Thread: DrTechnical's Lucidity Techniques

Since I rekindled my interest in Lucid Dreaming last May, I have had very good success at getting lucid, as well
as reasonable success in dream control (though I have much room for improvement here).

My first stab at LDing was about 10 years ago. I had focused mostly on the dreamsign and reality check type methods.
I had a few lucids.

In the last year, I have broadened my approach and found a set of methods that work well for me. I've had nearly
80 lucids in the last 11 months, three a few nights ago. I felt compelled to share my suggestions with the readers. The other
purpose of this informal tutorial is to introduce people to Tibetan Dream Yoga. I know there was a tutorial on this
recently which was well recieved. I think the authors approach was to take the essence of dream yoga and westernize
it. My brief write up will be a little more traditional.

DrTechnical's suggestions to induce lucidity:

1) Meditate. My suggestion is to do this lying on your back with a good pair of headphones and any one of the
brainsuites CD's that have theta or alpha based binaural beats. Focus on quieting your mind. Your eyes should be
closed but you can concentrate on an image, a letter - what have you. This helps you to practice focus in a brain state
that is closer to the dream state than your wakeful Beta state. In principle, this will facilitate better focus in the
typically "confused" dream state. If you're sleep walking through life - not paying attention to what's going on around
you - your ability to become lucid in dreams will be impacted. Train the mind to focus and allow that to help you maintain
a high level of lucidity during the day.

2) Practice reflecting on the fact that wakeful reality and dream reality are equivelant. You should constantly reflect
on the dream like nature of wakeful reality. Try to convince yourself that the actions you're taking (pouring a cup of coffee,
calling a friend on the phone, etc ...) are insubstantial and projections of the mind. Simply making these reflections seems to
carry into my dreams permitting me to identify miscellaneous unreasonable aspects of my dreams and hence become lucid.
If you have trouble convincing yourself of this consider the following:

- One can argue that the phone your calling your friend on is insubstantial, like a dream. Break off a piece of the phone. Sort out
the molecules. Break them down to protons, electrons, neutrons. Break them down further into subatomic particles. What do you get
when you're done? Energy. That's the true nature of the phone. It's insubstantial - much like a dream.
- Consider a dream memory for two days ago, and a wakeful memory from two days ago. What's left? Nothing - just memories, they're
equivalent.
- If you think this wakeful reality is real, ask yourself how sure you are of this? After all, most people have dreams, and without
being lucid, they're engulfed in a delusional confused state which is not reality at all. What makes you think that wakeful reality
is the true nature of your mind?

3) Practice minimization of strong emotional reactions to positive or negative events during the day. If you have strong emotional
reactions in dreams, you are that much more likely to get absorbed into the confused story line of the dream. Stay even keel throughout
the day.

4) The Dream yoga techniques suggest meditation after different phases of waking up at night. I think you can keep this simple. Employ
wake back to bed to accomplish the same thing. Sleep 5 hours, stay up for a while and go back to bed. This re-establishes good
conscious awareness that is likely to intersect with a REM period quickly uppon falling back to sleep. This is a very powerful method
in and of itself to maximize the likelihood of a LD.

5) Affirm your intention to have a lucid dream before going back to bed.

6) Last and certainly not least, for those who are more experimental, Salvinorin A works wonders. I am convinced of this. I have two theories
on this matter:

- First, if you can remain lucid under the influence of Salvinorin A, your ability to get or remain lucid in dream should increase (consider
this a practice technique for lucidity in visionary state, dreams being one such state).
- The other theory I have is that under the right conditions, Salvinorin A helps one experience the true nature of the human mind. Unless you've
had the experience you would not understand. But in the right dose, one can experience a state of awareness that is true mental energy, devoid
of physical perspective or anything else attached to this world or reality we're in. I quess my claim here is that it's a short cut (perhaps) to
the awareness of true nature that Tibetan Monks strive to achieve via a lifetime of meditation, dream and sleep yoga, etc ... Maybe it's
not exactly the same - but I suspect there's a relation.