Awareness
Since the goal of lucid dreaming is to become aware while dreaming, developing your skill of awareness about yourself and your dreams while waking is key to your development of awareness in your dreams.
Developing awareness of your dreamsigns is a simple activity that centers around the main ways that you will become lucid in your dreams. A dreamsign is "a peculiar event or object in a dream that can be used as an indicator that you are dreaming" (Lynne Levitan, A Thousand and One Nights of Lucid Dreaming). Or, in essence, a signal to you in a dream. For example, if a pink elephant walked in the door right now, you might conclude that you are dreaming. This pink elephant would be considered a dreamsign.
While we are dreaming, however, we don't often recognize our dreamsigns as being unusual. For example, if you were in a dream right now and you saw a pink elephant, you might not think anything of it and keep on reading this. If we read our dreams and find the dreamsigns that we have had previously, however, we will become aware of our typical signs and therefore more easily recognize them in our next dreams. There are four main categories of dreamsigns as developed by Dr. Stephen LaBerge:
Action - You, another dream character, or thing does something unusual or impossible in waking life.
Context - The place or situation in the dream is strange.
Form - You, another character, or thing changes shape, or is oddly formed /transforms. This may include the presence of unusual clothing or hair.
Awareness - A peculiar thought, a strong emotion, an unusual sensation, or altered perceptions.
After you have recorded a dream, go back and reread it. Locate unusual things or occurrences within it that could have given you a clue that you were dreaming. Then try to place these signs in one of the four dreamsign categories. A helpful way to distinguish these is to highlight, underline, or circle each type of dreamsign in a different color. For example, you might decide to highlight all action dreamsigns in pink, all context signs in yellow, form signs in green, and awareness signs in blue. This will help you to easily see these signs, and their categories, when you look at the dream later.
Once you have marked all the signs in several dreams, you should begin to record your dreamsigns in a table. One is provided for you on the next page, but you can easily just draw your own in your dream journal, or in another notebook. Recording these in a table not only helps develop your awareness of dreamsigns in and of itself, but will also allow you to determine what type of dreamsign most often causes you to gain lucidity. Learning about your dreamsigns will help you with visualization of your dreams in later techniques.
To determine your most effective dreamsigns:
Add up the total number of dreamsigns in each category. Add up the number of times this category was recognized.
Recognized / Total = % effectiveness
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