Learning by Teaching - The Protege Effect
I've been trying to improve my dream control lately. It has been interesting because while I understand it well in theory, putting it into practice brings me up against snags. Some things are easy to create one day, while others I can't alter a damn thing. I can always leave a dream at will, but I struggle to choose where I dream to next. When I lie down to sleep to practice, it's almost as if I can hear my ten-year-old self giving me their dream control advice: "You have to believe it, and know that it's true completely, not just think about what you want to do."
Easier said than done for most. I read many of the posts here about schemas, which eloquate quite well what's going on at a subconscious level, but then how do you actually access and change those schemas? Weirdly enough, I found through playing tabletop roleplays that gradually I started to be able to do things in dream I had struggled with before. I could never quite get teleporting to work, until over time one of my roleplay characters levelled up and learnt the ability "Misty Step". From then on, there was no blockage to teleporting in my dreams (except for the 30 yard range limit on the spell :P). Because my character was totally capable of teleporting, I'd altered my belief and now I could do it as well.
But that wasn't enough for everything I wanted to do. There were still blocks and limits, and I could hardly play roleplays all the time just to train myself. I started reading about learning styles to help maximise my study time for university, and through discussions with friends and classmates, we found that we all agreed that the best way to learn something was to teach or demonstrate it to somebody else.
It's called the Protege Effect, and utilising it has really helped me actualise my dream control much more effectively. Instead of spending each lucid dream dismayed at my own efforts, I turned it on its head. Entering the lucid dream, I quickly singled out a stable DC and told them that we were dreaming and that I was going to teach them all that I had learnt.
What followed was a high-spirited series of lucid dreams in which I was changing locales, taking characters through the void, manifesting new scenes and demonstrating the nature of dream physics. Because I felt pressured to demonstrate effectively to my young student, I was able to turn that into reality. There was no time for doubting, only doing.
I feel much more confident now, and I intend to keep utilising this method.
Annie Murphy Paul: Why Teaching Someone Else is the Best Way To Learn | TIME.com
Happy dreaming, everyone.
