MasterMnd's Guide on Being and Attaining Lucidity

Introduction

Hey! As usual I write a post primarily for myself, because I want to sort out my own thoughts and ideas. But I hope that you'll find it useful too. Be warned it will probably be very long, but also be curious and give the wall of text a chance, because I will attempt to make it valuable. Enjoy!

Why should you listen to my words?

Let's begin by saying that I am not a master of lucid dreaming, far from it.. However, I have been practising for a couple of years now and I have always been very driven by learning about lucid dreaming and what it means to master lucid dreaming. And I have read about the majority of theories and tried the majority of the techniques and my goal has not only been to learn how to induce a lucid dream, but also how to do it consistently.
And I have never felt that I have reached a satisfying conclusion, and if I did found a method that induced lucid dreams regularaly it had alot of side effects. For example I used a method before where I had set multiple alarms to wake me up which would produce lucid dreams close to at will, however it shocked the brain and body to the degree that I was left tired the rest of the day. You can read my old threads and posts if you want more details.
Other problems I bumped into was the fact that the lucid dreams I got where very unstable. Another thing that bothered me was the fact that I did not wanted to be reliant on anything else but myself, so all methods that was based external factors such as using alarm clocks, lucid aids, wake up timing or time of practise and so on did not speak to me. Because when we are reliant on a specific method, the method is using us, we are not using the method. But to answer the question "Why should you listen to my words?" - I have finally found a lucid dreaming approach that is consistent and what allows me to be reliant on just myself.

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What is awareness?

This is the first question that we need to have an answer to. Because if we want to attain awareness of our dreams, we actually have to have a definition of what it means to be aware. The general definition of becoming lucid is to "become aware of dreaming while dreaming". And the approach that we use to accomplish that is to practise being aware during the day. But then again we have to ask ourselves "What is awareness?". To make the discussion short I will just tell you my experience of awareness. My view is that most of us intellectually know what awareness and lucidity means but we have actually forgotten what it is like... Let me test you on something that might sound weird at first, but this is a crucial reality check of your own mind and life that is a truth you need to become aware of if you want to understand what it means to be AWARE. Close your eyes right now and focus on your breath for 10 seconds and then come back to this post...

First ask yourself: How did you feel? And then ask yourself: Did you smile?

The reason to why these are relevant questions is because they show your degree of awareness. To be in a state of awareness of what you are experiencing at this moment is to be aware of the NOW.

Most of us are not in the present moment, we are either in the past: which usually means that we focus on something that cause us to feel anxiety or the future: which usually means that we focus on something stressful. Or we are simply having lots of different thoughts that distracts us from seeing reality as it is.

But focusing on the present moment (when we truly are just in the NOW) oddly enough has the effect of generating joy and cause us to not being able to stop smiling like a laughing buddha or a playful kid.
And our mind is focused and instead of being distracted in a state of cognitive dissonance, our mind is clear and in a state of flow.

So let's re-define awareness to: The degree of focus you give to the present moment.

This idea can easily be tested by just feeling and observing your state of mind while experiencing reality. Test it while drunk, test it after a stressful day of work, test it after you have been sitting in front of your computer or when you have read a book to see which kind of activities that promotes consciousness/focus/awareness Vs. unconsciousness/unfocus/unawareness. That's how you truly learn to FEEL what awareness is and what awareness is not. And as a little side note, also pay attention to how your level of awareness affects your behaviour and feelings towards others.

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Awareness Promoting Activities

In my search for awareness promoting activities I have encountered many ways of generating that state of mind. One is diet, what you eat has a huge impact on your awareness, try to live a day without sugar and you'll see. Although what you'll quickly realize is that it's almost impossible to not eat sugar in modern society because we have society that promotes the general population to become unconscious (Sugar, TV, excess of technology, social media and stimulation). Another is something as weird as cultivating sexual energy, which basically means to abstain from .. computer stimulation and masturbation. Let's just say that when you learn to convert sexual energy into life energy interesting things happen, it's energy that is capable of creating life after all. I can't speak on how this is done for women, simply because I do not have experience of that, but if you are a woman reading this, search the wide web and there are probably someone who describes it. For me as a man though I feel an increase in desire for real life women, interacting with people in general and to express myself and fully give myself to the world, but these are just bonuses apart from the increase of awareness and energy.

There are many ways to strenghten your awareness but when I saw that every book on self-development and growth recommends meditation, I realized that there was something of extra value with that activity even though it sounds weird and spiritual at first. You can find my meditation guide in my signature and you can try it and observe how your own awareness change over time. In my personal experience, nothing generates a higher degree of awareness than meditation. Then again I haven't tried drugs, but that would be a solution based on reliance of something external, so it's something that I don't even look into.

