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Disclaimer: This is a guide for my own personal technique that may not be as viabl. It's how I learned to lucid dream originally (at around 10 years old). I've had hundreds if not thousands of lucid dreams from it over the course of 20+ years. It remains my favorite and most reliable technique personally, but I can't promise it will work for others. Take it with a grain of salt.

For those wanting a universally practiced technique, I recommend vanilla WILD or MILD.

Anyway...

Dream Brain Mimicking is a way that I personally like to initiate lucid dreams from the waking state (similar to WILD). It works by mimicking the same areas of your brain that are active during dreams, allowing you to seamlessly transition from waking to conscious sleep without the usual WILD anchors.
Note: Technically, the dream story you come up is your anchor, but you don't have to think about it that way.

This guide will explain the mindset for what I like to call "dream brain", what kinds of thoughts you can engage in to encourage dream brain, the mindset you want to cultivate for dreaming, and how you may feel in altered states.

If you're already familiar with the feeling of dreaming, I highly recommend you embrace your own personal experiences as a frame of reference in addition to the tips outlined here, as this is what Dream Brain Mimicking is all about! The more you emulate your own dreaming mindset, the better.

Optional Reading
My WILD guide can be found here if you want a more thorough understanding of vanilla WILD: https://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/ner...d-guide-94340/).
MILD can also (optionally) be incorporated into Dream Brain Mimicking for more powerful effects. Here's a good MILD guide: https://skyfalldreams.net/guides/skyfalls-mild-guide/

Moving right along!


Choose a Setting
As you lay in bed, choose a setting that you would like to start with. It can be related to your daily life, your dreams, or be something entirely new.

If you want the most potent option, choose a setting that includes dream signs that will continuously trigger and reinforce your lucidity and/or a setting of a dream you had previously. For example, a mythical fantasy world with dragons and cities in the sky will remind you that you must be dreaming. If you already dreamed of this mythical place before, even better! Any dream settings you regularly get lucid in are the best if your only goal is lucidity.

The setting you choose can always be changed later as the dream progresses, so it's not set in stone. The important thing is that it will eventually turn into a dream, so ideally pick something you want to dream about. The more motivated you are, the better. What's something you've always wanted to do?

You can also connect settings together. If you have a previous dream setting that you're always lucid in, you can create a path from that location to another setting for a dream you want (maybe it's connected by an alleyway or a portal) and go from there.

I'm going to continue this guide with an underwater city setting for demonstration. For this, you could start in the ocean already, or start above the water and dive in.


Starting Your Dream
Imagine yourself beginning the dream. If you picked the underwater city setting for example, imagine yourself flying above the ocean under a bright blue cloudless sky. See the mountains in the distance and circle downward as you dive. Feel the current and hear the water's surface breaking as you plunge right in!

Fully immerse yourself in the sensations of swimming downward towards an underwater city as a rush of bubbles trails up behind you. The closer you get, the more details you can see of the city below as it comes into view. You are immersed in this real time experience.

Take Your Time
There's no rush to this process. Feel free to take your time and be immersed with any or all of your senses. You can imagine breathing underwater in any way you want, whether you have gills or if it feels just like breathing air.

Does the seawater taste salty? Look at all of the color and details, bubbles, light, and darkness. Do you see any fish swimming by? Try looking around from different angles and perspectives. Look up and see the sunlight coming through the surface above. Then, as you look back down, get a view of the underwater cityscape and how the streets were once laid out by some lunatic who can't design a city, now in a serene murky ruin. Set the tone! Fill your world with personality and backstory, as if it has a real history. And what are you looking to accomplish? Why are you here again?

Note: If you have aphantasia, feel free to skip the visuals and work with other senses. The important thing is your immersion with your dream, not the specific details of it.

How to Be Immersed
Don't worry about using all of your senses or doing specific step-by-step tasks. There is absolutely no checklist to follow. The goal of this practice is to be fully immersed and invested in your unbridled inclinations. Be freely driven by your most primal and natural emotions. Follow your gut instinct, do what flows naturally (as opposed to complex decision-making and logical thinking). This is how we usually engage in dreams. It's a light, passive way of thinking. Like a flowing stream of though

Show, don't tell; do, don't think!
Although it may sound contradictory to lucid dreaming, part of immersion means not having constant meta awareness of what you're doing. In other words, put yourself in the mindset of actually being there in the moment, rather than being highly aware that you're laying in bed thinking about it. Engage the experience of the dream, not just thinking about the dream. Engage thoughts like "I am lucid now, this is a dream." and "I'm exploring! What's over there?!" instead of things like "Oh. Did I do that right for the technique?" or "Uh oh, did I use my sense of taste yet?"

Engage with your environment as it comes, rather than going through a checklist of tasks. Again, "I need to focus on this or that" isn't the right mindset. You want to engage in the environment in your mind as if it's real and right there in front of you. Allow yourself to forget your current physical position in bed—you're not laying in bed doing a lucid dreaming technique. Rather, you are experiencing this dream in real time. The thoughts in your mind are more than just thoughts. They are your direct reality.

