.
Likewise, if you wake yourself up at something like 3 in the morning, right before your normal REM cycles, you're more likely to remember when you enter them. If you're really really skilled with meditation though, the way to do it is with a WILD. That is, you stay awake while you fall asleep. That sounds like an oxymoron doesn't it? I've tried it over and over to no success - whatever part of me puts me to sleep, keeps realizing that I'm awake and refuses to let me pass from awake to dreaming.
Keeping dead calm and slowly letting yourself make that transition is hard enough, but it plays other tricks too. You're going from awake to asleep which means all of your senses start to transfer over. It's probably the most trippy thing you can do without drugs, because you SERIOUSLY get some insane hallucinations (because you've normally been unconscious through this, it should be one INCREDIBLE experience - it can teach you a lot about your body and the stages of sleep). Massive loud sounds or bursts of light are killers, they'll scare the heck out of you when you see them and send your pulse racing, waking you straight up. Other then that though, there are more subtle things, like hearing your parents call you - you get up annoyed that they're calling you in the middle of the night... only to realize that it was just a hallucination, you can be mad at yourself. Then there is your body, which at some point cuts off your ability to control it, don't freak out, it will come back when you wake up, but you are placed in a state of complete paralysis while entering the dream state - a place where you can't move your body. Period (which is good for obvious reasons. Also sometimes you might wake up before your body control is returned, don't freak out here either, it happens, just wait and eventually your mind will turn it back on). Only your eyes move - which is why it's called REM (Rapid Eye Movement), if you're wondering why a person's eye is twitching in their sleep, research shows that you're literally watching them move their eyes in the directions they're looking INSIDE the dream. People often say they don't dream anymore, but their eyes tell a different story - we just forget the dreams right after waking up. Another frightening thing is when you feel your heart rate drop - this happens naturally during the night as you relax, but when you feel your heart-beat come to a crawl (and let's face it, you're staring at the back of your eyelids, you're going to start to notice these things out of sheer boredom) then you might just panic. Once again, it's normal, you're body isn't going to kill you while you fall asleep - you just never notice these things until you try to ride in consciously.
Oh yeah, another thing. As you start to drift off, occasionally you'll get a 'hypnotic jerk', that is, your entire body will literally jolt as if a disgruntled police officer tasered you in the butt. If none of the other things wake you up, feeling your body undergo the equivalent of a giant knee jerk reaction CERTAINLY might. You may even think something lifted your bed up and dropped you... no - once again, it's just your body doing things without letting you in on them. It's natural. Why does it do it? That's an awesome mystery - but experiencing it is something else.
You can also see images, like the beginnings of dreams form, your belief that you're dreaming almost shuts off instantly once you start to skim the dream. Your senses merge, with the weirdest non-nonsensical things seeming to make perfect sense. "The jellyfish knows mathematics and if I stick the pencil in the toaster, it will solve that problem I had yesterday" becomes completely logical along with other visions that if they wake you, you'll realize they don't even make any sense at all (or even weirder stuff, like smells becoming a spoken language, or abstract ideas becoming people that talk to you - logical associations vanish. I'm not sure what associations are there, but I have a feeling that if I could remember them, there might just be some really deep stuff going on here)... if you can even frame them in an image or sense. Like I said, it's REALLY trippy. Dreams. My anti-drug.
Probably one of the most awesome things that happens are intricate geometric images and music that occasionally plays. It's not until you wake up and your mind quickly pulls the sound back into your subconcious that you realize that you've never heard it before and that you literally just wrote the next Mozart in your head without even giving it a moments thought. It's in dreaming that you come to appreciate the full spectrum of what your mind truly is just beneath the surface, the amazing potential within you becomes visible and it should really be rather inspiring. A few people, especially in the arts, have learned to tap their dreams and literally built entire professions out of them. I'm not that capable, but if I could put my dreams to work to solve things, I could likely do AMAZING things.
As far as when you get lucid? Control is difficult, it's almost a question of 'faith'. Literally - unless you completely believe to your core that it's possible, then it won't happen. I've flown all the time and know just how to do it - thus, it's nothing for me to fly, I just 'feel it' and up I go. The next thing I wanted to do was learn how to go to various worlds - that way my nights could turn into vacations. I've likewise tried to change how I looked. However, because I innately 'knew' that that wasn't true and I was trying to change it - it didn't work. I have since found out how to change worlds - you have to dive into water and swim until you break through to the other side - it kind of does a dream 'reset'. Don't worry about breathing, you can breathe underwater in dreams, just inhale. Unfortunately though, this just changes worlds, it's doesn't allow you to 'choose' the world you want to go to. One thing to watch out for though, is closing your eyes. I've done this in the past and I couldn't open them again, I was still dreaming but I essentially became blind and started to panic. Panicking is death because it ends the dream.
If the dream starts to blur, watch out because that's your mind telling you that you're about to prepare for the next REM cycle. When this happens in reality, you wake up for an instant, often times without even realizing it and then go back to sleep into a new dream. If you can catch one of these 'breaks' and calm yourself fast enough, rumor has it you can actually use these to jump into the next dream lucid. But to stop the current dream from ending, just spin as fast as you can in a circle. Silly isn't it? Yet for most dreamers, this will cause the world to clarify and you can continue to enjoy your dream... Heh heh, I'm going a bit to crazy here. I spent a lot of time researching this way back - mostly because I loved to dream. I really should get back into it, it seems to me like it was a lot of fun, for a while in life, I used to look forward to going to sleep each night. Every night was a chance, an opportunity to go on an amazing adventure. I typically remembered 2-3 dreams a night when I could remember them and one of those dreams was typically awesome.
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