A Guide To Dreaming

Introduction

What this is about
This Article

This is meant as a general lucid dream (LD) walkthrough. Lucid dreaming is being aware you're dreaming while still inside the dream. This article covers general subjects, and doesn't go too in-depth on anything in particular. It covers dream recall, induction techniques, control, and substances commonly referenced in dream enhancement.
Index

* Remembering Dreams
o Dream Recall
o Dream Journals
* Induction Techniques and Things Related to Them
o Relaxation
o Breathing
o Hypnagogia
o Autosuggestion
o DILD
+ Reality Checks
o WBTB
o MILD
o WILD
+ VILD
* Living the Dream
o Stabalizing Dreams
o Dream Possibilities
* Relatively Famous Substances
o Melatonin
o Calea Zacatechichi

Remembering Dreams

The difficult task of remembering that which is easily forgotten
Dream Recall

Dream recall is very important, because if you have an LD but can't remember what it was about, then what's the use? If you can't remember any dreams then that means you have probably looked at dreams as useless and in your head devalued it. To get a better dream recall you can just start thinking about it more. Start a dream journal, and when you first wake up don't move a muscle and try to remember last night's dreams. You can start with a small fragment and reverse through it and find out your dream. If you still have problems remembering then you should start consciously trying to remember your day, you can keep a notebook of your thoughts and events in that day. If you improve your daily memory it will carry over into the night and you will remember dreams with greater detail.

Some people will say things like "I don't dream," and the likes. But everyone does dream, and it is actually in a pretty rigid structure. The night, a normal 7 hour night, is split into five stages of sleep which repeat themselves five times. Stage 1 is drowsiness. This lasts from five to ten minutes and if one is awakened from it, it feels as if no sleep took place. Stage 2 is a period of light sleep with periods of muscle tone and muscle relaxation. The muscle tone can sometimes be attributed to auditory stimuli. Stage 3 and 4 are deep sleep stages. This is when brainwave activity reaches a low point. Stage 4 is generally more intense of a deep sleep than stage 3. Stage 5 is REM sleep, where the majority of dreaming takes place. Stages 1-4 are called non-REM sleep. The sleep cycle usually lasts 90-120 minutes before REM sleep begins. Each stage can take anywhere from five to fifteen minutes to complete, and during a normal stage the order is usually: waking, stage 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, REM. For some reason stage three and two seem to repeat themselves backwards before REM. After all cycles are completed that marks the first stage. This will happen five times a night with each successive REM cycle lasting longer than its previous stage.

When I first started trying to induce LD's I had no dream recall. I started a dream journal, stopped smoking, and starting consciously trying to piece together my dreams. They all have great results if you can stick to a routine everyday and get your mind used to recalling your dreams.
Dream Journals

A dream journal is very simple, it can be a basic notebook where you record your dreams in the morning. Or even a stack of papers, but most seem to prefer their computer. This practice will tell your subconscious that you want to remember your dreams. Thus adding value to your dreams, after doing it long enough you will notice profound memory increases. Most people start them with little or no dream recall and end up remembering all the dreams they have that night. There are no real rules and conditions on this, as long as you are writing them down and remembering more it will be good. For example: I write my dream notes down in a journal by my bed. This happens all through out the night and the next day I will try to remember more from my sparse notes and put it into a dream and onto my main internet journal.
Induction Techniques and Things Related to Them

Techniques used to induce lucid dreams
Relaxation

Relaxation is simple; this is you finding a comfortable position to sleep in. Most people need to have all joints in their body slightly bent to achieve sleep. You can start at your feet and tense them for a short time and then let go. You move up your legs, across your chest and back, up your arms, and finally up the neck onto the head. Then this leads to breathing to get into the right state of mind. I follow this method while I breathe deeply and slowly.
Breathing

Breathing for getting into a relaxed state for sleeping or going into WILD is easily achieved by letting your chest relax and breathing with your stomach. This is called circular breathing, and it's accomplished by using your abdominal region. It will inflate and when used with your diaphragm can be great for concentration. I usually relax all my muscles and focus on my breathing in this way until I get deeply into trance. My thoughts are cleared out and my breathing is all I focus on. Once I get there, I realize I can relax to another level, which leads me into hypnagogia.
Hypnagogia

This is an odd phenomenon experienced on the wake/asleep border. It can either be experienced when falling asleep and losing consciousness, or when waking up and regaining it. These are hypnagogic and hypnopompic occurrences, respectively. It is worth noting that hypnagogic experiences are much more common then hypnopompic. These periods are typically described as seeing flashes of vivid imagery, sometimes seemingly real. Sometimes people will also hear sounds, feel touch, and in even rarer cases, smell and taste. These are all hallucinations, and can not hurt you.
Autosuggestion

This is training the subconscious to believe something. There are various methods, from constantly repeating something to yourself until you believe it, to hypnosis. This subconscious belief can be used for many things in life. It can also be used to induce lucid dreams, and I haven't tried for anything else in Psionics, but it would probably affect most if not all other areas of Psionics as well. I have used this in many forms, from telling myself something as part of MILD to hypnosis and brainwave alteration. I have also tried subliminal messaging. The first few have all given me results - I am still testing the subliminal messaging idea, but as of yet, it hasn't produced anything.
DILD

