Hi all, lately I've been busy coming up with ideas on how to bring about lucidity within a dream. I would like to share and explain a few exercises and ideas here....
Awake while sleeping and Sleeping while awake
Consciousness is limited, not by nature, but by your own beliefs and practice... The following exercises will acquaint you with different feelings of consciousness that you are not familiar with. Your consciousness itself will have a different feel as the exercises are done, which may result in lucidity.
:arrow: One night as you're falling asleep you may try telling yourself that you will pretend you are awake while asleep. Suggest that instead of falling asleep, you will come into another kind of wakefulness. Try to imagine that you are awake when you sleep.
:arrow: On other occasions when you go to bed, lie down and settle yourself, but as you fall asleep imagine that you are awakening the next morning.
:arrow: Sometime during your waking life, imagine that your present experience of the moment is a dream, and is highly symbolic. Then try to interpret it as such.
Who are the people? What do they represent? If that experience were a dream, what would it mean? And into what kind of waking life would you rise in the morning?
The different modes of consciousness with which I hope to acquaint you with are not alien. They are quite native, in dream states, and are always present as alternatives beneath usual awareness. This is why lucidity may trigger as you become aware of them.
Becoming familiar with dream consciousness
As a child, you were more creative and in touch with your dreams, and probably experienced Lucid Dreaming on a regular basis. Creativity implies abandon within a framework that is accepted for itself, and itself only.
During your waking hours you can playfully make up a dream for yourself, and then playfully interpret it without worrying about implications, but for itself only, you will unwittingly touch upon the nature of your own nightly dreaming. Your regular dreams and your 'manufactured' ones will have much in common, and the process of manufacturing dreams will acquaint you with the alterations of consciousness that to a greater degree happen nightly. I think this is an excellent exercise which can be particularly beneficial for those who have a too-rigid mental framework as well.
I think the playfulness and creativity of dreams are vastly underrated in most dream studies. When you try to explore the psyche in deadly seriousness, it will always escape you. Your dreams can be interpreted as dramas, perhaps, but never as diagrams.
Try to playfully enter that reality imaginatively, and allow your own waking consciousness to rise into a freer kind of interpretation of events, in which energy is not bounded by space, time, or limitations. In other words become familiar with the process of dreams and create your own consciously but creatively and playfully like a child so that both will have much in common and both can be associated with awareness/consciousness = lucidity.
That's all for now, I may add more later....
:okbyenow:
