Lucid Dreaming

For the past few months, I've been really into the idea of lucid dreaming. If you don't know what lucid dreaming is, you can read all about it on Wikipedia, but the short answer is that a lucid dream is a dream in which you know that you're dreaming. This concept has fascinated me for a long time, but only recently have I started practicing the ability to achieve a lucid dream.

For those who might think this is some sort of New Age crap, lucid dreaming has a lot of science and history to back it up. Lucid dreams have been mentioned as far back in history as St. Augustine of Hippo in 415 AD. Scientific studies of dreaming have also documented them using brain activity monitors and other such fancy gizmos.

Fact #1 about dreams is that everybody dreams. Everybody. Multiple times per night even. The problem, though, is that the part of your memory responsible for dreaming also does a great job of resetting itself upon awakening, which is why it's so easy to forget dreams in the morning. You could be having lucid dreams every night and simply forgetting them the next day. So, the first and foremost strategy for anything involving dreams is to improve your ability to recall them. Like anything else, it takes practice. For a while now, I've been documenting my dreams by keeping a dream journal. It's as simple as writing down every detail you can remember about your dream the instant you wake up.

There are techniques you can use to help this process, which I won't go into, but it seems to work over time. For me, it started as very hit-or-miss (maybe one or two a week), but now I can almost always remember at least one dream per night, and sometimes two or even three. It's also incredibly interesting to go back and read the entries for some of my past dreams. Sometimes reading them triggers my memory and I can remember having that dream, and others read like the strange rantings of a madman.

Of course, you also have to become aware that you're dreaming while the dream is taking place. Your brain has a tendency to believe what it sees, and since dreams are brain-generated, you have to convince it that what you're seeing isn't reality (shades of The Matrix, anyone?) To practice that, you have to become accustomed to performing regular "reality checks," which are some type of action with predictable results in the real world, and for which any other result would help convince your mind that you're dreaming. There are a lot of possibilities, but a common one is to look at a watch or clock, look away, then look at it again. Things like words and numbers tend to become distorted and confused in dreams. Chances are, your watch would show a different time each time you looked at it (which is why you look twice), or might even show strange characters or or other non-numerical symbols.

So far, I haven't had any lucid dreams that I can remember, but the process been enlightening nonetheless. Dreams are crazy things.