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Can anyone back me up on this? In the few lucid dreaming books I have read, an 'exercise' is to imagine (durring the day) that you are in a LD, and doing whatever you want. Like imagining you are flying. I find it strange that it had been mentioned in every LD book I read (again, I have only read like 4) but I have yet to see it here, I don't know, maybe I have overlooked something. If so, I am sorry. But if not, can I get someone to call me on it being a legit LD exercise?
I'm sure it could be. Keeping your mind on lucid dreaming throughout the day helps, but only if you do other things too. Dream Journals are good for more than just recall, they help you keep that "Dream feeling" with you longer in the day and when you're imagining about lucid dreaming, you'll more likely have that feeling with you, so when you reality check it will be more effective.
however, when I first learned about lucid dreaming, I daydreamed about it all the time and it still took me forever to get my first LD. That's just me, but I'm saying that doing this alone shouldn't work as a technique, it should only be able to help.
I'm not at all educated in this area... but I do know there is a practice called "Dream Yoga". I'm not exactly sure if its practiced to help with Lucid Dreaming, but I do know it is practiced by a few. Basically, you just live your life as if you are in a dream. I seem to remember reading that if you always consider yourself dreaming while awake, you'll also begin to consider yourself dreaming while.. dreaming. So I can see how it would assist in becoming lucid.
I do this all the time. Mostly after doing reality checks, I kind of stop and say "Well if this WAS a dream, what would I do? Which of my dream goals could be accomplished? Are there nearby doors/windows/mirrors that I can use to get around the dream?" I also do this to practice dream control, especially if I'm bored and walking or something. I start to visualize, if I became lucid right now, what's something impossible I could do? I'll then imagine flipping over cars, or summoning a person or object... things of that nature.
I think especially the benefits of this are that it helps you with dream control and creativity than actually attaining lucidity. Creativity in that you look around and kind of take stock of what's around you, what the environment consists of and how you could use it if you were lucid and had all options open to you, and dream control in that you start thinking of ways to exploit that and get yourself into the habit of thinking, "OK, I can do anything. What would I like to do right now, and what would it look/feel/sound like?"
something that's quite practical is, in the middle of the night in the short time between sleep, assuming you get up, is to walk around your room- even in one spot, doing a mental simulation of what would happen if you were in an LD- for the best effect think of the most challenging environment possible, like say you gained lucidity on top of a moving train being attacked by aliens- imagine yourself calming down from the "OMFG it's a dream must do stuff before waking up" to a much calmer state and try to think what dream goals you could do at that location.
This is a great point, and something I think more people should know about. I first heard of this when I went to the thread about the lucid task of the year. The reason, so I've heard, is not to control your dream better. I'll explain. The task of the year for this year is to visit the 7 ancient wonders of the world. People have stated, more than once, that you should visualize yourself there. Imagine yourself in a lucid dream, and going there. After doing it enough, it should be ingrained in your subconscious, and you should automatically go there when you become lucid. In fact, guitarboy was writing about a dream he had. He was playing hockey, and people started using guns to shoot hockey pucks at him. He became lucid, and without any thought, it changed to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (one of the goals) instantaneously.