Lucid Dreaming 101

Step One - Doing the Mental Prep-Work

This step involves setting up the right mental foundation and building a mental framework that will maximize your success. In order to do this, you must take a look at your belief systems. I can't emphasize enough the crucial role that our belief systems play in determining our experience. As you develop your ability to lucid dream, you will be directly interacting with your thoughts and your belief systems, and you will be able to experience first hand how important it is to manage your thoughts. Here are four key questions that you need to ask yourself. Do you think you can do this? Do you think dreams are important? Do you really want to have lucid dreams? Do you know what you will do when you become lucid? Not only should you be asking yourself these questions, but you should also be taking an active part in strengthening these beliefs, or changing them if that is the case. Let's go over each of these questions to emphasize what kind of mental prep-work you need to be doing. "Do you think you can do this?" For starters, you must always have a positive attitude. If you have any doubts, then your first assignment is to replace each and every doubt with a self-empowering belief. If you think lucid dreaming is some rare phenomenon, realize that it is a natural ability. If you think it is going to be difficult, assure yourself that it will come naturally. Just remember, tying your shoes as a child was difficult but with time it became second nature, and so too will lucid dreaming. As soon as you have your first lucid dream, it'll be that much easier to have a second one, and a third one, and in due time you will be having them consistently. "Do you think dreams are important?" Once you have a positive, confident attitude, the next step is to make dreaming a top priority. The simple act of believing that your dreams are important will dramatically increase your results. Most people don't place any emphasis on their dreams so they in turn don't recall many dreams, and not surprisingly most of these people are not even aware that it is possible to have lucid dreams. They don't know any better because they haven't made dreaming a priority. You, on the other hand, will view your dreams as important, and this will speed up your progress substantially. "Do you really want to have lucid dreams?" The key to this question is desire and enthusiasm. The more you cultivate your desire to have lucid dreams, the more emotionally charged your intent will be. The more charged your intent is, the more likely that these desires will produce results. Along the same lines, the more enthusiastic you are towards learning how to lucid dream, the more you will absorb and the more you will be actively drawing this experience towards you. Sending messages to your subconscious that you think dreams are important and that you enthusiastically want to have them will speed up your progress dramatically. "Do you know what you will do when you have a lucid dream?" The point of this question is to be purposefully prepared. It sounds so simple, but just by having a plan you increase the odds of becoming lucid. If you have a goal or a mission planned, you will have that much more reason to become lucid and carry out your mission. The plan should be well thought out and thoroughly embedded in your mind. Throughout the day and before going to bed, remind yourself of your goal, and in keeping with the last question, cultivate a desire to fulfill your goal. In the beginning, you may want to keep your plan simple. Your goal may be as simple as looking at your hands or surveying the dreamscape or maybe you would like to fly. As you develop the ability to prolong your lucid dreams, you will be able to carry out more elaborate missions.

So be positive. Replace doubt with confidence and skepticism with belief. View your dreams as being important. Make dreaming a priority. Cultivate your desire to reach your goal. Be enthusiastic. Be prepared and have a plan. As you can see these mental prep-work concepts do overlap and intertwine, so start making all of them work for you today. This mental conditioning will not only help speed up the lucid dreaming process, but you can apply it to any other aspects of your life that you want to develop.

Step Two) Increasing Dream Recall

As mentioned earlier, if you can't remember your dreams it makes it that much harder to have lucid ones. So this step focuses on increasing your dream recall. You may be one of the fortunate ones who remembers a lot of dreams, but if you are not, don't be discouraged. There are many tried and tested methods for developing your dream recall. There are so many effective tips for increasing dream recall that you can count on remembering more and more of your dreams with a few weeks practice. For starters, do you really want to remember your dreams? Why? Could you be subconsciously blocking your own recall because you may be afraid of what you see? These are legitimate questions to be asking yourself. Be honest with yourself. You must make the commitment to yourself to increase your dream recall because it is important to you and it is something that you want to develop. You need to make it a conscious priority. After taking this step, it is just a matter of incorporating these techniques into your morning schedule.

