Thread: Lucid Dreaming Fundamentals -- With Q & A

Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ That is an excellent practice, Eamo; in fact, I think one of the LD-related yoga practices (Vipassanā, I believe) uses attention to breath in just that manner. It can be difficult to successfully adapt to your waking-life routines, though, just as it can be difficult to prevent it from becoming another habit that you basically ignore. So give yourself some time to make the practice work for you, and don't worry about lapses.

Good to know! Thx for the advice. Yes this can be quite difficult to do (especially for long periods of time), but, it’s such a well-known truth that to be lucid in dreams you have to be lucid in waking life as well (i.e. not go through each day on auto-pilot or in zombie mode). It can be very challenging to not let your mind wander etc. and it feels very difficult and unnatural, but I’m determined to stick with it in the hope that it will make LD’ing much easier and more accessible, due to the new “heightened” level of self-awareness you would acquire from this, even though it may take some time and effort before it becomes second nature (especially near-constantly).

Originally Posted by Sageous

Again, this breathing exercise is only an aid to keeping your mind in a place that allows you opportunity to develop your self-awareness; you still must do the other things (like RRC's) to actually develop it.

I can see what you mean about having a good opportunity to build self-awareness from something like this, however, I don’t know if I would call myself a complete “beginner” as such to self-awareness. I do feel like I am developing self-awareness in a more general, long-term sense (such as thinking about how I affect others/ the environment etc. which I find myself doing quite a bit), and I think I would see this as a separate endeavor to boosting self-awareness in more direct/ immediate terms for the purposes of LD’ing. The main reason I’ve decided to take the approach I’ve mentioned was to help diminish that “auto-pilot” mentality to make recognizing the dream state easier, with the assumption that I would also unlock the more broader sense of self I may have accumulated. I recall you mentioning once that although someone may have developed a good sense of self in their lifetime, it won’t be terribly helpful to immediate LD’ing goals and work (although a mature sense of SA will help to become lucid), so I was hoping that the approach I’ve listed would help to heighten my self-awareness enough to be able to become lucid easier in the more immediate context, but I would leave the “developing” of SA simply to what I’ve been doing all along. Hopefully this question isn’t too elaborate , but do you think the breathing approach I've mentioned would work fine for the more immediate LD’ing work, like induction, recall etc. and could work in concert with other (perhaps more established) self-awareness practices?

Thanks again.