Do you know the fundamentals of lucid dreaming?

But he wakes up and then loses all interest in the dream world. So it is with the waking world also.

Just as the dream-world, being only a part of yourself and not different from you, ceases to interest you, so also the present world would cease to interest you if you awake from this waking dream, samsara, and realise that it is a part of your Self, and not an objective reality.

Because you think that you are apart from the objects around you,
you desire a thing. But if you understand that the thing was only
a thought-form you would no longer desire it.

All things are like bubbles on water.

You are the water and the objects are the bubbles.

They cannot exist apart from the water, but they are not quite the same as the water.

– Ramana Maharshi

Watch on youtube

Some people are aware of this, while others are not. One of the ways to have power over the other is not to validate their point of view.

It is possible to have an objective perception about the other that reveals their limitations to you, but this objective perception never leads to disputes.

To the contrary, it generates reciprocity in the relationship. This perception means not closing your eyes to the other’s flaws, but instead keeping your heart open while noticing them.

The most common way to punish the other for his or her limitations is by withdrawing love.

– These are the words of Sri Prem Baba: http://prembaba.org

Watch the video on Youtube

“The process of enlightenment begins by identifying what still manifests itself through the shadow. There are compulsive obsessions or behaviors that manifest in the form of a thought or a repetitive dream, like a soundtrack that consistently repeats inside of you.

For example, let’s suppose that you are compulsively remembering your family and experiencing negative feelings about them.

This indicates that you still have unfinished business or open accounts. Which is the self that presides over the situation?

First identify what the feeling is: shame, guilt, revenge…

Once you have identified the feeling, then you can identify which self is sustaining that feeling.

Maybe this self needs something from you.

Maybe you need to bring a new meaning to your story, and do something in order to free yourself from this obsession.

This is how you shine light on the dark corners of your soul.”

– These are the words of Sri Prem Baba: http://prembaba.org

Watch it on YouTube here

It seems like everyone tends to define lucid dreaming in their own way. Some define lucid dreaming as “realizing one is dreaming while they are still dreaming.”

Others say you need more than that: “when one realizes one is dreaming while inside the dream and can control the dream.”

Another one I’ve heard: “you must realize you are dreaming, and also know you have a physical body back in your bed.”

The closest to the “real” definition of lucid dreaming is the first: “realizing one is dreaming while they are still dreaming.”

There is no “Real” Definition of Lucid Dreaming

What definition is real depends on the person. There is no one real definition as even if one defines lucid dreaming in the most popular way “awareness that one is dreaming while inside a dream,” there are many levels of that awareness.

1^st Level: Low Level Lucidity

For example, you can have a certain level of realization, what I call a lower level lucidity where you simply find yourself doing things that you can’t normally do in waking life.

You just accept it without question and don’t even really try to explore it with any thought or experimentation, you just do.

2^nd Level: Intermediate Lucidity

The next level up from that I call intermediate lucidity and that is when you are also doing things you can’t normally do in waking life, like flying, or jumping high, or putting your hands through walls.

But this time there is a sense of more conscious exploration. You find you can jump a bit higher than normal, so you try to jump even higher, then higher, and you see how much you can push it.

Or you start running fast, then realize if you try you can run as fast as the cars next to you.

There is a type of conscious exploration where you are experimenting with the laws of this new world, but there is not yet the high-level cognitive understanding that you are dreaming and this is why you can jump like superman.

3^rd Level: High Level Lucidity

The next level I call high level lucidity. Here, your critical mind activates inside the dream and you realize you are in the dream world. You might say “this is a dream” out loud, or simply think it.

You may or may not think about your body back in your bed. On the upper end of high level lucidity you remember the intention you set for yourself when going to sleep. You remember the action you want to take. Whether it is to fly, to ask your subconscious questions, or to improve your skills in waking life.

4^th Level: Advanced Lucidity

The highest level I call advanced lucidity. This is where you can completely control your dream. This is a very wide spectrum.