DILD stands for Dream Induced Lucid Dream, which means you are in a dream and realize you are dreaming. This is usually done by conditioning yourself to do reality checks. Ask if you're awake or asleep. This is often the easiest method and will happen as a side effect of any LD training. My first LD was a DILD and was very stable because of when it took place during my REM cycle. Not much can be done besides doing reality checks constantly and always questioning reality. It is also worthy of note that most lucid dreams are DILD's.
Reality Checks

Reality checks are a simple test to see if you are dreaming. They all work on one principle, that dreams are unstable. For them to be effective you should use a few in combinations, because sometimes your dream will stabilize certain aspects to trick you. Here's a short list of reality checks:

* Hold your nose closed or go underwater, if you can still breathe then you are dreaming.
* Try to jump, if anything strange happens you are dreaming.
* Read stuff, if small print changes as you look away or are looking you are probably dreaming.
* If your vision is perfect but you don't have perfect vision, you are probably dreaming.
* Examine your hands; they can usually be pretty obvious. Sometimes changing color and size or growing an extra finger.
* The time, always check the time. Clocks will change at random times, have improper numbers, or simply change as you look at them.
* Try to visualize using powers, in a dream they will often manifest themselves fairly quickly.
* Try a light switch here and there; they usually don't work in dreams. This isn't an absolute however, and they do occasionally work.
* Check your reflection; usually your dream will have trouble keeping that constant.
* If you close one eye, can you see your nose? If not you're probably dreaming.
* Try to remember things like; why you are there, how you got there, what you were doing 1,2,3 or hours ago... etc.
* Try biting your lower lip and really experiencing any minor pains.
* Be creative and just do things you can't do while awake.

Personally, I will do both nose reality checks and just try to remember all my reasons for being somewhere. I do this all through out the day to condition my mind to do it while I'm dreaming. Unless you are using WILD or can easily recognize being in a dream, reality checks will be your main test. Even with WILD I highly suggest reality checks though, only the more experienced or naturally born lucid dreamers can become lucid without them.
WBTB

WBTB Stands for Wake Back To Bed. In my opinion the easiest method to learn and practice, it is basically getting up a certain amount of time into your sleep cycle, before your longest REM periods. You then think about having a lucid dream and try to awaken your mind while leaving your body sleepy. You then go back to bed. Here is a very good walkthrough on how to do it. In my experience, you don't always need to stay up that long, or take a shower. The entire point of both of those is to wake up your mind and keep your body asleep. If you think your mind is sufficiently awake after 45, 30, 15 or even 10 minutes, then try it out. This is a very relative technique. It's worked for me when all I've done is wake up to an alarm; reset it for a few hours later, then go back to sleep. I didn't even repeat anything to myself, and I got a lucid dream. WBTB is very powerful in my opinion.
MILD

MILD stands for Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dream. Created by Stephen LaBerge, it was and still is a very effective method of induction. Peebrain recently posted it as an article, so I won't go in depth with this technique. In short, this method is effectively training your memory to prepare for a lucid dream, and then repeating to yourself that you will have a lucid dream before you fall asleep. I tried a cut down version of this where I simply kept repeating something to myself as I fell asleep. It gave me some results, and is still my best way of getting better dream recall.
WILD

WILD stands for Wake Induced Lucid Dream. It is going straight from consciousness to a dream, and is a very efficient method once you have it down. To start you relax and do very relaxed and controlled breathing. You have to stay conscious for long enough to recognize the state of hypnagogia and pass through it. It manifests as a hallucination, and could be tactile, visual, or auditory. To stay conscious many people deploy many different methods. The most common being to count 1 I'm dreaming, 2 I'm dreaming, 3 I'm dreaming... etc. This should be repeated while you remain calm and motionless, remembering to not react to any sensations and just observe. When you get close you really have to focus on the mantra and remember that you are dreaming. Once this is completed and the border is crossed, you will be dreaming.

WILD is a very difficult technique to master, and takes time and dedication. It is a lot easier to perform after a WBTB, but can be practiced every time you are going to sleep. What I have here is only personal reflection and methods that have given results. It will be different for everyone so if you're having difficulty with something here then tweak it and experiment to find out what will work for you. This isn't to say you should skip around with techniques. Test them out, and stick with one you like. The longer you're with a specific technique, the better you get at it and the greater chance you will be lucid more often.
VILD

VILD Stands for Visually Incubated Lucid Dream. Everything you could ever want to know about VILD is here. That's in depth walkthrough from its creator. If you don't want to read that large article, I will give you a small version of VILD. First, you incubate a dream. Incubation is thinking about a specific dream situation, imagining all the details as you fall asleep, the idea being that you will dream about the situation. For example, I might think of a small room with a door, and a sign above the door that says "do a reality check!" I would think about every aspect of this, and play out a short little scene of me appearing there, looking at the sign, reality checking, and becoming lucid. I have not practiced this extensively, but from my limited experience, I haven't had much success. Those results are hardly meaningful, however. This is sometimes the best technique for more visual people.
Living the Dream

How to control dreams and the general flow of dreams
Stabalizing Dreams

Stabilizing dreams is what it sounds like, making a dream less frantic and prolonging your lucidity by doing something in the dream. There are many ways to go about this, the better known ways being: Look at your hands. They're always there, right? (hehe) They will probably be messed up in some way, and might begin to melt. This will solidify the fact that you are dreaming, and will keep you concentrating on the dream.