It's okay if you don't do this perfectly. If you have to scratch an itch, move around, or your thoughts veer off track, that's fine. Don't worry about it! I do this constantly and it doesn't interfere when I don't draw attention to it.

Plan Ahead
If there are very specific things you want to do, I recommend making plans for your goals ahead of time rather than trying to sort it all out in the moment—particularly for more complicated ideas that you're not sure of. For example, if you want to make up a plot about a sea dragon living in the heart of the city and what it's doing there, make some notes about it before you start. You could still have this sea dragon show up without planning, and improvise what it's doing, but if there's anything you want special control over, do that ahead of time.

Same goes for dreams. Incubate anything you really to go a particular way ahead of time so you don't get caught up in complicated plot structures in the moment—because most of the time when you're dreaming, you're not going to be making tons of complicated plot decisions. Dreams tend to form naturally and are influenced by our intentions, associations, free-flowing thoughts, and natural expectations—rather than heavy logical thinking and scheming.

So I recommend you do your fancy logic brain stuff beforehand for best results. It's not that you can't do this in dreams, it's just that we tend to do it less, and doing it less makes this technique easier to fall asleep to. We are, after all, trying to fall asleep. Easy free-forming thoughts you can fall asleep to is the goal.

Engage Your Passion
Dreams that motivate you on a personal level can be highly effective. If possible, pick something that you can easily get lost in while staying immersed, and invest your time in without it feeling like a chore. Feel free to follow your instincts and desires. Do the things you're most motivated to do.

Things that are currently pressing you in waking life are great candidates for dream material, too. For example, if you have a fictional crush you're interested in, you can make them a character in your dream. Tie what you know about the character into the story. For example, if the character is an author, the dream version of this character could have written about this underwater city and joined you to learn more about it for their research. Or you can shake things up a bit—maybe this character has a book that allows their writings to become reality, which can be a dream control tool for the both of you.

Perspective
Don't feel like you need to maintain a first person perspective for the sake of immersion. Overthinking this is immersion-breaking and not worth doing. Third person perspectiive is fine to have! Dreams often switch between perspectives randomly anyway, often without us even noticing because we're so immersed in the contents of the dream (which is what you want to emulate).

Follow Your Natural Schemas
If you're familiar with schema for dream control, you know that personal associations are involved in dream formation. If you see a cat, it will be more likely to meow than to bark like a dog, because you associate cats with meowing (unless there's some specific reason it would bark instead). This dream doesn't have to follow the rules of reality, but it should generally follow the personal way you associate concepts, because your dreams also form in this way. There's a lot of schemas that many people universally share (like cats meowing and dogs barking). Other schemas may be cultural, and then there's personal schemas. For example, if I see a white cat, I might automatically expect it to be a male with one eye, because I had a male white cat with one eye growing up. For someone else, a white cat may be more likely to have other attributes since having a one-eyed male cat is a highly specific experience for me and not others.

You don't have to overthink this though. Schematic associations that you have already will come automatically without you even having to think about them. It's the way dreams are formed instantaneously without the need to think about it, and waking thoughts will do the same when we let them flow naturally. It's a good idea to let your mind do what it does naturally, even if it doesn't always make sense, rather than trying to narrate, drive, and control every little detail.

Your Dreams "Want" to Process Your Experiences
An important underlying fundamental behind all of this is that your mind "wants" to process something when you go to sleep. You have dreams about your past experiences, especially the more recent experiences you've had. If you went to a family gathering the night before, you're more likely to have dreams about it. We even have dreams about media we've recently consumed. The things that are most immersive and "important" to are often the things you dream about. It's your brain's way of processing and storing memories. Dream Brain Mimicking takes advantage of this natural processing by "feeding" your mind an experience you want to process in your dreams. The "mimicked" dream you create in your mind becomes the thing your brain thinks you need to be dreaming about. This is why an immersive approach with personally impactful themes that tie into other memories works really well.

Dream Control
With the above said, you can absolutely control the dream and I recommend doing so if you don't like something or if you want to adjust how the story unfolds. You can totally backtrack and start over when it's necessary to fix unpleasant things. Despite everything this guide has explained so far, you absolutely can make decisions and change things as needed. It's just not a majority of what you should be doing.

I recommend using dream control methods that you would employ in real dreams for making changes (not required, but it generally works better this way).
Here's a guide on dream control basics: https://www.enter-the-mist.org/post/...-part-1-schema
And another guide for schema: https://www.dreamviews.com/dream-con...ur-dreams.html

There are multiple ways you can control dreams:
- Redirect your attention.
- Switch out unwanted schemas for wanted schemas.
- Develop new schemas/expectations.

For example, you may associate being underwater with saltwater. If you don't like the taste of salt, you can change this in different ways:
- Stop paying attention to the taste. Unlike waking reality, dreams depend on your attention. If you thoroughly ignore and forget about something, it ceases to exist completely.
- Change it to a different taste that follows a another schema. For example, maybe it has an algea flavor. Kinda nasty though, redirection may have a more desirable outcome in this case lol.
- Create a new schema such as imagining that this is a magical ocean that tastes like cotton candy. This can have transcending effects on your entire story and you may need to change other things about your surroundings to reinforce it. This is more of a drastic change that I don't recommend most of the time, but absolutely recommend it to fix particularly unpleasant trains of thought.

