Every year I teach a workshop called Lucid Dreaming Kung Fu: how to have dreams where you know you’re dreaming so you can take control, live out all your wildest fantasies in living detail, converse directly with your subconscious mind, and work on creative or personal problems. It’s fun and fascinating stuff.

I’ve been having these dreams since I was 3 years-old and consider myself an advanced self-taught student of the art.

The article below reports my system of techniques that one needs to learn in order to have regular lucid dreams (or, as I’ve begun to prefer, ‘conscious dreams’). These are my four easy steps to conscious dreaming, organized into sets of methods to be practiced at different times of the day, every day. Good luck and have fun.

Dreaming is a Discipline

Lucid dreaming is a set of disciplines, meaning they require commitment and time set aside to practice regularly. The good news is that the effort required is only mental, but it does take strong conviction to experience the benefits consistently.

Take a moment right now to ask yourself why you want to do this. Emotions and feeling are what drive this. Tap into any and all strong emotions that lie behind your intellectual curiosity. Imagine what it would feel like to experience the dreams you want to have. Acknowledge that you have the power to do it. Promise yourself right now to use that power. If you ever find your efforts slacking, remind yourself of this promise and renew it.

Getting into shape for lucid dreaming is a lot like getting into physical shape. It’s fairly easy to start and you quickly start to experience benefits: more vivid dreams, much-improved dream recall, heightened awareness and peace in waking life. The full-on lucid dreams may only occur sporadically, if at all, for several weeks. Stick with it. At some point you will have a dramatic break-through, and this will bolster your commitment.

It may take several months to a year of consistent discipline to reach top shape. It all depends on your mental effort and conviction. Once you’re in top shape, you’ll experience lucid dreaming more or less consistently, up to several times a week. And once in shape, it becomes a natural habit to stay in shape. The experienced benefits become incentive enough to stay with it.

The Four Disciplines

Each discipline is a set of techniques named for the time-of-day during which you practice it. Have patience. The goal is to create a new set of habits, which takes some time. Persevere and you will succeed. The timeline is different for everyone. You may succeed tonight.

Tackle these disciplines roughly in the order given, moving to the next one as you become relatively solid on the previous one, working up to practicing all of them simultaneously. You’ll find that they naturally build on each other: you’ll know you’re ready for the next step.

For further reading and discussion, see the Lucid Dream wikipedia article and the Dreamviews online community.

The Four Disciplines are:

1. Sleeping – going to bed at night
2. Waking – the moment of waking
3. Walking – during the day
4. Dreaming – inside a dream

Sleeping – disciplines for going to bed at night

Get Enough Sleep

Lucid dreaming happens when your mind is awake while your body is still asleep. However, unconscious sleep and dreams are critical to your cognitive and emotional health so it’s important to get enough rest. A well-rested conscious mind is much more likely to become awake and alert inside a dream. Go to bed early. Get plenty of sleep. This is also important because you’ll need plenty of unrushed time in the morning for the WAKING disciplines.

Waking – disciplines for the moment of waking

Gentle Waking

Wake slowly and gently. Don’t rush out of bed to begin your day with your mind jumping to your concerns and to-do list. As soon as you realize you are waking, don’t move a muscle and don’t open your eyes. If you must turn off an alarm, move minimally to do so. Lie still and think only about the dreams you are waking up from. Review them carefully, backwards and forwards, not skipping any parts, especially the interesting ones. Review as much detail as you can until you feel you’ve committed it to short term memory.

Dream Journal

Reach for your dream journal which should always be kept by your sleeping place. Write the date and your location (for future reference). You may find it helpful to jot a quick list of key words or phrases as an outline so you won’t forget things while writing. Write as much of your night’s dreams as you can recall, including details. I find it helpful to write in the present tense.

Walking – disciplines to practice throughout the day

Dreams on the Mind

After you get up to begin your day, continue to think about your dreams. What emotions came up? Who else was there? If possible, share your dream with someone else. Throughout the day, reflect on your dreams from last night or any night. As a general rule, the more you think about dreams and dreaming while you are awake, the more likely you are to think about them when you are asleep, leading to more conscious dreaming.

Reality Check

Throughout your day, at random intervals, ask yourself sincerely: “Am I dreaming right now?” Don’t just robotically ask the question, knowing you’re going to say ‘no’. Sincerely give it consideration. It helps to associate reality checking with an external cue to remind you, like anytime you see a flashing light, anytime you hear a phone ring, anytime you’re paused at a red light, etc.

You Can Fly

Whenever you find yourself at a high place — a cliff, a balcony, up in a tree — imagine jumping off and flying away. This habit will lead to more flying in your dreams.

