LD technique & what works for me
I have been lucid dreaming for most of my life. I learned about it at a young age and quickly got to the point where I could lucid dream ten or twenty times a night, with control. I have had lucid dreams just about every day ever since. I dream vivid, lucid, dreams with control, the ability to summon objects, premonitions, and kept persistent themes such as a road trip or town including building detail for multiple nights (with prop integrity lasting for several years!). I sometimes find more detail in my dream world than in most real world places. I'm not too hip with the terminology so I might refer to some familiar ideas under different names. Use this as a rough guide in your journey from beginner to advanced LD. Here are some things that work for me.
Step 1: Dream journalling
I kept a dream journal by my bed. Every day I woke up and wrote in it. Sometimes it would be one sentence, sometimes it would be a paragraph. I did this every day. Within a week I was waking up and writing several paragraphs + pictures. After a month I switched from the pen/pad to my computer where I was typing up to five pages from my dream each morning. At that point it became a little absurd so I quite journalling for a while. Your time may vary, but don't quit early. My point is that your journal is the key to LD, not just for recall, but for connecting reality with the dream world in a unidirectional manner that will prime you to naturally become more aware of your dreams each day because you will be associating them with a specific place in the real world.
TIP: Use reality checks, they really help with realizing you are in a dream and will become the catalyst that plugs your subconscious into awareness during a dream.
NOTE: When you are beginning you may not remember anything when you wake up. Jot down a word, draw a picture, resembling anything about how you are feeling when you wake up. Even if it's just "tired". If you remember the slightest flash of what might have been a dream, write yourself a little note about it. Doesn't even have to make sense, and probably won't, for the first few days.
Step 1.1: Food, a piece of the puzzle
I had a weird habit of eating a bowl of cereal before I went to bed. Not sugary cereal, just something simple like cheerios, chex, wheaties, raisin bran, or shredded wheat. Seems to help getting into the right state of mind for proper dreaming. Other foods did not seem to have the same effect. If you enjoy cereal, do this, if not, try it, and if you don't like it, don't do it.
Step 2: Another piece of the puzzle is daylight
Sleeping in. I noticed my dreams became more and more ridiculous the more I would sleep in. Later I realized that sunlight plays a big role in keeping you aware during your dream. You are more awake than you are asleep while sleeping during the day, which is the state of mind you want to be in to make this whole process easier. If you can't naturally sleep in, try getting less and less sleep until you are exhausted all the time and then stay up late and sleep in until 11 or noon. If you wake up early just try and fall back asleep. If this isn't working for you, don't worry, read on.
Step 2.5: Simulating sleeping in
If you have to wake up, or wake up naturally at 10am (or whatever time). Set an alarm on your cellphone (or alarm clock if it can have multiple alarms) for 7am, 8am, and 9am (or subsequent hours prior to your desired waking hour). Wake up when the alarm goes off, turn the alarm off, and go back to bed. Don't think twice about it, expect to dream. This eventually triggers dreams like you wouldn't believe. When you finally wake is the time to write in the dream journal. Once you start remembering more of your dreams you'll realize how easy you can forget them as the dreams that follow your first wake will mostly be a blur even when recall from your final wake seems clear.
Step 3: Interpreting dreams
Your subconscious mind is a total freak-show, so be prepared to accept anything and everything that comes out of it. You will not understand the meaning behind a lot of the weirdness at first, it will not make sense, trust me. Just focus on the imagery and the feelings and leave it at that. When you are writing down your dreams you can look up certain symbols (dreammoods.com has a good dictionary to start with). Symbols are the most obvious memes in your dream.. fish, reindeer, a fallen tree, a glacier, stormy water, an elevator, etc. They can get more complicated. Your subconscious mind creates a symbol for certain feelings or sets of feelings and you don't perceive these during your normal conscious thoughts so getting used to them is a new experience. Just roll with the punches, eventually it will start to make sense to you with experience just like learning a foreign language. My point is that, don't become too focused on the meanings of the dreams, instead, let them happen and enjoy the show.