This goes from being able to manifest a simple object like a spoon, all the way to multiplying your consciousness into a thousand dream characters and perceiving from all of them at once.

In this arena one has the thorough understanding that they are in the dream world and therefore the only limits are those they put on themselves.

Most of us are so conditioned by living all our lives in our physical bodies, that when we start to spend more time conscious in our dreaming body, the laws of the physical world seem to get imprinted in our dream world.

Maybe we take off to fly and bounce off the ground. Or we simply can’t fathom or don’t think of doing something, simply because we are conditioned everyday in the physical world that it isn’t possible.

The possibilities are infinite.

How do you define lucid dreaming? Let us know in the comments below.

“Death is a frightening word, but it is only a myth that imprisons us.

You overcome death and free yourself from this conditioning, this myth, when you allow yourself to be guided by love and become a silent witness.

For this to happen, you should practice self-observation, which is the first key.

Observe your thoughts, emotions and sensations, just as the sky observes the clouds passing by without getting attached to the fact that they are light or dark clouds.

Simply observe and remain the same.

Continue developing this power of self-observation until it becomes as natural as breathing.”

– Sri Prem Baba

Learn to see past the myth of death with lucid dreaming.

When the topic of astral projection and lucid dreaming comes up, I hear people making all sorts of claims about what astral projection means and what lucid dreaming means.

Lucid dreamers can get attached to their preferred skill and think it’s better than astral projection. Astral projectors do the same.

In the end, there is really no battle. They are very similar in their end result, but they take different routes to get there.

Explaining Astral Projection

Astral projection occurs when you consciously enter your dreaming body, also called your astral body, while remaining completely conscious of the process.

A great example of this is people in meditation. They will sit down and allow their consciousness to enter their dreaming body without blanking out or losing consciousness.

There are many techniques to achieve this, including the popular rope technique, where you visualize yourself climbing up a rope, higher and higher out of your body.

Often during astral projection, you will find yourself close to your physical body once you have moved into your dreaming body. This is certainly not the case all the time, especially if you attempt to astral project with a different destination in mind.

However, this effect happens much more with astral projection than it does with lucid dreaming.

Why might this be?

Explaining Lucid Dreaming

In lucid dreaming, you become aware once your consciousness has already moved into the dreaming body. You are not aware of the whole transition. You are in your dreaming body already, and then your conscious mind wakes up and realizes you are in the dream world.

Because you have already moved into the dream world, your scenery will often not be your room, or around your physical body. This is because you have already moved to another place in the dream world.

You can certainly travel back to your room, or wherever you fell asleep to attempt to view your physical body.

WILD – Astral Projection or Lucid Dreaming?

WILD stands for Wake Induced Lucid Dream, and this is where the already overlapping line gets more blurry.

A WILD is when someone lays down and attempts to fall asleep consciously, being aware of the whole process along the way.

So technically this is actually astral projection when done perfectly. However, for most people, they lose consciousness even for small periods when transitioning. It can be very hard to spot because the realms are very subtle, and memory of these times can slip away easily if not locked in immediately afterward.

Many astral projectors and those in the lucid dreaming community will disagree when I say WILD is actually astral projection because they are so used to seeing it as a technique for lucid dreaming.

Others will see that the lines start to blur here, and we don’t need to split hairs past this level.

I do find it helpful to understand the simple difference between lucid dreaming and astral projection though.

Lucid dreaming = becoming conscious while already in the dreaming body

Astral projection = being aware of the entire transition of consciousness from the physical body to the dreaming body. Or put in another way: falling asleep consciously…

Do you agree with these definitions? If not make your voice heard in the comments. If so, still make your voice heard!

This video is from the wisdom of Prem Baba

Lucid Dreaming and the Inner Critic

The inner critic is something you’ll have to deal with when you are learning to lucid dream.

It will pop up and try to ruin your day by convincing you that you’ll never be able to lucid dream consistently. It will demand that you be better. That you be better than others. That you learn faster.