Dreaming – disciplines to practice inside of a dream

Grounding in the Dream Body

If you practice all the above disciplines you will eventually have a dream wherein you realize that you are dreaming. The immediate reflex will be to wake up. Resist this and instead focus on grounding yourself in the dream body. Two useful techniques: 1) dream spinning, spin around with your arms out to keep your balance) and 2) looking at your hands as you wiggle your fingers. Any sort of physical activity that requires balance and/or concentration should work to keep you grounded.

Do Nothing

Ignore all dream characters, situations and narratives. Set aside all objects, goals and plans. Do not get interested, engaged or frightened by anything happening around you. Dreams are very good at producing amazing, interesting, beautiful or frightful things to keep you engaged with the dream story — this will lead you to forget that you are dreaming. Instead, do nothing. Sit down and rub the ground with your hand. Listen to the birds. Be completely idle. You are not just the dream body: you are the whole dream world. So after grounding the body, you must settle the world. This will clear the stage for you to take charge.

Dream Control

Energy follows thought, in life and in the dream world. In dreams, clear thoughts and feelings are potent and will instantly manifest. So to control your dreams you must learn to control your thoughts and desires. If you want to fly, you must think only of flying, never of falling. You must completely discard all doubt in your ability to accomplish something. Any doubt that creeps in will neutralize any intention and you’ll manifest failure instead of success. It takes practice, but you’ll get the hang of it. Desire and emotion are very powerful in this regard for aligning and focusing your intention. Don’t just think it — desire it, wish for it, ache for it, yearn for it. It will come true.

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You see, there’s a kind of Holy Grail in computer science. No one has been able to write an algorithm that can compute solutions to a particularly hard set of problems (known as NP-complete) in a reasonable amount of time. A reasonable amount of time means less than a trillion years or so.

One example is the so-called Traveling Salesman problem: what is the one most efficient route a traveling salesman can take to visit all the cities in his sales area using the least amount of gas? You can figure out the optimal route for a handful of cities, but as soon as you get above ten or so, the complexity of the problem grows astronomical. Analogous problems show up for routing traffic on the internet, routing airplanes between airports, coloring world maps, and whenever you go on a run of errands and want to be efficient with your driving time.

Computer scientists have found plenty of algorithms that approximate the optimal solution. That is, they compute solutions that are merely excellent but not The Best. One thing you should know about computer scientists, though, is that they are obsessed with optimality. And the Holy Grail algorithm would make this optimization problem tractable. No one knows if it exists. And no one has been able to prove that it doesn’t exist (though they’ve tried). What we do know is that if an algorithm is ever found to solve any one of the NP-complete problems, we’ll be able to solve all of them in one fell swoop. They are equivalent to each other. That’s why it’s generally considered to be the most important open question in mathematics and tops the list of the Millenium Prize unsolved problems. Finding the Holy Grail algorithm would mean instant fame, fortune and a shiny pedestal in history for the discoverer.

Promising paths

I once worked for an eccentric and brilliant Computer Science professor named Bob who was determined, in his own way, to find the Holy Grail algorithm. Bob had a hilarious sense of humor, was a great teacher, and could read Yoga sutras in the original Sanskrit. Working in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Bob had developed ingenious methods for getting computers to learn. He’d made money on the stock market by writing an automatic stock-trading AI. He’d created a chess playing AI that started out with zero knowledge of the game but learned to play respectable chess after losing (and learning from) thousands of games. (Most chess-playing AIs are pre-programmed with sophisticated chess strategies by their human creators. They don’t have to learn the hard way.)

Yet despite all his practical successes solving problems that demanded merely excellent solutions (as opposed to optimal ones), Bob had Holy Grail on the brain. He was obsessed with a particular NP-complete problem known as the N-puzzle; you’re probably familiar with the 8-puzzle version, the old sliding tile game where you have to slide the 8 tiles scrambled on a 3×3 grid back into order. The N-puzzle is the general case of the 8-puzzle for a grid of any size. Bob felt that existing algorithms weren’t making optimal use of past experience — they were ignoring valuable lessons learned in the early stages of problem solving that could more quickly lead to a solution later on. He called it a waste of computation. And he was convinced he could discover a new path to solving the puzzle and thereby find the Grail.

Of all my time spent working in Computer Science, the months I spent working with Bob, searching for the Holy Grail algorithm, showed me most clearly that it wasn’t the field for me. That’s not to say it wasn’t time well-spent. I loved the work and always looked forward to our next meeting. It was fascinating and fed the part of me that sought beauty in the mathematical and abstract. I just eventually came to the conclusion that I was more interested in human beings than computers. And of course, I continue to be fascinated by the combination of the two. Still, my time with Bob was illuminating, and I think it’s a story worth sharing.

