Become A Dream Architect

What Is It?

Lucid dreaming is the act of becoming aware or conscious in your dreams. It mainly takes place during the rapid eye movement or REM cycle of sleep. Everything but your eyelids becomes paralyzed during this cycle to keep your body from acting out the movements you make in your dreams.Sometime during your REM cycle your lateral prefrontal cortex can reactive itself allowing your brain to become conscious while your body sleeps. Once lucid, you have the ability to consciously take part in your dreams. These dreams can be so incredibly realistic that you think they are real life. You can live out your wildest fantasies and go on amazing adventures all while securely snoozing in your bed.

How Do You Do It?

For some people lucid dreams are not hard to attain, for others it’s not so easy. Luckily for the lucidly impaired there are plenty of techniques to get the ball rolling. Here are a few to get you started:

1) Keeping a dream journal

Remembering your dreams is one of the first steps to take when trying to induce lucid dreaming. In Lucid Dreaming: A Beginner’s guide to Becoming Conscious in Your Dreams, Charlie Morley suggests that dream recall and keeping a dream journal will increase your chances of inducing lucid dreams. “Whenever you wake up from a dream, recall as much of it as you can and then write it down or document it in some way,” Morley says. This can be as simple as leaving a pen and paper by your bed at night or you can keep a dream journal to help document your dreams. Morley also mentions that many people use their “smartphone or tablet” to voice record their dream recall. Morley explains that the reasoning behind this technique is for us “to know the territory of our dreaming mind, and the better we know that, the more likely we are to recognize it when we’re in it and become lucid.”

2) Finding your hands

Robert Waggoner and Caroline McCready suggest “finding your hands” first in their book Lucid Dreaming, Plain And Simple.“Look softly at the palms of your hands and tell yourself in a relaxed manner: “Tonight while I am dreaming, I will see my hands and realize that I am dreaming,” Waggoner and McCready advise. This should be repeated to suggest the strong intent of finding your hands in your dream. The important thing to remember with any of these techniques is to always set a strong intent to lucid dream before going to sleep. The point of finding your hands is to jog your mind when you are dreaming. When you recognize your hands in a dream after setting the intent to, you will recognize that you are dreaming and become lucid.

3) Dreamsigns

Dreamsigns are another technique explored by Waggoner and McCready in their book. Dreamsigns “indicate those out-of-place features in a dream that may signal that we are dreaming,” says the authors. Dreamsigns can be an inner awareness, an action, a form or context in a dream. For example, you could be looking at a building and it starts to transform into a plane. Another example would be finding yourself climbing the great wall of China, but you live in Texas and have never left the state. Things like these seem out-of -place and help you to conclude that you are dreaming and then you become lucid. The authors suggest using a dreamsign found in the pages of your dream journal or request a dreamsign by asking your dreams for one to appear before you go to sleep. Once you have found it, set the intent of seeing your designated dreamsign in your dream so that you can recognize that you are dreaming and become lucid.

Seems like a lot of work before bed, right? Well don’t worry. There is no need to overwhelm your nightly routine with multiple techniques. Waggoner and McCready suggest finding the one that best works for you and to use it for a month without combining any other techniques. Waggoner, McCready and Morley all put emphasis on practicing whatever technique you choose in order to see the best results. Don’t forget, practice makes perfect!

Why Do You Want To Do It?

So why is it so great to lucid dream? Believe it or not there are myriad benefits to taking part in lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming can help you both physically and mentally to become more lucid in your actual waking life. Here are some of the benefits:

1) Performance enhancement

A Beginner’s Guide explains that “training while in the lucid dream state creates neural pathways that will carry over into that waking state.” Morley reports that “scientists say that the reason we can increase our performance through mental practice is that ‘the peripheral activation of the supplementary motor areas that occurs when we imagine engaging a motor action leads to kinaesthetic feedback from the muscles and builds the basis of the learning mechanism’, even though those muscles aren’t moving.” So you can practice landing that 360 or serving that perfect pitch in your lucid dream and “gain new sensory-motor skills” as the research from the book quotes. You can practice any sport or exercise without ever having to worry about making a mistake or hurting yourself. You are not bound by any limitations, free to practice or train what ever you please.

Real World Example:

Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple gives an account of a sports science student who wanted to become a better swimmer. He used his lucid dreams to train and gain the skills to achieve his goal. While lucid, the student would change the consistency of the water, transforming it into thick honey in order to build endurance from the resistance. He could position himself outside and above his physical body in his dream. This allowed him to watch himself swim and correct his technique with his second set of eyes. He could change his perspective more readily in his lucid dreams and improve his over all skills as a swimmer in the waking world.

2) Psychological healing

Lucid dreaming can help those with addiction, overcoming fears or phobias and even help those who suffer from post — traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Morley says “a lucid dreamer might implant a beneficial suggestion once lucid” to break an addictive behavior. So, say your a smoker who wants to quit smoking or a nail bitter who wants to fight the urge to bite your nails. Once you become lucid you can suggest to yourself that you will be happier and healthier if you stop smoking or biting your nails. The suggestion will then be implanted in your unconscious. This “self-inception” as Morley calls it, can alter our actions in real life and “implant a new habit pattern in our minds.” Hypnotherapists use a similar method to help patients discover the underlying meaning of their addictive behaviors.

Real World Example:

A Beginner’s Guide offers the case study of a man from the UK who overcame his addiction to smoking cigarettes after attending one of Morley’s talks at a festival. After listening to Morley talk about self-inception, the man induced lucid dreaming that night by using the “finding your hands” technique. Once lucid, the man dreamed he was storming a castle. He noticed a woman running next to him and then she told him she was his brain. He asked her to distract him with something else when ever he craved a cigarette because he was worried about his health. She agreed and then the man woke up from his dream. He later reported to Morley that he hadn’t smoked in six months and had no further urge to light up. Ah, the power of suggestion!