Here is a list of tips and techniques that will help increase your dream recall:
1.) Wake Motionlessly. Upon awakening, don't open your eyes. Don't move. Lie completely still.
2.) Wake Slowly. Allow yourself time to naturally remember your dreams. Don't start thinking about what you are going to do for the day. Don't allow your mind to be flooded by your waking thoughts or your dreams will start fading or may even disappear entirely like bursting dream bubbles. Let your mind be focused on whatever you were just dreaming.
3.) Let your mind drift. Allow your thoughts to meander through whatever mental imagery you may have. Once you remember one part of a dream. Relax and allow the rest of the pieces to fall into place.
4.) Drift through your dream checklist. If you have absolutely no initial recall, then start running through a dream checklist in your mind. This list should include people you know, activities, places, foods, smells, music, anything that may trigger a dream fragment to surface. Allow your mind to drift through this list and ask yourself if this person or this place was in your dream. Movement is very common in dreams so try to think about action. Were you walking or running or climbing or flying? Emotions are also very prevalent so try to think about your moods. Were you happy or afraid or surprised or confused? The more familiar you are with your dreams the better you will know which questions will most likely trigger your memory, but in the beginning you can use any list as long as it is a big one.
5.) Think and question backwards. Try to work your memory backwards from what you can remember. You will usually remember the most current dream scenario first so for maximum retrieval it is helpful to think backwards, or think in terms of effect and cause instead of cause and effect. If you can remember one part of the dream, ask yourself how you got there? Or where did a certain dream object come from? Did you find it? Was it given to you? One dream fragment will usually lead to another until the whole dream starts to take shape, and your dream memories can be jogged by questioning yourself about what you already remember.
6.) Try different sleeping positions. Try all your common sleeping positions before getting out of bed to maximize your recall. You will have the best recall when you are lying in the same position that you were in when you were dreaming. If you wake up on your right side don't move until you recall all you possibly can, and then repeat this process on your left side, then your back, and your front. This may jar loose some memories and it certainly speeds up your recall.
7.) Keep Trying. Sometimes, you may have no morning recall but flashes of dream memories will surface during your day. Be prepared to jot down any time-released memories. They may unlock your access to more memories.

If you are still having trouble recalling your dreams, here is a sure-fire method that will have your remembering your dreams in no time. We know that most of our dreams occur in the last hours of our sleep so we can safely assume that this is the target time to be exercising our recall. We also know that we have a much greater likelihood of remembering a dream if we awaken directly from it, and this leads us to the ultimate method, the Alarm Clock Method.

The Alarm Clock Method:
Using an alarm clock is one of the quickest and easiest ways to start increasing your dream recall especially if you rarely remember your dreams. The idea is to set your alarm for a time when you will be dreaming and awaken yourself from a dream while fresh memories are still in your head. The earlier morning hours are the best time to use this method since this is when you are most likely to be dreaming. Your alarm clock will become a valuable tool for increasing your dream recall, and in a later section I will mention how it can be used to induce lucid dreams. Here are a few ways to take full advantage of your alarm clock. Try them all to see what works best for you

"The Early Morning Technique"
Set your alarm for two hours before you normally would awaken. When it goes off, reset it to go off in a half an hour. Do this each time it goes off and you will have instant and plentiful recall. This is one of the most effective techniques because it takes full advantage of your natural dreaming cycle and it creates a daily target time when you habitually practice your dreaming skills. These few hours before you normally awake are going to become your new training grounds. This target time zone will be described in much greater detail when we cover lucid dream induction methods and again when we take a look at the lucid dream terrain.

Depending on how poor your recall is you may want to immediately write down your dreams each time you wake up. If you don't, you may experience what I refer to as dream superimposition. It happens when you wake up during the night and have vivid recall of your dreams, so vivid that you are sure you will remember them later; however, when you go back to bed you have more dreams and upon reawakening these recent dream memories have replaced the previous ones. As you exercise your dream recall you will find your memory will become better so that less dream superimposing takes place, but even after years of training it still happens to me sporadically.

"The Waking at Odd Hours Technique"
This technique is pretty self-explanatory. Set your alarm to go off at any random times throughout the night. The advantage of this technique is that if you are extremely eager to develop your dreaming skills you may not want to settle for only two hours of practice a day. So you can use this technique along with the previous one to maximize your exercise.

"The Snooze Button Method"
Set your alarm for a time before you would normally wake up and then continually hit the snooze button until you have to get out of bed. This is probably the most common technique, and the odds are that you have already had some experience with this one unless your alarm does not have a snooze button. By hitting the snooze button you are constantly coming in and out of dreams so you dramatically increase your recall, and it is very helpful for inducing lucid dreams as well, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Step Three) Keeping a dream journal

The single most important thing that you can do to increase your dream recall and to maximize your lucid dreaming progress is to keep a dream journal. This increases your recall by engraining the idea that dreams are important into your subconscious mind. It also helps you become familiar with your dreams which is the focus of the next step. The habit of writing down your dreams soon becomes a habit of recalling your dreams. If you seriously want to learn how to lucid dream, you MUST keep a dream journal. It is not an option.

I strongly emphasize this because I know from experience that keeping a journal is a crucial part of the process. I had been trying to lucid dream for a year with little success until I started keeping one. Shortly after I started consistently making my dream journal entries, I began to recall more dreams with greater clarity and detail, and this led to my first lucid dreams. Even now after years of lucid dreaming, I still see a correlation. If I neglect my dream journal, my lucid dreams become less frequent. All it usually takes is a few days of making entries and I will be back on the lucid track.

Here are some tips on keeping your journal. Record all of your dreams with as much detail as you can. Even if something seems trivial, you should still write it down because it may turn out to be significant when viewed in the long run. Write down not only what happened during the dream but also what you were feeling and what you were thinking at the time. These emotional and mental notes will help you later when you are becoming familiar with your dreams. This will also help you see how your daily affairs and your waking mind influence your dreams. For example, you may notice during times of stress that you will have stress-influenced dreams. You may dream of being late for an exam or being unprepared for a business meeting. The point is that your dreams are sending you a message. They are reflecting what you think and feel at a subconscious level. Looking at the patterns of your dreams and examining the recurrence of certain dream themes will tell you a lot about yourself. This is yet another reason why keeping your dream journal is so important. It allows you to have an overview of your dream patterns which are actually reflections of an ever-changing you.