We would meet once a week or so. In order to discover some new foothold for solving the N-puzzle — which begins in a random state and ends up in exactly one solution state — we dreamt up (and I programmed) myriads of ways to map out its strange, mountainous landscape; to find a way to see the end from wherever you happened to be starting from. It’s like being trapped inside a garden maze with someone calling to you from the exit. You can follow the sound of the voice and know you are getting closer; you pick routes that seem to head in the right direction, but over and over you come to a dead end that stops just short of the exit. So now you have to backtrack and try a different route, one that didn’t look as promising the first time you saw it. In other words, the voice calling to you is not enough. You need to be able to look down a path without walking down it and somehow know if it’s promising or not. If you can figure out a way to do that, you’ve solved NP-complete and found the Holy Grail.

Each meeting with Bob went much the same. I would share what I’d tried that week and point out the flaw I’d discovered in our earlier reasoning. Over the course of an hour, we’d inevitably have a leap of insight into a promising new technique to try out. We were back on the brink of Eureka! As the meeting wound down, the conversation would drift… to chess, metaphysics, Sanskrit, stock market prediction, yoga, or the philosophy of J. Krishnamurti.

One afternoon in his office, we sat talking while chainsaws buzzed gratingly outside Bob’s window. Every ten minutes or so, an enormous redwood tree would come crashing down not fifty yards from where we sat. They were clear cutting a redwood grove to make room for the new Engineering building. As it fell, each tree made the most horrific and tortured moaning sound, what seemed more like a blue whale’s death rattle than a majestic tree. I made a remark to Bob about the beautiful and sad old trees. Bob turned and looked out the window.

“I know, it’s terrible. What a waste of computation.”

Later that week, I was up all night, coding our latest wizardry, some little algorithmic sleight-of-hand we’d dreamt up. Inevitably, another flaw in our reasoning stared back at me from the terminal screen in the strange half-light of dawn. Another devil in the details. Another promising path that dead-ended just short of the exit.

The weeks slid by. During the drifting, philosophical epilogues to our meetings, I began to wonder if Bob secretly knew our Holy Grail search was futile. Was he playing a sophisticated joke on me? Was the N-puzzle merely a kind of algorithmic Zen koan intended to reveal the limits of my own mind, in order for me to let go of it? Was our collaboration an allegory for the futility of striving after rational answers to absurd questions? Was he trying to tell me that life was purposeless?

After precisely one too many of those Holy Grail nights, I found myself at a crossroads. I took a good long look down the path I was about to take — without walking down it: there I saw my future life as a computer scientist, hunched over my desk, alone, twiddling bits through the long night. And you know what? It didn’t look promising.

A waste of computation, really.

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It was an unconventional talk, as academic lectures go, for Tufte was speaking “in the first person” about his own life: his origins in rural Nebraska, his education and formative years, his mentors who influenced his thinking, and the turning points that signaled moments of profound reorientation. As Tufte noted, for a sample size of N=1, the estimated variance is infinite; so other sources should be consulted.

Edward Tufte at Stanford, 2006. Photo by Daniel Steinbock.

Tufte has had a remarkable career and speaks as someone who appears to have found the courage to follow his bliss, leaving a tenured professorship at Yale to self-publish his famous books on visual information, go on speaking tours, and make large-scale landscape art in his Connecticut backyard.

There were three principles I took away from his talk, summarizing Tufte’s notion of a life well-lived.

Contribute to ‘forever knowledge.’

The most important decision a researcher makes is choosing what problem to focus on. One should choose problems that are not only profoundly important, but ones for which good progress is possible. It’s worth nothing to work on grand problems and make no progress. Tufte’s own compass for this decision: contribute to Forever Knowledge. That is, create knowledge that will be universally useful to humankind in any time or place in human history. Tufte ditched his career as a political economy theorist because he found he was working on only temporarily important problems, things he decided were not worth his “time, energy, passion and mind.”

Be self-exemplifying.

In whatever one’s work, be not only a great communicator of ideas and practices, be an exemplar of those same practices and this will communicate the value of what you are saying far better than anything else. Tufte’s books are not only superb treatises on the visual display of information, they are also exemplary demonstrations of clear visual communication. I call them the Kama Sutra of information design.

Strive for personal utopia.

Here again, Tufte is, as he presents it, self-exemplifying. While utopian cultures may be unattainable, you can pretty well approximate an ideal life through clarity of purpose, courage to act on that purpose, and, most importantly, doing what you love.

Shall we follow?

Tufte opened his talk with a poem, excerpted from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I’ll leave it to you to interpret what he meant by it.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Recommended: Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte

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I created word clouds like this for every faculty member at the retreat to visualize their interests based on research statements and resumes. It was a treat to watch such great minds interacting and using the clouds as launching points for conversations.

I encourage you to check out TagCrowd and play with making your own word clouds from your writings, resume, poetry, chat logs, or whatever suits your fancy.