Being & Doing - The Unconscious & Conscious Self

From my understanding of the brain that I have attained from books I have learned that the most beneficial way to view yourself is not as ONE, but as TWO. In a modern perspective we can say that the most effective way to travel from point A to point B would be to have a really fast and well functioning car and then be a very skilled driver and reach our destination in no time. However, as Plato and Freud and many other great men understood, our brain is not as rigid as a car, our brain constantly change and is neuro-plastic. So a better analogy would be that of a rider and a horse. Our unconscious mind is the horse and our conscious mind is the rider. For more info read the book "The Happiness Hypothesis" by Jonathan Haidt.
So what we should do is to take care of our horse by taming it, in our case that is by doing awareness promoting activities (especially meditation) and then also be a skilled rider. Although when the horse is tamed the rider barely have to do anything because the horse/ unconscious mind is already on our side. And we just sit back and observe and enjoy the ride and the journey.

Lucid dreaming & Meditation

Now you know how to prime your mind to BE awareness and that is in most cases all that is needed to start experiencing higher degrees of awareness in your dreams, because you don't attract what you want, you attract what you ARE. But to help the horse/mind and give it some directions doesn't hurt.

So let's look at how to do that now.

I have experimented with meditation as my new way of sleeping, because I try to decrease everything that has to do with unconsciousness, even sleep. And I have had a few loose ideas in my mind, but some days ago I decided to see if there were any books on meditation's relation to lucid dreaming. And I found one for 1 dollar, which contained ideas that I myself could verify and some fresh new ones that I could try out.
I will cite these here now. But show your support and buy the book from this incredibly helpful oneironaut. It is called "Meditation for Lucid Dreaming" by Jamie Alexander.

First of all recall your dreams, even if your memory and dream vividness will improve because this is a direct result of your increase in awareness, to write it down is a good way of logging your progress. But remember that every experience you have is stored within your unconscious mind, so it will be accessable for you when you truly master unconscious exploration. But recall your dreams, it's fun!

Develop the habit of meditating as your new way of sleeping, what this does is that the last thing on your mind before falling asleep (if you fall asleep) is to be focused and aware. So a likely result of this is that you'll just wake up in a dream and you'll suddenly find your conscious mind switching on within a dream for no reason, there's not even the need to reality check to become lucid, you are just aware from the get go!

Realize that the dream world and transition to the dream world has NOTHING to do with your physical body. From now just focus on one thing: What is going on inside your mind?

Be prepared that your increase of awareness will result in you becoming aware of both your dreams but also your micro-awakenings during the night. (Without an alarm clock) Which is a perfect time to do any of all the different dream chaining methods you've read about. Or even to get up and do a WBTB. The point is that you now can do anything of YOUR OWN choosing, and the methods become tools that you use rather than something that you are reliant on.

There are more specific details in the book about particular ways to focus before going to sleep to actually transition right from awakening to the dream, but that would be too much to add to this already very long post.

But to summarise how to both BE and DO Awareness: Meditation - You are no longer falling asleep to then become aware, you already are aware and then you go to sleep.

How to both DILD/MILD/WILD/WBTB/DEILD/ NATURALLY. - Be in the now, daily and nightly :meditate:

I hope you enjoyed this guide. And that it will help you in your journey towards more awareness in your life.

Feel free to discuss and ask questions.

Peace! ;)

Good

Hm please don't get me wrong. I agree that meditation is very beneficial in many ways. I do it every day too. But in my opinion one should not fall asleep while meditation.(exceptions might be when you meditate for 12h straight or meditate through the whole night but that are exceptions for people who have decades of experience). When you fall asleep in formal meditation you do something wrong because meditation is an act of focus and concentration...
I also agree that one should fall asleep conscious and not just pass out. Therefore are different approaches to stay aware and focused but I wouldn't call this formal meditation.

Awareness is indeed the key for having present and vivid dreams. (just considering the benefits for the night, there are a lot more for your waking daily life itself) and attaining lucidity!

And as I said I don't want to attack you but I notice that you really love to blog your gained knowledge and talk a lot about it that's okay for me. Everyone can choose to read your stuff and make ones own mind about it.
But you seem to have nearly every week a new epiphany and new enlightenment so I am just curious, like you say not just talking but action:
Tell me something about your LD count and rate stability/lenght. How successful you are actually with all your epiphanys considering lucid dreaming over all the years of intense practice like you say? (I don't mean at all all the other benefits for your daily life that I am sure you have and I really think that you are on the right path and think in the right direction) but really concerning your lucid dreaming.
Because i at least have the feeling that you don't lucid dream that regular and not on a daily basis and since you are doing it that long now with that much of activity and effort here in DV one could say you could be successful or at least there are other that are more successful with less talking?
I just want to hear your opinion to that.