Step 3.5 : Fear
Your deepest fears will/can surface in your dreams because they exist in your mind and near LD territory. Nightmares can be terrifying but remember they cannot hurt you and that you don't actually have to worry about anything. I still get dreams where I am trapped in barns with very real spiders (I have an acute arachnophobia), these dreams can be terrifying. However scary they are, or however close the spiders get, they have never actually gotten me in my dream. Part of dealing with fear is acceptance. Just accept and move on and eventually because you don't associate your fear with any kind of response, you will find that it is not going to be a problem. Eventually you'll gain control of it. Then when you arrive at it in your dream, your dream will automatically change course and continue on without a problem. If you wake up from a nightmare just concentrate on relaxing and forgetting about it. It is important to have a handle on this, as it is part of the rocks you will navigate around when sailing through the ocean of your dreams.
Step 4: Going lucid
At this point your dreams should be getting very vivid, hopefully jaw-dropping vivid. You are sort of lucid dreaming. To go lucid, you must learn to maintain a state of mind that enables you to "watch" your dream as if you were playing a movie. Then you can recognize you are watching your dream, while you are dreaming, without waking up or interrupting the dream. Do this until it is a comfortable state. Your thoughts during perception of the dream will start to get mixed in with the dream itself and you will discover that you can every so slightly steer the direction of your dreams. This is not control. It's just a simple state of awareness. Hone in on this ability, learn to hold yourself here. It enables you to have lucid dreams without being woken up. I have had dreams where I fell out of the sky, most people get scared and wake up before they hit, I have hit the ground and perceived the impact, only to get up and continue the dream. Strange, but part of the power of lucid dreaming. After this point the quality of your dreams will skyrocket.
TIP: How do you know if you are lucid dreaming? You will start watching your dream and have a moment of awareness, and your senses and perception will become entangled in your dream. When you awaken later you will vividly remember every one of thousands of details from the dream and it will stay with you throughout the week as if it was a real memory. You should remember at least one point during the dream where you were actually there (involves mind, body, spirit, time, feeling, emotion, all embodied into a moment focused near a particular spot in the dream where you obtained awareness) and made a decision that influenced the direction of the dream.
NOTE: This is a state similar to deep meditation. If you meditate during the day, using your meditation to take yourself deep into your subconscious (step by step, like going down a series of escalators or a flight of stairs into the deep basements of your subconscious and imagine all the thoughts that reside there). This will help you connect with your subconscious and maintain a state of mind while you are there. Then while you are dreaming not only will you be aware of your dreams but you will have presence and experience emotions and feelings in a state similar to tripping on hallucinogenic drugs where you can kind of control it but you don't totally know what is going on and you can't really escape from it either...seems kind of super-real.
Step 5: Obtaining full control
This comes with practice. You want to focus on realizing that you are in your dream, and waking up in your dream, but not waking up in real life. Sometimes it can happen automatically and you will simply notice you are awake inside of your dream. You are going to need to have a good handle on meditation for dream control because your thoughts are fragile and can easily be disturbed...the meditation teaches you to tread very lightly in your mind so that you can dream, perceive all of your regular emotions and senses, continue to dream without waking up, and also choose and control the events taking place during the dream. Obviously there is a lot of presence of mind here and the ability to focus is crucial because you will be juggling multiple paradigms at once. If you need to, get resources for improving your meditation/focus.
You will eventually get to the point where your senses will become fully available to you in your dream and will be as vivid as anything that is ever in your short term memory! (stare at something for a couple minutes and then close your eyes and visualize what you just saw, look around at it) You must realize that you are ultimately in control of what elements comprise your dream. Your brain creates your dream based on things stored in it's memory, so you can bring real life things into your reality during your dream and "play" with them, they will feel and act as real as you remember (sometimes more so than you remembered, the untapped power of our subconscious mind is astonishing).
The meditation will enable you to hold these thoughts together in a way that doesn't wake you up or surrender your control over the objects.