Simply shifting your attention off of the undesired experience is often the best route. Take the path of least resistance for the little things. Save the schema-changes and new schemas for more important things or for when shifting attention doesn't work.

Strengthening Associations Through Repetition
The more consistent you are and use repetition for the things you want, the more it will become a part of your real dreams on a consistent basis. For example, if you give yourself gills in this dream every day for a week of practice, you will be much more likely to always have gills in your dreams when swimming and you may even unconsciously develop an association between the feeling of having gills and being lucid in dreams. Through repetition, gills can become your default in swimming dreams and even a trigger for lucidity.

You may also have more swimming dreams in general, lucid or nonlucid, because of the repetition.

Dreams are often formed through associations and repetitions. Be mindful of the reality you're creating for yourself. I recommend not botheringt with nightmarish or unpleasant things. Turn your attention off of things you don't want, and change them with schema if they're particularly ingrained (sometimes deeply ingrained connections require more repetition of new associations to fix).

Staying on Track
It's normal for the mind to wander, especially while falling asleep. Dream Brain Mimicking can help you stay on track because of its dreamlike mindset, but if you find yourself losing track, keep practicing! You can also hop on your new train of thought and create a whole new dream from it, alternatively.

It helps greatly to use a dream story that you can easily and comfortably follow as you fall asleep. Some things may be easier to stay on track with than others. The more enjoyable and low effort, the better. The goal is to fall asleep consciously using passive awareness (aka WILD technique), so unlike regular story creation, skip the complex decision-making, boring parts, complicated plot structures, and overfocus. For example, sometimes I just skip character dialogue altogether and assume they conveyed something without deciding every word spoken. Detailed dialogue is boring to me. I just assume they conveyed the intended meaning without worrying about the details.

There are no specific details that you must follow. You can skip anything that doesn't interest you. Dreams are oftewn nonsensinsical like this, but they make sense to you, the dreamer, in some way. That's all that matters. This is a dream process rather than a final draft scripting process. The only audience is you. Allow your mind to flow freely on its own, like a dream, even if it's not always logical, and have fun!

Easy Thinking
Most of my success with Dream Brain Mimicking comes from things that are easy to think about. Low effort is ideal. Feel free to be lazy and make half-baked stories. You're going to sleep doing this so it need not be work! When you get the ball rolling on a story narrative, you will start to (eventually) fall asleep consciously because you're immersed, not because you're trying hard to perform a task. The story flows and wanders sometimes nonsensically like a dream, but it'a a dream you're passively following.

Doing this all cultivates a dreaming mindset before you fall asleep. You start the dream when you're awake, you encourage dream-like thought patterns, and work with your mind (instead of against it) to enter a real dream that you can stay engaged in. This will not only give you lucid dreams, but train you to have longer dreams with stable story narratives and can also be used for MILD and incubation of specific dream elements.

The Final Transition
You may or may not notice when the dream becomes real. Sometimes I experience hypnagogia with this technique (odd sensations like buzzing or tingling), but usually not. If you do experience anything like that, keep engaging in your dream. The transition can often appear as if the scene becomes more vivid (gradually), you may encounter a doorway or portal of some kind, or you may not notice any transition at all. Experiences can vary, but eventually you'll wind up fully asleep in the dream.

Final Note
Just a heads up that you can also get DILDs from this technique, not just WILDs. Sometimes if you fall asleep unconsciously, you end up back in your intended story lucid dreaming anyway later in the night.

Happy dreaming!

non-dream dream semi-lucid lucid FA / AP

Attending my guru's teachings in some resort somewhere. The architecture of the place kinda reminds me parts of Greece or Turkey, with white buildings in rammed earth. I am taken to my dorm, which is a really bizarre very narrow room with shelves sticking out of the wall that are supposed to be sort of bunk beds, but with no stairs to climb up and no guard rails to prevent falling during sleep. Besides that, they are really high up, some are like 2 or 3 meters high and I wonder how people get up there, or how they come down if they need to pee at night. The only way is using someone else's bed as steps to go up and down.
I then go back out to check the registration table for the event and it is a bit chaotic with people arriving and making a lot of noise. I spot my teacher arriving. I look absolutely exhausted and don't want him to see my face so I kind pull my hair to cover my face. I think he spots me anyway and he looks puzzled with my hairdo. I look like a mix of a sexy mysterious gal and a crazy lunatic lady.
I return to my dorm to refresh and change clothing, so I take my travel bag to the bathroom with me. As I prepare to shower, I retrieve my hygiene products from my bag, but I hold it in the air over the toilet, which has no lid, and the unthinkable happens: my bag is open and all my clothes fall into the toilet. For some reason they don't just stay there, the water is running a little bit, so the clothes are sucked into the pipes. In despair I try to retrieve them, and I need to get deeper and deeper into the toilet bowl until I get my last clothing item from inside the drainage pipe, my whole arm inside it. I feel disgusted and completely defeated that I have nothing to wear that didn't fell inside the toilet.