DrTechnical's Lucidity Techniques

[DrTechnical]

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.

[Suby]

This sounds brilliant! Thanks for the post. I am going to start meditating also during all this free time I have in summer.

[Jepster]

I don't know if I will try all the things, but that meditating thing seems good. That I will try when i have time.. maybe like, doing it for an hour of half an hour. just 2-3 hours before going to sleep

[Flounder]

What is the difference between Salvia Divinorum A and plain Salvia Divinorum Extract?

[DrTechnical]

Salvinorin A is the pyscho active ingredient in Salvia. I use the terms Salvinorin A and Salvia somewhat interchangeably.

[TalkingHead]

Good post. I do plan on trying the salvia the next time I hit a wall with my "pure" techniques. Just a question in case I it works very well. Is this something that is likely to have any kind of side effects/negative brain effects if used every single night?

[DrTechnical]

I cannot answer your question in an accurate manner as I am neither a biologist or chemist. I can offer a few general comments. The effects of Salvia are very fleeting - with a return back to baseline within an hour, tops. I personally have never noticed any type of hang-over effect or overall dulling of the mind. Back in my college days, I would smoke Pot with some regularity. I hate to say this (sorry people who like to get high) but pot definately has a negative effect on brainpower. The handful of times I did more traditional hallucinagins such as LSD or shrooms - I certainly noticed what one might call after affets for some days later. So I have found salvia to be much more benign in this regard. But little is known of the long term effects.

[TalkingHead]

The effects of Salvia are very fleeting - with a return back to baseline within an hour, tops. Thanks for the ebook. So when do you personally ingest the Salvia, and by what means? I tried chewing and smoking it once before without major effects. Capsules? I've also heard of something like "Salvia x10" on web shaman. Maybe I roll a joint of that and smoke it when I wake up in the middle of the night!?

[TalkingHead]

Also, on Iamshaman.com where they have salvia extract x10 they say that this is not for human consumption, only incense. Is this really for human consumption? What do you think: http://www.iamshaman.com/eshop/10Bro...37;20Divinorum

[DrTechnical]

They have to say "not for human consumption" for legal reasons. I suspect there's not a single person using it for incense. Many people have trouble getting a good effect from Salvia. To answer your first question, I find the time of day doesn't matter so much - though an hour before you go to bed would seem a reasonable strategy. As always, my advice is to go to www.sagewisdom.org. Read the users guide and read the link related to "getting effects from smoked salvia". I use a standardized 20X extract that's gauranteed to have 72 mg of salvinorin A per gram of fortified leaf material. This is plenty enough to have a breakthrough effect on one big hit. Smoking bad product or smoking it like pot will not yield results. You need to take a lot in very quickly as your body metabolizes it very quickly. PM me if you want to know where I have purched from - as I tend to stay clear of anything which might be deemed an advertisement in the general postings.

[TalkingHead]

Thanks for all the help so far... I already have theta binaural beats that I downloaded. I'm not 100% sure that they are authentic though. I once heard that real binaural beats can only be heard with BOTH headphones on at the same time. To test if this is true the next time your tuning in, could you listen through only one ear and let us know if you hear anything?

[DrTechnical]

An interesting question. Let's take theta waves. If I recall the definition properly, that's 4-7 Hz. Your inner ear does not respond to anything less than about 20 Hz. The idea behind binuaral beats is to introduce for example a 100 Hz signal R and 104 Hz signal L. You can hear these signals even with one ear. BUT, your brain responds to the difference in frequency. Essentially, if you do the math, when you combine these sinusoids you get a signal with frequency components between 100 and 104 Hz but with a 4 Hz amplitude modulation. Your brain entrains to this low frequency amplitude modulation. It's that simple.