Thread: Mindfulness

Something that may or may not be entirely true.. One thing for sure, it has changed my way of practicing Lucid Dreaming.

Mindfulness
"The practice of mindfulness involves being aware moment-to-moment, of one’s subjective conscious experience from a first-person perspective"

For most of my life, i have lived every day and almost every moment anticipating the future, whether it be a new TV show episode coming out tomorrow, or a game that's releasing a few years from now. I kept dwelling, dwelling on the past.. Thinking about what i should have done back then, or how fun it felt back then, and the likes of these thoughts. It was sooner or later apparent that i wasn't living my life properly, that i wasn't enjoying the moment i was in.

Such behaviour and way of thinking wasn't very likeable, but i didn't know any better.
I thought that lucid dreams were "rush experiences" because when the dream is over, all that's left is your memory of it. But i had forgotten that even life is the same way.. Every passing moment was my next memory. And what happened when i worried a lot or thought a lot about my future or my past? I stopped thinking about the present, the now... The past is nothing you can change, and the future is nothing you know for sure.. Worry too much about tomorrow's event and you'll barely have any time to prepare for it today.

You might say, what does this have to do with lucid dreaming?
Well, to my understanding, this has a lot to do with awareness. How do you become aware of something? by paying attention to it.. What happens when you are always thinking about this and that and not paying attention to what you want to be aware of? You end up only paying attention to your thoughts, only aware of that. It's true that you have a degree of awareness on your environment, but that awareness -for the most part- is very weak. Were you paying attention to your breath or body position while reading this? You can answer that by yourself now.

What happens when we spend more time paying attention to what is going on right now, and only providing a reasonable amount of attention to our thoughts? We become aware of what's happening in this moment while providing enough mental feedback. Whether or not maintaining mindfulness provides lucidity relies on the person, but the way i see it, it's a very effective way to become aware. Nevertheless, it's an interesting thing to try.. Being mindful is also what i believe to be the main way to stay in your lucid dreams longer and enjoy them more. It's also part of meditation, but i'm tackling it by itself in here.

Putting it all into practical use, try to be less absorbed with your thoughts, and more focused on your sounds, sights, sensations or feelings.. Aware of the now instead of the past or the coming future. If you slip your awareness away and go into that auto-pilot mode, gently place your attention back on the present moment while recognizing your thoughts, but not being sucked away by them.

Imagine that this mindfulness became more of a habit or a way of living.. For the people who were able to stay mindful throughout the day, it was almost always the case that in their dreams, they were either very aware, or lucid one or more times in one night. Of course, being frequently mindful is not that easy of a task, but when you succeed at it, the chances are that inducing lucidity is going to be a walk in the park. It's a fact that I've been aiming for lucidity for a long time, and what I brushed off as a stressful method of raising awareness, turned out to be the one I'm most comfortable doing. It's not that you have to remember to pay attention every 5 seconds, it's that you have to make yourself one with your present moment, even if you may sway a bit to that usual mode of low awareness with the present, just softly return to the present reality.

I won't claim to be a master lucid dreamer because of this since I just started incorporating it into my life, but I know for sure that with this, I will soon get the lucid dreams I've been longing to get.

This is all my personal opinion and thought and it could be wrong for all i care. Whatever it actually is, i believe this to be the key to having lucid and vivid dreams. Either way, i like this feeling of freedom of thought and enjoyment of the present.


Just a moment ago, you were reading all of that. Now it's a memory..