Because I have been off the weed for almost three weeks (again), I had my first lucid dream in a while this morning. I had heard about lucid dream meditation and how great it can be, and I finally tried it for the first time in this morning's lucid.

My last lucid before this morning changed my philosophy on how to behave in lucids. I came to the conclusion that my lucidity is always best when I am not trying to force things to happen. That led me to believing that transcendental meditation in a lucid might after all be the ultimate experience in consciousness alteration. Well, this morning, I became lucid and first tried effortlessness. It worked. I had my most vivid experience in lucidity yet. I was absolutely astonished at how real, but surreal, the situation seemed. Even upon major observation, it seemed every bit as real as the moment I am experiencing right now, but in a different type of reality. I was climbing walls and doing other bizarre things in a very strange world, but I was not really "trying" (in the usual sense at least) to do so. It was awesome. I was curious to see if I could hold onto what I was experiencing if I started putting out effort to create situations. I spun slowly and tried to make a giant bug-bird creature appear when I moved my head toward it. It didn't happen, and the pushing to create a situation made my lucidity lose a lot of its vividness. Then I decided that I would try lucid meditation. I started thinking my usual meditation mantra, and things stayed the same for about three seconds, but then I started losing my surroundings. Everything faded out, I lost my focus, and I lost my lucidity. Then I woke up. I never felt the rush of mind expanded bliss that meditation gives me ordinarily. So as far as the claim that a few seconds of dream meditation is worth thousands of hours of waking meditation, it doesn't seem to apply to me. I don't even see how lucidity can be maintained during meditation. I know that my waking lucidity commonly gets lost when I meditate, and being asleep would seem to increase that tendency.

The good news is that my theory (though not original) that the ultimate lucid dream is one where you don't push hard to do anything was strongly supported. When I was "effortlessly" (I put it in quotes because there is obviously some level of subconscious effort.) just experiencing the lucid dream, it was phenomenal, but putting out conscious strain to make given things happened spoiled things. I'm not sure how it works for everybody, but it appears that I have found the style of lucid dreaming that works best for me and that I am going to hold onto. I think I am about to reach the next level of my lucid dreaming advancement.