You can recognize the inner critic is rearing its ugly head when you find yourself comparing your progress in lucid dreaming to others. When you think either:

“I am better at this then they are.”

or…

“It only took him 4 days and it’s been 4 months for me. I’ll never get it.”

Everyone learns at their own pace. Some it might take 4 months to have their first lucid dream, but they will then consistently lucid dream. Others might get it on their first try.

The real question is, can you sustain your lucid dreaming practice and consistently be lucid? Or can you be lucid when you would like, and sleep normally when you like?

Can you bring this kind of fluidity to your practice?

Some of these methods to induce lucid dreams might be strange to you, but you know what?

They work.

Later in the post I’ll give you the most important lucid dream induction method of all, so make sure you keep your eyes peeled.

1. Explosively simple reality checks

If you’ve learned a bit about lucid dreaming then you are probably familiar with reality checks, but for those who haven’t…

A reality check is when you stop the hamster wheel of your mind for even just a moment and truly question whether you are awake or dreaming.

A true reality check requires that you stop, truly ask yourself if you are dreaming, and then perform a certain action that will confirm whether you are dreaming or not.

You must perform these reality checks throughout the day if you want to become a lucid dreamer.

One of the better ones is to hold your nose and try to breathe. In a dream you’ll be able to breathe, whereas here in waking life you of course won’t be able to. However, this check works 80-85% of the time.

I teach a method that will work 100% of the time in Lucid Dreaming Mastery. I also give you an exact step-by-step process of performing a proper reality check that can save you months of wasted effort.

Unfortunately most people do reality checks wrong, which means their progress goes very slowly.

When you do reality checks often during the day, you’ll start to do them in your dreams. This will in turn induce lucid dreams because your check will tell you that you are dreaming.

2. Triumphant affirmations that rock your world

Before falling asleep at night and the first moment of waking up in morning are two crucial periods for learning how to induce lucid dreaming.

Before you fall asleep you must focus all your intent on one affirmation: “The next time I dream I’ll realize I’m dreaming.”

Repeat this as you fall asleep. Make sure it is the last thought you have as you drift into sleep.

In order for this to work well, you have to actually feel it. If you repeat it mechanically then it tells your subconscious that you really aren’t interested to induce lucid dreams.

Feel and think this affirmation as you fall asleep.

3. Binaural beating your way to inducing lucid dreams

Still a relatively new technology, lucid dream binaural beats allow you to induce lucid dreams with sound.

They work by entraining your brain into the right frequencies for inducing lucid dreams. One frequency plays in the right ear, another in the left. Your brain takes the difference of these frequencies and entrains to that.

So if I want to entrain my brain to a 21 hertz beta frequency, then I could play 300 in my left ear and 321 in my right.

By using multiple frequencies you can guide your brain into the right state to induce a lucid dream. It’s pretty cool stuff.

See our full article on how to use binaural beats for lucid dreaming.

Sometimes people refer to these binaural beats as lucid dream music. It might be 8 hours long, with nice soothing nature sounds in the background.

4. The science of siestas

Taking a nap??

Seriously?

It can’t be that easy, can it?

Turns out that our normal sleep biorhythms make naps a natural part of our day.

What hidden power lies in our afternoon naps?

We can use these natural biorhythms to induce lucid dreams in a very efficient way.

During naps we normally go straight into REM sleep, which is where most “storyline dreams” occur. The key is that we don’t have to go through deep sleep in order to get into this REM state.

We can go straight into it.

When trying to maintain consciousness what do you think is easier?

1. Going through the coma-like state of non-REM sleep before starting to dream
2. Going right from waking into dream-like states

#2. Obviously.

This is called the Wake Back To Bed method, or WBTB. Often this lucidity technique is combined with the wake-initiated lucid dream (WILD) method to allow someone to lucid dream tonight (it can happen).