Another popular and effective method is spinning. You start yourself spinning around like a whirlwind, and keep speeding up until everything blurs and then fades to black. Or you can stop earlier, either one will increase your lucidity. But if you wait till everything blacks out, you will most likely change your location in the dream world. Also, when I say spin, you might think: "how can I spin that fast?" All you have to do is think about it. False awakenings are also side effects of this technique, so make sure to reality check after doing it if you wake up.

Yet another way of stabilizing dreams is to say out loud to yourself something pertaining to staying lucid, like "I will stay in this dream!" or "Lucidity x1000!" Stuff like that.

A final, more desperate way of staying in the dream is to grab some dream scenery. Feel everything that makes up this scenery, the texture, the weight, the smell, etc. Focus on it with all of your dream senses. This is basically like playing tug of war with your conscious. It wants to go back to sleep. You want to stay awake (in the dream) the only question is, who can pull harder?
Dream Possibilities

Dreams are crazy things where everything is possible, and all too often everything will happen. Luckily not all at once. Things don't have to make sense or even approach it; in fact, they usually stay far away from it. Here is an example:

You could be walking downtown, when a bus pulls up and demands your liver. You of course, want set the bus on fire, and commence to throw gasoline (that you got from nowhere) onto it. The bus turns into a transformer and you stand in awe for a moment, and then you burn it anyways. But it doesn't really burn, it kind of shape shifts into a fire breathing dragon. Great you say, as you slap shut your faceplate on your armor. "That dragon will be the fifth one today." With that you charge at it on your horse.

That is a random example, but it's not far fetched at all. Stuff just happens, and the dream usually goes with it. Sometimes, however, the dream just kind of "skips" and you end up in a completely new area or situation. For example you're talking at a party then you're swimming in the ocean. There is no blackout period; it just goes seamlessly from one to another. This is much less common in lucid dreams, but "blipping" is all too common in normal dreams. Another thing about blipping, if you look at something, you all too often become part of what's going on. Never try watching TV unless you want to become part of the show.

This brings up dream control. If you expect something to happen, it will. Bottom line: If you honestly think that the dragon mentioned earlier will turn into a goldfish when your lance hits it, it will. If you expect a jet pack to appear in front of you, it will. Some people have trouble with this, and a nice way around it is to simply expect them to be behind you. When you turn around, or go around a corner, or behind something, it will be there. This brings us to a useful way of traveling.

You can go anywhere in the dream world simply by finding a door, and expecting a certain place to be on the other side of it. It doesn't have to make sense. You could go from a city to a desert. If you've seen the movie Matrix Reloaded, it's like that endless hallway of doors. They go everywhere. But in the dream, you only need one. You don't even have to use a door, use a portal, a sewer grate, a mirror. The mirror is especially popular, although it has this nasty habit of putting you in weird places that you didn't exactly want.

One last topic of dream control is special "powers". As far as supernatural abilities go, you can do them all. Anything that has ever been conceived, you can perform it. I have yet to find an exception to this rule. The only problem is getting the ability right. But that stems from personal control, not dream limitations. As far as dream limitations go, there basically aren't any.
Relatively Famous Substances

Substances that commonly receive praise as dream enhancers
Melatonin

Melatonin is a hormone that is secreted by the Pineal gland each night. It does many things in the body, including regulating sleep cycles, which is why it interests us in this article. It is called the "hormone of darkness" because light inhibits its production. It has been said to improve dreaming, and is sold as a sleeping aid in most drugstores. I cannot say from personal experience whether this is true or not, but from what I've heard from people who have taken it, it makes it harder to wake up from the very vivid dreams. I.e., it increases stability. I personally do not think it influences whether you realize you are dreaming or not, but that's my opinion. It should also be noted that most supplements have a huge dose in relation to what the Pineal glad secretes each night. During the night your pineal gland produces anywhere from 5 to 25 micrograms of Melatonin. The supplements usually have 1000 to 3000 micrograms. Also, all of the supplements I've seen recommend you do not take melatonin until you are 18 or older. Some even say 21.
Calea Zacatechichi

This is a very special plant to the native peoples of the world. It is known as the dream herb in Mexico and Central America, where shamans and others of the tribe will use it for entering a dream state to receive prophetic visions. The dried leaves can be boiled in water to produce a tea, and should be used in conjunction with a small joint of the dried leaves. Most people who use a larger amount of one or the other seem to have fewer results. This should be taken right before sleep because of its mild waking effects, but profound dream effects. I am not telling anyone to try it; I'm just giving out the information so you can all make more informed choices. For more information on it, a search at erowid will be helpful. I haven't tried this yet, but I will be growing my own bushes of it soon. Erowid has plenty of write-ups for personal experiences with it. Remember: Be responsible.