How To Lucid Dreams…
The essence of the lucid dreaming experience is to have the mind awake while the body is asleep. If you search for advice on how to do this you’ll find plenty of people telling you to train yourself to do “reality checks” and keep a dream journal in the hopes of waking your mind while inside a regular dream. While this has some value, if you want quicker results you’ll have to follow a different approach. You’ll need to do what is known as a WILD, or Wake-Induced-Lucid-Dream. The trick is knowing how to do this effectively.
Inducing a WILD is much easier if you have a pre-sleep. Go through your day as usual, be active (physical exercise is helpful). Once you are tired, go to bed. Do not go to bed if you are not actually tired. Set an alarm for an hour and half. When the alarm wakes you, get up. It doesn’t matter how sleepy you feel, you’ll have to stay awake for about an hour. Take a cold shower if you have to, put on some music, just don’t go back to sleep. Once you have been awake for an hour, you will be in an ideal state to attempt this.
Set your alarm again for an hour and go back to bed. This is in case you fall asleep again, so you’ll have another chance to try. You will need to use an “induction routine”. This is simply something to keep your mind busy and focused internally while you wait for your body to fall asleep. If your mind starts drifting away from this, you will be able to notice and bring it back in focus. It can be anything, like remembering a song you are familiar with, or going through a predetermined cycle of visualizations, or repeating a mantra in your head, or even counting from 1 to 1,000. Take your focus away from your body and refrain from movement. If you have a consistent problem of falling back asleep, you may want to try putting on some background music, or using a timer setup that wakes you up every 5 to 20 minutes. The key to using a timer is to not move at all when the timer beep wakes you up.
You will know you are drifting into sleep once you notice some of the following:
- High quality images or sounds flashing through your mind. They may vanish in a split second, but feel very real.
- A constant buzzing that grows in volume. If you notice this, pay attention to it and focus on controlling its volume.
- Body vibrations.
At this point you should start focusing on imagining your desired dream scenario. Eventually you will suddenly find yourself inside it. Enjoy it while you can!
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