Using this method you’ll often cross through sleep paralysis, where you’ll see hypnagogic imagery and can experience various fears and intense sensations.

So why go with #2?

People don’t have much success retaining consciousness in comas, and that is exactly the challenge of trying to retain awareness as you going through deep sleep.

It’s an advanced practice and one to strive toward, but for now we are mostly focused on how to wake up inside our dreams. Deep sleep will come later.

5. Magic lucid dreaming devices that do the work for you?

Lucid dreaming devices attempt to induce lucid dreams by sending a signal to the dreamer while they are in the dream.

The dreamer is supposed to recognize the signal coming through the dream and then realize they are dreaming. This basically acts like a dream sign: a sign that you are dreaming.

The most common device is a mask that detects REM sleep, then flashes lights on your eyelids. These lights are supposed to come through in your dreams.

When you see the lights in your dreams you are supposed to realize you are dreaming.

You might have noticed that I said “supposed” to multiple times.

That’s because it’s often not as easy as it’s made to sound.

You actually have to go through a similar process if you learn to lucid dream without one of these devices.

There still needs to be a trigger, a signal. You still must recognize this signal and from that recognition realize you are dreaming.

The lucid dreaming devices help with the first part, the signal, but the second part is still your own work.

6. Supplements…a tricky path

I am usually very wary to recommend people induce lucid dreams using supplements instead of using a proper lucid dream technique.

First, there are all the medical aspects to take into account, and this is something everyone must research or talk to a doctor on their own about.

That being said, I can’t deny that supplements can be used to induce lucid dreams, and I personally have experimented with many of them during my exploration into the lucid dreaming universe.

The two best I found were Calea Zacatechichi and Galanatamine.

Calea Zacatechichi is also known as the “African Dream Herb” and was used by African shamans to explore the dream world.

It can give VERY intense dreams, so make sure you are ready if you take it before bed.

Having these super vivid dreams can truly enhance your dream recall, allowing you to remember your dream in stark detail. This is a good time to get out your dream journal and start writing down your dreams.

Galantamine is an extract from the Red Spider Lilly plant is also a very powerful way to induce lucid dreams.

Unlike Calea, Galantamine is an extract, not a plant (though you can get stronger extracts of Calea).

Use your own common sense when experimenting with these.

7. The miraculous and mysterious power of meditation

Meditation allows one to work more consciously with the various states of consciousness that are possible for a human to experience.

Normal our awareness is limited so a small band of states of consciousness, but as we explore meditation and lucid dreaming we expand our awareness to include other normal, but subtle states.

A good example is our eye’s ability to see only the “visible spectrum.” It’s named visible spectrum not because nothing can see outside of this range, it’s just that human eyes can’t.

Bees and other insects have the ability to perceive frequencies outside of the “visible spectrum.” It’s actually pretty arrogant for us humans to call it that when you think of it.

Meditation expands our ability to be aware in states of consciousness that are normal outside the “perceivable spectrum.”

8. Hypnotic tricks of the mind

One very cool way to induce lucid dreams comes through the wonderful art of hypnosis.

Since we have to activate a part of our subconscious to remember we are dreaming while we are inside the dream, we need to work on our subconscious.

What better way to work on our subconscious than through hypnosis?

You can embed an affirmation in your subconscious that will then flower when you are in a dream, thereby inducing a lucid dream.

9. Shameless longing for a jaw-dropping experience

Hands down THE most important way to induce lucid dreams.

Without this, the rest of the methods either won’t work or won’t work very well.

You have to want it.

It can’t be something that would just be nice to have. That doesn’t work.

When you play this game, you have to really want it.

If you have a shameless longing to experience lucid dreaming, it will come.

You will do what is necessary, and subtle things inside you will be rearranged to satisfy your longing.

If you don’t yet have that longing then a good place to start is to read about the benefits of lucid dreaming.

If you have a strong longing, then you’ve got it. You’ve found the secret.

Now that you’ve got the secret….act on it!

Get out there and dream dammit!