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Originally Posted by RelaxAndDream

Hm please don't get me wrong. I agree that meditation is very beneficial in many ways. I do it every day too. But in my opinion one should not fall asleep while meditation.(exceptions might be when you meditate for 12h straight or meditate through the whole night but that are exceptions for people who have decades of experience). When you fall asleep in formal meditation you do something wrong because meditation is an act of focus and concentration...
I also agree that one should fall asleep conscious and not just pass out. Therefore are different approaches to stay aware and focused but I wouldn't call this formal meditation.

Awareness is indeed the key for having present and vivid dreams. (just considering the benefits for the night, there are a lot more for your waking daily life itself) and attaining lucidity!

And as I said I don't want to attack you but I notice that you really love to blog your gained knowledge and talk a lot about it that's okay for me. Everyone can choose to read your stuff and make ones own mind about it.
But you seem to have nearly every week a new epiphany and new enlightenment so I am just curious, like you say not just talking but action:
Tell me something about your LD count and rate stability/lenght. How successful you are actually with all your epiphanys considering lucid dreaming over all the years of intense practice like you say? (I don't mean at all all the other benefits for your daily life that I am sure you have and I really think that you are on the right path and think in the right direction) but really concerning your lucid dreaming.
Because i at least have the feeling that you don't lucid dream that regular and not on a daily basis and since you are doing it that long now with that much of activity and effort here in DV one could say you could be successful or at least there are other that are more successful with less talking?
I just want to hear your opinion to that.

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After this long post and my style of writing I get that you are critical and that is good. I am as I said in the beginning of the post NOT claiming to be a master (damn you username..). And yes I do love to talk about new epiphanies as if they grow on trees. The reason for that is simply because I used to be very negative, so I basically brainwash myself to see everything as positive, it's one of my tricks to stay commited and motivated, since a blog isn't research and most likely isn't read by that many people I don't see that as something wrong. There is a reason to why I named my blog "MasterMind's EGO". Anyway I am not claiming that meditation gives you lucid dreams every night, there are other factors affecting our state of mind such as taking care of the responsabilities of our life. But when I share for knowledge I don't write about things that just sound good, I actually try things out and when I find a pattern of something reocurring I disect the very experience and identify the key factors that produce result. In this case, meditation.
To truly understand, to know, to grasp something is to have experience of it and understand patterns.

In my life for any path of growing your consciousness or performance in anything the simple answer is meditation. I seek the impossible then I begin the slow painful journey of attaining it. Things that people used to doubt and tell me wasn't possible such as becoming an attractive man without having to be good looking, rich or have status and basically just look at a girl in the eyes and see attraction getting sparked, doing push ups and doing 4 claps in front of and behind my back before landing on the ground, and then of course to become aware of dreaming while dreaming and experiencing an environment where you can be a GOD in your own universe. ALL of this can be achieved through cultivating energy (in my case through sexual energy transmutation) and meditation. It all sounds so complex but the answer to everything lies in focusing your mind. So amazingly beautiful and simple.

The reason to why I love this simplicity is because I have dabbled in all of these activities for YEARS. I got motivated when I realized that I could recall my dreams by just waking up and remembering them, then I got lucid dreams but I got a bit unmotivated when I realized that they only last for a few minutes, unless you sleep in during the morning. I am as I said in the other wall of text, a guy that doesn't want to be reliant on anything not on the external world for happiness and not even on my BRAIN for DREAMING and LUCIDITY. Might sound crazy or naive, but what can I say, I like the challenge.

But to answer your question. No I am not having lucid dreams on a regular basis simply because to stick to what is required to do that, just like for getting result in the gym, eating healthy or simply meeting many different girls and date them in a manner that doesn't hurt anyone and still leaves everyone happy, well all that takes DISCIPLINE and TIME. (A little bit of a rant here) Something that most people aren't willing to sacrifice so they get fat, eat shitty food, either get lonely or rationalise loving someone from a frame of needyness or just simply become an irresponsible player and for attaining different states of mind they turn to DRUGS. I am slowly learning to live with a long-term, drawing state from within mindset and moving away from short-term thinking.

Lucid dreaming is as you can see not my ONLY hobby in life, because I also focus on living my DREAM LIFE. ;) Therefore I dabble from time to time, but now after this guide I am quite excited because of the SIMPLICITY in the solution. Because I actually know how to (atleast for myself) regularly attain high degrees of awareness in my dreams. And for ld count, well I don't count my lucid dreams, that would be disrespectful to the practise itself, I love the practise which is also why I write so passionately about it, I am in this for the long haul so no matter what happens it is AWESOME. Might not be totally true, but it's a helpful mindset to have.

