Understanding How To Lucid Dream involves knowing what the different stages of lucid dreaming are. Obviously some are more experienced than others and will be further down the route to achieving their lucid dreaming goals. This article discusses different starting points and how to progress from there for the beginner all the way through to the more advanced.
How to Lucid Dream? For most this question would seem to appeal to beginners only. I found there are different types of beginners that start off within different stages in there Lucid Dreaming journey. Let me explain. I know people who recently discovered what lucid dreaming is only to realize they have been doing it for all their dreaming life. These people typically can give you a detailed five minute rendition or blow by blow version of last nights dream. This they can do every day. Well lets just say this was not the case with me and I had to start right at the beginning. You'll also find that if you talk to them about techniques for practicing dream awareness, while awake in order to achieve dream awareness while in a dream, they are successful without much effort at all.
If this last sentence did not make sense let me try and explain in another way. The first goal with lucid dreaming is to realize or to become conscious that you are dreaming and that you are not awake. So you are consciously aware of the fact that you are dreaming while you are asleep. Now to achieve this you have to practice checking or testing whether you are in a dream while you are awake. This can be done in different ways but one example is to have a set routine. For example every half an hour ask yourself "Am I dreaming", pinch yourself (and feel it) and look at the time on your watch twice a couple seconds apart.
The main idea involves conditioning yourself to test if you are dreaming, so that your subconscious mind keeps on requesting you to do this test. Eventually while you are in a dream the answers change FROM "no I am not in a dream"," ouch that hurt" and 10:10am & 10:10am TO "yes, I am in a dream", wow that did not hurt and 10:10am & 05:28pm.
Typically in lucid dreaming, otherwise known a conscious dreaming, if you look at your watch twice a few seconds apart, the time with each view is totally different and you do not feel being pinched and you just somehow know you are now dreaming.
Typically people need to practice this for days and weeks before they get it right. The naturally talented lucid dreamer mentioned above was able to tell me, the day after a conversation we had about double checking the time, that the previous evening they where "practiced" enough to remember to do this test in a dream. We had one conversation about it and they were able to try it in a dream and succeed within hours. Their starting point in the lucid dreaming journey was not the same as mine.
The point being that learning how to lucid dream is a journey and each individual will have a different starting point. Not to mention also a totally different paths. This is important to understand in order to know where you are on this journey to help you focus on the next techniques to practice for you. This journey's life cycle could involve the following phases.
Not only is it important to understand where you are in your journey but also to know where you want to be. There are many end destinations and they keep on changing as you reach some successfully.
Note that the above list is only a rough guide and that each phase can involve lots of ground work and practice while awake. The trick is to first learn about conscious dreaming, understanding more about each phase and then deciding what you want gain from it. Then it is simple to know where you are and what you need to do to get to your destination. From there you can easily find out exactly what lucid dreaming techniques and exercises you need to do. As you start your journey and become more experienced you'll soon notice that there are many other benefits and usage of lucid dreaming that can to be discovered and help you to archive your goals, basically you can tailor make a journey for you.
To really make the most of conscious dreaming one needs to find ways to work on your creative imagination. After all everything you experience and create in your dream comes from yourself and you need to cultivate this gift with a creative imagination. But first things first, aim to understand the big picture as discussed above, then realize where you are in it and then figure out the detailed effort involved to get to the next step. So when learning how to lucid dream make sure you know what your first goal is, you need to be very goal focused to be successful.
And lastly remember to enjoy the lucid dreaming experience from the beginning. In this case the cliché of the journey is more important or fun than reaching the destination is so true as with most things in live.
