Also called lucid dreaming, conscious dreaming is a state where you are aware that you are in the middle of a dream and can then start to control the goings-on of the experience. You can do anything that you can imagine while having a lucid dream, as soon as you understand that you are dreaming.
While having the ability to control your dreams may sound farfetched, it’s actually something which is within your reach. Lucid dreaming isn’t that hard to do and these dreams are a great place to express your true self and your desires. There are techniques which have proven effective at producing lucid dreams.
To begin you need to think about what you want to gain. Do you want to have fun and live out your fantasies, or do you want to use lucid dreaming to help solve problems in your life. Maybe you are just curious about what the experience is like. It does not matter what your goal is as long as you keep it in mind and stay confident that you will achieve it.
After you define the reasons for wanting to learn to dream consciously, you can learn the steps to get your mind on the right level. You need to be in the right state of mind to be able to lucid dream. A good place to start is recalling your dreams. This means to remember any dreams you have had.
You need to remember the dreams you have every night in order to start conscious dreaming. Try to remember every detail. A good way to do this is to keep a journal of all your dreams. Keep it beside your bed and record everything you can recall about your dreams. Do this every morning when you wake up. Do not wait until later in the day as you may forget. The longer you are awake the more you forget about your dreams.
Before long, you’ll find yourself able to remember more of your dreams – and your dream diary can help refresh your memory. Once your mind is trained to remember dreams, the ability to recognize them while they are happening will follow easily. You might, like many do, come to the awareness suddenly that you are dreaming!
Hypnosis is another widely used method for lucid dreaming. It is a good way to get into the state of mind you need to begin lucid dreaming. A hypnosis session works quickly to help people to recall the tiniest details in their dreams. This can be done in only a few sessions. Once you have this level of dream recall, you are ready to proceed with conscious dreaming.
You may wake up suddenly when you are having a conscious dream in the beginning. This is not unusual. Go over the events in your dream as you drift back to sleep. If you focus on them hard enough, you will go back into the same dream and perhaps control the events and the outcome of them.
Another method which many find useful for inducing conscious dreaming is to wake up a few hours earlier than normal. Simply set your alarm about two hours early and then go back to bed after awakening. In these last few hours before you are accustomed to waking up, it is much more common to have lucid dreams. These dreams can be hard to tell from simply laying awake and daydreaming! This is a good way to begin conscious dreaming.
Watch your sleeping patterns closely. In this way, you will be able to tell what time is more likely to have this type of dream. Do not deprive yourself of too much sleep, as being extremely tired makes you sleep deeper and lucid dreaming is unlikely to occur in this stage of sleep.
You will be happy to know that lucid dreaming is helpful for insomnia as well as other sleeping disorders. If you can dream consciously, you can condition yourself to turn off nagging thoughts that keep you awake at night.
You may think that learning lucid dreaming takes years of practice, but in fact it’s not so hard at all to learn – with just a little practice, you can be a conscious dreamer too!
In fact, conscious dreaming is something that everyone can do. Just practice and use these techniques to develop your own lucid dreaming abilities – you’ll find that it has a lot to offer.
