CONTROL YOUR MIND: A QUICK GUIDE TO LUCID DREAMING by Sophie Latham

CONTROL YOUR MIND: A QUICK GUIDE TO LUCID DREAMING by Sophie Latham

Lucid dreaming is when you are aware you’re dreaming without waking up in real life. You are present within your dream.

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DREAM LUCIDLY?

When you’re dreaming, your entire environment – the people present, your surroundings – is a product of you, and your subconscious rules over it all. It’s a great way to learn about yourself, but most importantly, lucid dreaming enables you to control what happens in your dreams. Those who suffer from frequent nightmares turn to lucid dreaming to confront them. Most of the time, people want to learn this technique to be able to do something which is impossible in real life. For example, most want to fly and defy gravity. Some do it to speak with a dead relative or even with their past selves to come to terms with issues they may have. It can be a very useful tool to get into your own mind, but the three step process requires dedication for it to work.

STEP 1: JOURNALING

The first step to lucid dreaming is recording your dreams, and teaching yourself to remember them. Try putting reminders around your room and keeping a notebook by your bedside table. As soon as you wake up, before moving – as this will shift your surroundings and the dream will slip away from you – write down everything you can remember about your dream, any details you can think of. Focus on your senses: what could you see, hear, taste, smell and feel? Mentally walk through what happened, one event at a time. Who was there? What was your prevailing emotion (joy, humiliation, panic, frustration, paralysis, anger, confusion…)?

As you keep this journal, read your past dreams every once in a while: you should start to notice recurring patterns which could be people, elements, feelings, or places that are always present. These are your “dream signs”.

STEP 2: REALITY CHECKS

As soon as you identify your “dream signs”, you’ll know what to watch out for so that you can tell you are dreaming. In order to remember to do “reality checks” in dreams, you need to establish a habit of doing reality checks in real life (when you walk through a doorway, when you check the time) to get used to them. Reality checks are quick tests that aim to check the reality of your surroundings. The easiest and most popular checks are:

- Looking at your hands: whilst you are dreaming, anatomy becomes quite fluid and so you are likely to notice something abnormal, such as having an incorrect number of fingers. If you regularly stare at your hands and count your fingers you will train yourself to test your surroundings, and eventually, you will do it whilst you’re dreaming and realize you aren’t awake.

- Checking the time: in dreams, time is very difficult to read and it doesn’t flow as it should. When a clock isn’t displaying properly, or when the time changes unusually if you glance away and look back, you are dreaming.

- Reading a sign: the same principle applies to printed writing. In dreams, words and letters seem to dance around the page and it is very difficult to make any sense of them. Checking a sign - or anything with writing on it - when you encounter your “dream signs” will ensure you do this while you are actually dreaming.

- Testing gravity: If you jump, do you float down or drop? Gravity is arbitrary in dreams, so a weightless feeling will indicate you aren’t conscious.

STEP 3: STAY IN THE DREAM

The most difficult part of lucid dreaming is staying in the dream once you’ve realised you are dreaming. For the majority of people, the excitement of becoming lucid wakes them up in real life.

The best advice to avoid waking up after becoming lucid is to focus strongly on one thing in your dream (preferably something close up e.g. your fingertips) or to start spinning, in order to keep dreaming through the ‘swooping’ feeling. Once this fades, you are dreaming lucidly and can do anything you wish!

Sophie Latham