Lucid Dreaming For Beginners Step by Step (part 1): Remembering Your Dreams
Some say that dreams let us unlock our brains awesome potential, when we're awake our brains are constantly active, but when we're asleep our brains get even busier.
It's when our body is laying perfectly still that practically every area of our brain comes alive, that's when we begin to dream.
There's only one part in our brain that shuts down completely, and that is our logic center. Not being restricted by logic or reason, our dream brain can travel within fantastic worlds it creates.
Knowing how to stay awake and in control within a dream will allow you to simulate any imaginable experience, generate fresh and creative ideas, help you deal with psychological issues and help overcome nightmares.
This can be achieved by learning to harness the sleeping brains power by using a technique called Lucid dreaming, the key is to learn how to know that you're dreaming without waking.
In this video Shanti speaks candidly of her own experience, describing the methods she uses and how she learned to induce lucid dreaming.
What is Lucid Dreaming and Why Would You Want to?
Not a lot of people talk about lucid dreaming but it's a very universal thing in the human experience. Lucid dreaming is were you wake up in your dream and realize you're dreaming without waking up into waking life, so you stay awake and present within your dream.
It's an extraordinary experience, some people only have this experience a couple of times in their life, other people are very prone to having lucid dreams all the time. But it's something that you can cultivate in your life and it's really quite easy if you have the dedication and time to give to it.
So, I've been thinking about were to start and I thought I would begin the video with saying... What is lucid dreaming? Why would you want to cultivate that experience in your life? And I would say that the overall reason, there's so many reasons, but the primary reason is because we digest life on multiple levels.
You know there's the waking personality, ego and the pre-frontal lobe, and our understanding of the world as we digest it coming in. But there's a whole other process going on inside of you at all times which is your subconscious processing and understanding what you're going through.
Now when you're dreaming, the entire environment around you from your surroundings to the people you interact with are all a product of you, and your subconscious rules it all. It's a wonderful way to learn about those underlying processes that are happening inside of you anyway, that you may have never been aware were there.
Another really good reason I'll throw out there is that for people who have frequent nightmares, lucidity is a wonderful way to confront those things.
You know in your dreams the more you fear something, because it's all product of your brain the more you fear it you give it power, and the more you fear something the bigger and badder it becomes.
But if you can face that fear, almost universally what happens there is a transformation and usually that incredibly negative thing transforms into something beautiful and awe inspiring, and gives you a lesson that you can take home with you that morning.
There are three steps and I will explain them in detail, (1) is remembering your dreams which involves journaling, (2) is finding your dream signs, indicators that you're dreaming, and (3) is doing reality checks, which bring the two together and I will talk about all of these.
Step 1: Remembering Your Dreams
Number one, remembering your dreams. How many of us remember our dreams? Some people not at all, some people have crazy dreams they remember all the time, it really has to do with how well you're sleeping, were your attention is when you wake up, and how much attention you give to the dream after the fact.
So, first of all, if you're not sleeping a lot, like if you're sleeping 4 to 5 hours a night every night, you may not actually be getting that deep involved REM sleep that you get after a couple of cycles of REM where you're having these incredibly vivid poignant dreams.
(Rapid Eye Movement 'REM' during sleep is an indicator that a person is dreaming)
You're most powerful dreams are the ones you have right before you wake up in the morning. So the first thing you have to do is sleep more and It doesn't mean you have to do it every night, but depending on how dedicated you are you may have to start setting aside enough time to be able to sleep enough to be able to have the dreams in the first place.
The second part of that I was talking about is were you're attention is first thing in the morning. So when you first wake up if the first thing you're thinking about is "my alarms going off"... "my phones got five messages"... "what do I have to do today"... "man I have to pee", your dream is gone.
Within those first 5 seconds of waking if you don't focus your attention on the dream, unless it was a particular poignant dream, you'll probably will just lose the whole thing at it's gone.
Keeping a Dream Journal
So it's very important to train yourself to, first thing in the morning, think "what was I dreaming". The most useful way to remember your dreams, and infact it's an essential criteria for lucid dreaming, is dream journaling.
So that basically means when you first wake up, you think, "what did I just dream", and you go through the dream and you figure out all the details and then you get up, and as soon as possible get to writing down that dream.
There are some tips involved in remembering your dreams. First things first, you could put post-its or notes or something all around your room so that even if your alarm is on your cell phone and there's a message that goes along with it, you could make the message 'Remember Your Dream'.
Second tip, is to not move, because when you shift your body's position you're regenerating all your neural ends, all of your nerve endings and increasing sensation to your body, which lets go of the sensations that were all going on in your brain.
If you stay in the exact same position you can go back into that dream space because you're not yet bombarding your body with senses.
(2) Lucid Dreaming For Beginners Step by Step (part 2): Dream Signs and Reality Checks
(3) Lucid Dreaming For Beginners Step by Step (part 3): Staying Lucid Inside a Dream
(4) Dealing With Nightmares And Disturbing Dreams
(5) Lucid Dreaming For Treating Recurring Nightmares
(6) Simple to Use Dream Interpretation Formula to Unlock The True Meaning of Dreams
