The Power of Present-Moment Awareness

Recently I've been reading a lot of threads that stress the importance in having a very strong present-moment awareness and paying attention to the often overlooked details during waking life... Most notably KingYoshi's tutorial about All Day Awareness (ADA). I have noticed something in common with nearly all of the people that post these threads about having a very high awareness, which is that they all report GREAT SUCCESS WITH A VERY HIGH LUCID DREAM COUNT. Immediately after noticing this trend (only a couple days ago), I started practicing KingYoshi's technique with great care... At first, it was a little difficult and overwhelming trying to pay attention to the significance of every single aspect of my body, such as what I am doing with my hands/fingers and why, paying attention to blinking and even more importantly breathing, the feeling of my feet pushing into the cushions of my shoes with every step, etc... But as I continue to concentrate on trying to have a powerful awareness, it is starting to happen more naturally, and it is starting to feel like more of a lifestyle that I feel I need to engage in for the rest of my life... Not just for Lucid dreaming, but for myself... I am the kind of person that often has my head down, looking at the gravel as I walk, kind of zoning out into thoughts and worries, and completely missing the world in front of me. Since practicing this technique, I have been more engaged with my environment and the people around me, I have embraced the entirety of long walks from place to place on my campus that usually feel like a burden, and I simply feel more in touch with the world around me. I have also not felt a single ounce of the daily anxiousness that I normally feel when I let myself slip into thought about both the past, and upcoming events of the future that would normally have me extremely stressed. To put it simply, this isn't just a fantastic technique to become lucid, this is a lifestyle change that will drastically improve the quality of anyone's life. A good attitude to have when practicing this method is that there is no past and no future, but only the present moment.


Now onto the lucid dreaming part.

I am not the least bit surprised that living this all-day-awareness technique yields such a strong impact on people's efforts to achieve lucidity. I remember reading on someone's thread something along the lines of ''You will dream lucidly if you live lucidly,'' and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense, because we really do seem to 'sleepwalk' our lives away when we get lost in things such as T.V or the internet.. Now I'm not shunning these things or even discouraging them, but since practicing this technique it has become SO clear just how distracting these things can be to our senses. But with practice, we can have a natural awareness while doing these things. As I lay here in my bed, in the darkness, thinking about what I am going to type on my laptop gently resting on my chest, I watch myself in a passive awareness while my eyes seem to effortlessly dart between my screen and the pin-point locations on the keyboard where my fingers must land in order to form a coherent message, all while feeling the rhythm of my breath, the air gently traveling in and out of my nose. I am not getting lost in my computer screen, which usually feels like it completely envelopes my vision, but I have this sense of the peripheral space of blackness around the screen, as well as the platform under the screen where my fingers do their dance on the keyboard, as i focus my main attention on the letters appearing on the screen. I hear my fridge humming a sound familiar to isochronic tones, as i feel my lower body, my legs and feet dormant and sinking into the bed.

Now, if we can train ourselves to have this sense of awareness at every single moment during the day, wouldn't it only make sense for this sense of awareness to gradually transfer into our awareness during the dream state? Well, like I said, I've only been practicing this method for two days, and this morning I woke up from a very noticeably more vivid dream than usual... I could remember specific physical feelings from my dream almost at a fully conscious level upon awakening, which is very uncommon for me.

I don't have too much success with LD'ing currently, and have only had 4 Lucid's in my lifetime... But I am feeling REEEAAALLY good about this technique, and I have been growing this very confident sense of expectation to have a lucid dream within the next week. Anyone wanna share thoughts about this?

One thing I forgot to mention too is that I often had problems remembering to do reality checks, and since practicing this method I have been remembering and performing the nose plug reality check almost automatically, and every time I see something strange I genuinely stop and question reality, which is definitely a very critical component to the process.

Indeed, awareness is what makes us lucid, either from reality check, ADA or any other technique. Congrats on the success with ADA too! :thumbup:
Keep going and i am pretty certain that many lucid dreams will come. ;)

Very good to hear about your personal progress :)

I love practicing awareness as well, I don't even think about it much anymore. Many people don't want to do it because they think it is exhausting to focus on every detail etc., but what they don't understand is it's not really focusing on every little thing, it's merely acknowledging their presence. I doubt it would even be possible to take in everything we are sensing/perceiving at once. Awareness is basically being...well, aware...of them and knowing they exist.

And you are right, it is not only beneficial to lucid dreaming, but to waking life as well. Ever since I practiced ADA, I'd understand discussions so much better, because I take in what the professor says with much more sense. I used to always just go "okay, yes, hmm whatever you're saying". It even helped me immensely with practical exams where we had to identify cells and parasites because when you start having that understanding with yourself and how you are perceiving things, it's like whatever you see/hear/feel/perceive gets internalized, and like you said, you are more engaged in them. And I think the best thing about practicing awareness is you finally realize the beauty in all the little things you barely even noticed before—like the tapping of raindrops on the pavement or the smell of the book you're reading, to name a few.

Cheers to you :cheers:

"auto-pilot mode" Feels pretty lame. I feel as if I'm missing out on too much. I almost feel guilty after going a stretch without... examining. Like at work, for example. I think I'm going to start incorporating ADA into my life. I know a daily recollection of events and dialogue in a journal has made my dreams a bit more vivid, ADA may be just what I need to get an extra squeeze of enjoyment out of life, both waking and not.

I love this. Thank you so much for posting this.

One of my peers at work a few days ago noticed how I tend to eat. I tend to mindlessly just shovel the food into my mouth, and continuously chew and swallow, while scooping in more food. I realized that this is a bad habit that was directly caused by always being in autopilot mode all the time, particularly due to a past lifestyle where mindless rushing was the norm. This was during my studies, where we would always need to pull all-nighters, and just generally be rushed. Everything was a rush; we'd have little time between classes to get things done, we would rarely have lunch (and that would be rushed if we ever had the opportunity), there would be long lines in the computer lab or wood shop to get things plotted, etc. Such a lifestyle would readily enable one to pick up tremendously bad "autopilot" habits, which render the individual as "hardly existing". Thus, these bad habits have carried over past my first four years of architecture school, and into my work life.

My boss (he's a really cool guy; in fact, he buys us lunch now and then, and this was one of those times) told me something about how the Buddhists call this "Monkey Mindedness"; about how one should not live their life mindlessly. One should be aware, and thoughtful about their actions; in this instance, preparing the food properly with utensils, slicing and dividing the portions as necessary, manipulating the utensils, scooping up the food, and putting it gently into the mouth. Then of course, the act of eating in itself; chewing...enjoying the taste and texture and temperature...enjoying the interaction of the ingredients, and then finally swallowing and repeating.

This little occurrence got me thinking, and this post made me add two and two together. This is definitely something I am going to work on, hopefully, not just to improve my lucid dreaming/dream life in general, but also to improve the quality and experience of waking life, at large.

Although, I have to say...being in autopilot mode sometimes forces me to mentally withdraw and exist thoughtfully within myself a bit more, which I find has its own effect on dreaming. In this case, the body becomes a mere appendage to the mind that dwells within. Perhaps some form of reconciliation between the two will enable me to experience the best of both worlds, as well as allowing me to correct some bad habits that have been accumulated.