Lucid dreaming creates a space for those who have certain fears or suffer from PTSD to explore what is troubling them. Since you are lucid and aware that you are only dreaming, you can give yourself “gradual exposure” as Morley says, to what scares or troubles you. For example, if you have a fear of water, you could slowly submerge yourself in an ocean or in a lake during a lucid dream to overcome your fear. You have to embrace what ever fear you have in order to overcome it in the waking world. According to Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple, “It appears that lucid dreaming allows for a new type of desensitization, inasmuch as lucid dreamers can realistically engage fear on multiple sensory levels in the virtual realty of the lucid dream.”

Real World Example:

Another case study from A Beginner’s Guide explains how a woman from South Africa was able to hug her fear away while lucid dreaming. The woman suffered from fear of her own insecurities and the lack of love she received from others. The woman dreamed that a threatening man broke into her house and attempted to attack her. Once she was lucid, the woman decided that instead of running from fear, she would hug the man and embrace him. The man transformed into a baby and the woman was no longer afraid. She later reported to Morley that she began to “live more lucidly” after the dream and began to face her insecurities head on instead of running away.

In the case of someone who has reoccurring nightmares as a result of PTSD, lucid dreaming presents the opportunity to seek out what is causing the nightmares and come to terms with it. The causes are usually repressed feelings or memorizes that the dreamer must confront in order to heal. Once the dreamer has come to terms with the nightmare they can start to engage in a more regular sleep pattern.

Real World Example:

Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple recounts an interview with an airline mechanic who lost her leg after a plane she was working with had fallen on top of her. She unfortunately developed PTSD from the trauma of the accident and had “unbearable” recurring nightmares of a monster chasing her as she ran with one leg. Once lucid, she stopped running and faced the monster to waved at it. The monster waved back and the woman flew away. The nightmares did not end right away, but after a few times of being lucid the monster stopped chasing her altogether.

3) Harnessing your inner creativity

Lucid dreaming can be the gateway to finding your inner creativity. Many have used lucid dreaming to tap into their creative core to compose music, construct art and even experiment with math and science. Our creative streak comes from the right hemisphere of our brain. When you become aware in your dreams you gain more access to this inner creativity. “Lucidity brings a strand of left-brain cognizance into the dream, meaning that we can intentionally engage the dream’s right-brain creativity,” says Morley. So, when you become lucid while dreaming you open yourself to the opportunity of asking your unconscious to help you with any block in creativity. You can even ask your dream a direct question concerning your creative motives and the unconscious can reveal a solution in your dream. According to Shirley S.Wang of The Wall Street Journal, a study done by the University of Lincoln in England found that people who lucid dream frequently are better at problem-solving. Once you hit the nail on the creative head in your dream, you can apply those problem-solving skills in real life.

Real World Example:

Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheningold talks of a software programmer who uses his lucid dreaming for his job of creating code. He would actually ask Albert Einstein to appear and help him with problems he would encounter writing code.Then when he woke up he would write it down and bring it to work. His lucid dreaming turned out to be extremely effected,“I take this to work and usually it is 99-percent accurate,” the man reported.

Who Will You Meet?

Each lucid dream can introduce you to different dream characters or figures. A dream character or figure can simply be any person or animal you may come in contact with while dreaming. Interacting with a dream character or figure can be an exciting experience for a lucid dreamer. You could sleep with you celebrity crush, play sports with your favorite athlete or even visit with a deceased relative. Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple advises you do the following to engage in “more interesting and varied conversations” with a dream character or figure:

“Ask open-ended questions, do not insult dream figures, take time to consider the responses, realize that dream figures vary in awareness and approach conversation with a sense of openness.”

Who Else Will You Meet?

Carl Jung and his archetypes

Carl Jung was a psychiatrist, who according to A Beginner’s Guide, “saw that certain dream content was transpersonal, sourced not from our own personal unconscious.” Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple says that “dream figures normally represent some aspect of yourself projected outward for you to engage in the dream.” Jung thought instead that the content came from a collective unconscious . A beginners Guide defines this collective unconscious as “a vast storehouse of ancient human experience containing themes and images found cross-culturally throughout history.” He suggested that there are four main archetypes that represent this collective unconscious:

The Self — “The unification of the unconsciousness and the conscious of an individual.”

The Shadow — “Composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts and shortcomings.”

The Anima — “A female image in the male psyche.”

The Animus — ‘”A male image in the female psyche.”

Real World Example

Finding my shadow is how I learned to lucid dream when I was just a little girl. The shadow represents the part of us that we suppress or that we are afraid of. We give that part of our psyche a face and it becomes a dream character or figure. Unfortunately for me, my shadow was the child murderer of Elm Street, who ironically kills people in their sleep. When I was younger I had all kinds of reoccurring dreams, but the ones I had the most were nightmares of Freddy Kruger. After a while, I developed the skill of realizing I was only in a dream and would ask myself to wake up. Since I was unintentionally lucid dreaming and had no understanding of the concept, I only used the lucidity to wake myself up and escape from the deranged man wearing a Christmas sweater with knives for fingers. I never used the lucidity to my advantage to explore the dream character or change the dream into a positive one.

Morley actually advises that we embrace our shadow instead of running from it. This can open up a line of communication between you and the dream character or figure, getting to the bottom of why they are there in the first place.The shadow becomes present in a dream when your mind wants you to face something that you are suppressing or that has been troubling you. “ In many cases a nightmare is just a dream that’s shouting, ‘Hey look at this! Deal with this! This needs attention!’,” Morley states in his guide. So when you embrace your shadow , your actually embracing your inner self and discovering what needs to be fixed or healed inside of you. If only I had known that when I was seven.