The following might be a strange comparison but everything I learn in meditation I use for everything else, it is the same brain we use for everything after all.
But when I go to a club do you think I point at a girl and think "I am having sex with that girl!" or that I count the number of people I sleep with? No of course not that would be to degrade the person to a sexual object for my ego. What I do is that I socialise with everyone and let everyone in on my party of FUN, then as an inevitable result I have lots of girls attracted to me. In the same way I just go to sleep to enjoy the night and the act of practising lucid dreaming itself that way I also attract more oppurtunities for lucidity. Over time (It's still early in my practise) this mindset will allow me to get a sense of what works but I'll also enjoy discovering it. If you think about what lucid dreaming actually is, you'll realize that it is actually a very odd and strange type of practise, "Hacking a naturally healthy unconscious state in order to gain the lessons of what your unconscious mind wants to show you, to instead trigger awareness and achieve control" well 5 years of practising that is nothing! It takes time, and my personal victories so far is more than enough to keep me going. The magic pill type of methods that actually attract most people like "Having an alarm wake you up in REM sleep" (used to be me) well that is what produce questions in the forum such as "How do I know that I have reached sleep paralysis" .... So what gave birth to this thread was actually the desire to put long-term thinking in my own mind (and other people's mind) again.
Just like I know that regularly going to the gym produces result, I know that regularly cultivating energy/awareness and meditating produces result.
Do you have any idea of how annoying it is to have pinpointed the formula for SUCCESS in ANYTHING but then realizing that you lack the self-discipline to use it!

It's sort of like that for me but writing this post is the start, and I'll keep fighting. The rest will become history. Expect me!

So knowing what to do is simple, to actually have the strength to do it, that's another matter..

There are probably people out there that are more successful lucid dreamers than me, and they are free to speak up, I am not competing. (I am even citing some of their work and books in my posts) :P I am simply expressing my perspective for the sake of expressing in itself. It's fun. :D Maybe I should apologize for the long post, but if you ask me something I can't help spilling my mind on paper..

Hopefully someone find it valuable. If it doesn't click with you, you are also free to make the choice of ignoring it. :meditate:

Peace!

Great post. I actually found it helpful. However the one question I have is how do I meditate and fall asleep at the same time? Since a major part of meditation is retaining awareness doesn't that just make falling asleep while meditating WILD. Also I've read that WILDing when we first go to sleep is very hard, and non rewarding. I don't know though. I've only had 2 Lucids, and haven't even attempted WILD and barley have ever meditated, so it might just be that I need clarification or something.

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Originally Posted by How

Great post. I actually found it helpful. However the one question I have is how do I meditate and fall asleep at the same time? Since a major part of meditation is retaining awareness doesn't that just make falling asleep while meditating WILD. Also I've read that WILDing when we first go to sleep is very hard, and non rewarding. I don't know though. I've only had 2 Lucids, and haven't even attempted WILD and barley have ever meditated, so it might just be that I need clarification or something.

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Great questions! (I will do my best to make this post "short") :)

A guide on how to meditate can be found iat the bottom of this page in my signature. It's something you have to practise, just like going to the gym. If you have never focused before your mind is going to be weak and perhaps only be able to handle light training (1 min). The importance is consistency (making it a habit) so meditate for 1 min a day until that feels easy and then do 5 min and then 10 and so on until you are comfortable with 20 min. I don't recommend meditating in your bed at bedtime before you are actually comfortable and like doing meditation, otherwise it might result in insomnia and trouble going to sleep. When it feels as natural to meditate as it is to brush your teeth, well then you know that you are ready.

With falling asleep I actually don't mean falling asleep in the traditional sense. It's difficult to explain if you haven't experienced it, but what I mean is that you lose focus and become aware of the unconscious mind, I kind of explain it in this thread: http://www.dreamviews.com/meditation...editation.html
To fall asleep while meditating is actually to fail, however I have turned that failure into a solution by making awareness and then the lucid realization of knowing that you have lost the awareness the anchor for my meditation in itself. And even if you fall asleep in the traditional sense the regaining of awareness is still the answer.

WILDing before going to sleep isn't black or white, so we can view it as "non-rewarding" although it all depends on what frame we come from. If you expect to get a lucid dream fast from it, you are having unrealistic expectations, however if you use the WILD process as a a new ritual for falling asleep in order to prime the mind to fall asleep with the intention of being awarenss and re-attaining awareness well then you are more likely to become aware of your dreams and if you one day manage to get through the whole WILD process and recieve a lucid dream that way, that's a nice bonus, and that's a more realistic frame. In a short-term perspective meditation or going to the gym just seem like boring frustrating work, but if you trust the process and the value that these activities have to give you'll slowly see yourself grow and change.

Peace!