The incredible helpfulness of auto-suggestion
Note: This is mainly aimed at beginners and those still not able to get regular LDs – although anyone feel free to add any thoughts or feedback. It’s all been said before but it still seems to be fairly underrated.
Anyway, throughout my lucid dreaming career, from first learning about the art (as I would call it) right through the incredibly difficult 'newbie' stages and on to the intermediate-advanced level that I would consider myself to be at now, I have tried all of the techniques and little tricks that I could find on dreamviews to discover which one would work for me most frequently, or pose as the easiest, or which would get me out of a dry patch. I can see with much certainty that this seems to be a case of trial and error, as due to the neurotic nature of dreaming everyone will find that their experiences and triggers will be infinitely different to the next person. I have, however, always used a trick that is just as uncommonly known as lucid dreaming itself, but probably used if not consciously then unconsciously by most people here to increase their chances of inducing a lucid dream or astral projection. For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, it is autosuggestion.
Autosuggestion basically means repeating a message to yourself, talking to yourself or seeing an image or some words in your head when you visualize to convince your mind of it’s truthiness. Because we are a product of the society and culture that we grew up in, our mind will either accept a notion or reject it based on our previous experiences. This might be that you have already had a bad experience related to what you are thinking about, you have heard about a bad experience, or it just sounds too hard based on the information you know to be true at the time. A common example: When you first heard about lucid dreaming, you probably though it was a fantasy and could not be done. Then you joined this forum and learnt that it could be done. When you first tried it, however, 9/10 of you would have failed to have a lucid dream. Why? Because your mind is not convinced that it is possible!
The most valuable tool you can have in your lucid dreaming toolkit is telling yourself that you can do it, and visualizing yourself already doing it. Dreaming is essentially all in your head, therefore it controls how often you enter into a lucid dream. To convince it that you can do this is a huge step forward, especially for those new to dreaming.
Listed below are a few auto-suggestion related things to try that are guaranteed to increase both the regularity of LDs as well as the length and clarity.
• Try to isolate the feeling of being in a lucid dream, of for those who haven’t yet had one, use that feeling that you get when writing in your dream journal. For me it’s kind of like being in a fantasy world, and the same as the feeling I get when something really cool happens to me, so basically that feeling of pure joy. It’s an eerie background feeling for others. Whatever it is, find it and think about it often. This has the same purpose as keeping a dream journal – to get your mind used to the feeling of dreaming.
• Before bed, tell yourself over and over positive phrases like ‘I will have a lucid dream tonight’ or ‘I will do a reality check in my dreams tonight’. If it works for you, pretend that you are already having plenty of LDs. ‘I am a lucid dreaming master’, or ‘I have three lucid dreams every night’ are my favourites.
• Visualise yourself in a room sitting at a table writing on a piece of paper a phrase like the ones described above. Try as hard as you can to keep yourself in the environment. If you are having trouble, de-focus on everything except for the paper and the pen. Feel the words as you write them.
• During the day initiate the feeling of knowing that some event is taking place later in the day. For example when you think about the rest of your day and you have a class on in a few hours, that class will pop into your head as a small dot point in your mind. This is hard to describe. The idea is to convince yourself that your timetable will include a lucid dream during the night, every night, and when you think about what you have on for the day that will have the same effect as things that are really happening, like a class or meeting someone for coffee.
• Lastly, reality checks are VERY USEFUL. To increase their usefulness, use the dream feeling as described earlier when doing these to simulate the possible feeling of being in a dream.
As a reminder, keep trying new techniques, either if you still haven’t found one that works well or even if you already have. I am a huge advocate of keeping an open mind. It is similar to travelling to a foreign country – you will have much more fun if you keep a variety, try new things and push the boundaries.
So that’s it for now, this is already a very long post. Feedback and opinions welcome. Like I said I know all of this has been described before but here is my take on it!
Goodnight all