EXAMPLES: I have had dreams where I was able to choose vehicles (or objects such as dinosaurs, swimming pools, and a variety of other things) I wanted to drive (or manipulate), manifest them in my garage (or wherever), drive them to different places, park them, modify them with regular shop tools and spare parts, and come back to them years later during another dream to find them right where I left them.... which is usually wherever in my mind they belong (driveway, garage, yard, particular parking lot, etc)
I have had dreams where I was able to turn an empty trash bag into a flying device capable of taking my body in any direction I desired over the familiar terrain of the neighbourhood I grew up in.
I've had dreams where I was able to see and touch things as real as life, read text off of labels, and even move them with my mind like telekinesis and to then wake up and have the vivid memory of the dream stay with me for weeks, even years.
I've also had several dreams per night that are complicated enough to produce ten pages or more of description. I'll spare you the details.
NOTE: The biggest step in LD control is realizing that you are in control during your dream. The amount of control you desire is up to the amount of self-discipline you have over your own thoughts which is a strength you can only exercise through meditation, balance, and focus. This will also help you immensely in other areas of your life.
Step 6 : Interactive LD
This is control with the element of surprise. I invented this concept because after years of lucid dreaming I found it was too easy and too predictable to just know what I was going to dream about or how I was going to control it. Interactive control is harnessing the power of passive lucid dreaming together with the power of active control. This is where you have a normal dream in passive lucid (movie watching) mode and then create a level of desired interaction so that you are almost playing and creating a video game inside your mind. Where some things follow physical laws and other things don't, you have the choice to switch in and out of lucid mode and into what I can call "edit" mode that lets you change some aspect and carry on with a dream in a more desirable way so that you can control your dream and enjoy the unpredictable outcomes of regular vivid dreaming at the same time. Imagine watching a movie and when you got to a certain part you didn't like you could just alter it for the better and then continue the enjoyment of watching the movie not knowing what will happen next.
For example, I found myself dreaming the other night that I was inside of a small house that I had rented and accepted it at first to be whatever my brain had created for me which ended up being such a small room with such a small doorway that I couldn't even fit my body out of it. (persistence of physical object dimension tends to come along with lucid dreaming) I had to literally realize that this wasn't going to work, pause the other parts of the dream (it was raining, so the rain stopped) and then essentially 'learn' a new door that was slightly larger and just allowed me to weasel my way out of. Once outside, I started the rain back up and then continued with my dream, which went on with me exploring the outside of the house area, assessing outdoor objects, and then eventually continuing my dream further which went down a long winded scenario explaining in detail why I had rented such a strange house and elaborate scenarios in my mind involving yelling at my landlord. I woke up naturally and literally had a realization that it wasn't real, that I didn't actually live in the very tiny house, and that I didn't have to call my landlord and complain. I'm leaving out a ton of details. Dreams can be surprisingly vivid, learn to go with the flow as if it was a fruit of novelty.
Step 7 : Continuing dreams
It is possible to continue a good dream the next night from wherever you left off. Just tell your mind each time you arrive at the thought of dreaming that you will continue to dream that same dream. When you go to sleep, think about the dream from the night before, and focus on the end of it being the start of your new dream. Remember how much you enjoyed the dream and you should just slip back into it. This is simple, and has worked for me on multiple occasions.
Conclusion
I hope this helps with your journey into the dream world. It is the undiscovered mecca inside your mind and will make your boring day job a lot more tolerable. It is the tip of an iceberg.
NOTE: How all of this applies to you over the years will differ...I no longer have to write down my dreams, I can just remember them. I don't have to do reality checks anymore either. Every day I set one alarm on my phone for the hour before I want to wake up, and one alarm for the hour I want to wake up... that alone is enough to trigger 3-5 crazy lucid adventures each morning which usually fuel me with enough excitement to hold me over for the rest of the day. This is a big part of how I have achieved incredible happiness in my life.
Sweet dreams :P
