Thread: The basics.

Can someone please tell me the basics of lucid dreaming? In other words, among all those methods of achieving lucidity inside a dream, which are the things they have in common?

By trying to lucid dream, you're trying to alter your perception of your dreams, so the basics of lucid dreaming are the same as those of perception.

Attention-During the dream you need have attention on the dream itself to become lucid.

Memory-During the dream you have to recall that the dream is one in order to become lucid.

Expectation-In order to recall that the dream is one, you have to have an expectation that you're dreaming.

Learning-To have an expectation that you're dreaming, you have to learn beforehand what a dream is like or otherwise learn that it is possible to be dreaming in whatever situation you're in during the dream.

It's basically different approaches to create any kind of anchor point that we can trust from our waking life experience. And trying to build the habit of remember to test those anchor points inorder to see if the enironment or the moment we are in, might be real or not. Life is so natural to us, that we rarely question it's realness. So when we are awake, it might feel really unatural to make these reality checks for example. But no matter how real anything seems to be, it stil needs to be tested inorder to build the habit of the same mindset when we actualy are in a dream and think that this cant be a dream it's to real.

Im by no means any expert at lucid dreaming, but becoming aware of your own reality or surrounding is to create a distance to what you naturaly take for granted as real out of mere instinct. That is why creating and using reality anchors are the common ground no matter what methods that are used I would say.

Learn about Reality checks and create the habit of using them. My personal problem with RC's is like I said above. That during my waking time, they feel totally useless in that moment since there is hard to create any doubt that you need to validate your surrounding in that waking moment. Always to my surprise, is that the same feeling of certainty of being awake is there in my dreams, until I used my RC a few times to prove myself wrong about the feeling of being awake.