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Late morning sun is warm and bright, here at the June edge of a Santa Cruz summer — a wonderful condition. The two-thousand-or-so crowd of moms, dads, grandparents, professors, friends and lovers fills the Porter College quad to overflowing. They churn in happy cacophany. In the middle of it all: the black-robed bloc of soon-to-be-graduates, sweating in the sun. And up above, the great oak trees sway, their music inaudible above the crowd sound.

I am sitting behind the provost, faculty and fellows on stage, eyes closed in meditation. I listen to the sentimental speeches: a dance professor who urges us to be passionate people; a fellow student who bears to us her honeycomb heart; the provost who commends our achievements and foretells our great works. Meanwhile, the breath goes in and out, and with it goes all fear, anxiety, pride, hesitation. The provost calls my name and I rise, black robes flowing toward the heavy podium and an ocean of faces. With palms laid face-up on the wood I take a deep breath. I speak:

“This is dedicated to the one I love…..”

An eruption of smiles and laughter as I pause before completing the invocation:

“….You.”

I look into the crowd before me and begin a slow scan of the faces — trying, to the limit of my ability, to make eye contact with each and every person. As I do, they slowly catch on to the meaning of my words. Now the smiles are ten-fold wider, the laughter ten-fold louder. There are a lot of people in the audience. It takes a long time. I make a complete circle, turning to include the faculty and administrators sitting behind me, until once again I am facing the ocean, now totally silent but vibrating with glee. Up above, I hear the wind blowing through the oak trees like a great, invisible breath. I begin:

I come before you in this moment, not as a bearer of words, but of a Word.

The human genome is a single, glorious Word three billion letters in length. And though spelled from an alphabet of only four characters, this one Word is more profound than all the words uttered by all our poets. For the sound of its articulation is the human being, and, by extension: all the poetry, the cave paintings, and atom bombs that have sprung from our hands, mouths and minds.

Human creativity is Nature’s creativity, expressing through us.

Now science races to transcribe the text of our genome. When UC Santa Cruz became the first institution to share this text freely on the Internet for all to see, our species took yet another step towards a great Initiation. For with the deciphering of DNA’s code, the flesh will be made Word. We will step back to contemplate the very bodies in which we are clothed.

Through the vehicle of human cognition, Nature is striving to understand itself. And the arrival of this understanding will serve as The Great Reminder: that we and every species of plant, animal and microbe are branches on a Tree of Life that has been growing on this planet for three and a half billion years. Each branch is a unique expression of Nature’s endless creativity; and humanity is but the most recent branchlet, straining up toward the Sun.

Did you know? You share half your genetic code with common yeast. You are 90% genetically identical to the field mouse. And only 1% separates you from the chimpanzee.

I pause as the graduates break out in wild monkey hoots and screeches (a Porter College tradition frowned upon by the administration).

And the difference between you and everyone else in this audience? A mere tenth of a percent.

What makes humankind unique among all the branches in the Tree of Life? It is our Creative Intellect, reflecting in microcosm Nature’s own creative power to fashion novel forms out of our environment. Our own creations, artistic and technological, are themselves yet further branchings in Nature’s Tree.

Thus it’s no wonder that the most advanced developments of our Information Age bear such close resemblance to Nature’s own forms: the World Wide Web, extending our collective memory in a global embrace, bears a family resemblance to the brain’s own network organization. Computer scientists design search algorithms based on the foraging patterns of ants. Digital information storage, massively parallel computation, nanotechnology — these are all basic functions of DNA’s double helix. To call these concepts “new” is like the chicken claiming to have invented the egg.

Still, one thing is truly new. And it is our one hope for survival. On the Tree of Life, humanity’s Creative Mind is the one and only fruit, nurturing within it the seed — invention — the vessel by which DNA’s message might one day be carried to the stars — to plant new gardens before ours is consumed in the fire of our dying Sun.

H.G. Wells wrote, “History is a race between education and disaster.”

Caught up in the dizzying spell that is globalized millennial culture, humanity has forgotten its connection to the Tree of Life. We have forgotten our kinship with every plant and animal.

Forgotten how to live in equilibrium with our environment.

Forgotten the Word, that binds all people as one human family.

Forgotten the true source of our creativity: Nature.

And we have forgotten the stars, though they shine on us every night.

Yet this state of affairs is not tragedy! It is opportunity: to collectively employ our inheritance, the Creative Mind. Whether to design high-technology, adopt ecologically sustainable ways of living, or simply to extend the smile of friendship to strangers you pass in the street — we are all acting out The Great Reminder.

Remember: the stars.

Remember: imagination — the inside of our heads — is the greatest frontier.

Remember: You are the Tree of Life, branches reaching up for the Sun, ever-curious, ever-seeking new possibilities for being.

And what is, perhaps, closest to ‘being,’ is ‘beginning.’

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