When keeping your journal, it is best to write your entries in present tense instead of using past tense. For example, you would write, "I'm walking down this street and I see a man" instead of "I walked down this street and I saw a man." By writing in the present tense, you may be able to remember even more of your dreams as you are recording them. Also, when working with some of the methods we will cover later like dream reentry and dream incubation, it is best to be thinking and recording in terms of now not then. As an added bonus, writing in the present tense also makes for better reading at a later date.

With each dream journal entry, you should include a date, a time if you can, and a title for each dream. To find a suitable name for your dream, imagine if it were a movie and choose the most appropriate title. Something simple is usually best as long as it captures the essence of the dream. Anything from "Red ants in a rainforest" to "Class reunion on an airplane" will be fine. If you have several different dreams during the night, it is best to separate and title each one. Mixing separate dreams together may make the dream's message harder to find and may make choosing a distinctive title nearly impossible. The main purpose of titling your dreams is to make them easier to access at a glance when you are looking through your dream journal.

Now, if you are like me or like most people, I am assuming one of two things. You are either going to think you can learn to lucid dream without keeping a dream journal or else you will start keeping a dream journal and before you know it, it will be gathering dust next to that book you meant to read. I say this only because I thought the same way. Not to say that it could not be done, anything is possible, but why not increase your odds, maximize your results, and speed up the process with a proven method. Once you get into the habit of keeping your journal, it will become as routine as putting your clothes on in the morning. Although it gets easier with time, in the beginning it is helpful to have some pointers.

Keeping a dream journal is not the easiest thing to do. I have spent many a day thumbing through random pieces of papers scribbled with dream accounts. To make the beginning of the process easier I have several suggestions based on several different approaches I have tried combined with the advice of others. It seems like such a simple thing. You dream, you wake up, and you write down your dreams. Well, there's more to it. For example, when you awaken if you start writing in your journal as you are recalling the nights dreams, it is hard to remember everything accurately in the right sequence. You may have already moved on to a new scene but then you remember something you had forgotten. This prompted me to write everything I could remember on a sheet of paper and then after doing this I would write an organized account of it in my journal. This works fine if you have lots of free time but with time being a valuable commodity it is rather inefficient.

Along with the difficulty of balancing your time and determining how organized you need to have your journal, another problem you will encounter is the simple fact that you have to do a lot of writing which in itself can become monotonous. The best approach is to recall all that you can in your head before writing anything, but even so you probably will remember more as you are writing it. By recording your dreams only on the right-hand pages of the journal, you can write late arriving memories on the left-hand page and conveniently draw an arrow to the portion of the dream in which it occurred. You can also use the left-hand pages to draw pictures of any dream objects or maps of the dreamscape. This tip may require you to buy double the amount of journals, but if you want more organized entries it certainly works.

If you do choose to use this method, you should use the left-hand pages to record what you did while awake that day, where you went, who you saw, etc�?Whether you use the left/right page method or not, you should include this daily information somewhere in your journal, preferably on the same page as your dream entries. This can be very helpful when you are looking for patterns in your dreams. For example, I have found that I will often dream about things from two days before or two days after the dream. If I watched a program about natural disasters on Monday, I would not be surprised if I dreamed about it on Wednesday. If I dream about a person who I have not heard from in a while, they will usually call me two days later. I don't know why it happens, but by analyzing my dreams and the journal entries of what I did for the day, I have found this to be one of my patterns.

Many people recommend using a dictaphone to record your dreams. Upon awakening you can just speak your dreams aloud into the recorder, and enter them into your journal later. I've tried this method and find that for me at least it is not the way to go. It is not very time efficient. It certainly is easier to record them verbally, but the problem comes when you are transcribing these tapes. It takes far too long to listen to these recordings and write them down in your journal, and you still have the problem of trying to keep the dream's sequence in order which becomes even more troublesome when you use a tape recorder.

There are many different styles of journal keeping and everyone may have a natural preference, but if you want to save some time. Learning mostly through trial and error, I have developed the easiest and most efficient method. Prompted by the idea of how wonderful it would be if the dictaphone could write up my journal entries for me, I employed the help of my personal computer. I purchased a speech to text recognition program called ViaVoice. It will convert what you say into text on your computer screen. You speak at a normal pace and it does all the typing for you, and you can use it directly with MicroSoft Word, my word processing program. The speech to text program was on fifty dollars and it works just fine for a dream journal. It may make an occasion error but the journal entries are extremely legible and the time saved is enormous. It completely removes the burden of writing down your dreams and it totally solves the problem of jumbled dream sequences because you can cut and paste any misplaced dream fragments into their appropriate place. If you have the resources, this is by far the easiest and most efficient way of keeping a dream journal.

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