Dream Awake
Homebrew VR that’s better than NASA’s
Preamble:
I’ve just joined this forum again after an almost 2 year break from actively trying to produce lucid dreams. The techniques that follow are mostly regurgitations of Laberge’s techniques and other things I’ve picked up along the way… including some good techniques that I learned on this forum a couple of years ago. These techniques have worked quite well for me… At best I’ve been able to have about 5 remembered lucid dreams in one week… Here are the basic steps (These steps often overlap each other and you will really be doing them all at once, after you get the hang of it):
- Dream Recall
- State Testing
- Recognition of Dream forms
- Practice Makes Perfect
- W.I.L.D. Experiments
Dream Recall is fairly obvious. Remember your dreams. Good techniques include: Keeping a dream journal where you write down as much as you can remember… even if it is only a feeling or random image. Before you go to sleep, use self hypnosis to tell yourself to remember your dreams (basically just relax and then speak the words in your head/visualize yourself waking up and remembering). When you wake up, don’t move your body if you can help it. Just try and remember a dream. Go over the dream as much as possible until you think you can remember it, then write down key words to help further keep it in memory. Then write as much detail as you can remember and do diagrams if possible.
After practicing this for a while you will start remembering more easily. Just becoming interested in your dreams will automatically make you remember more. You will start to remember dreams from the middle of the night as well as the ones from just before waking. If you wake up during the night and can remember a dream, write down some key words in you journal (if you can stand it). Tailor these techniques to your liking. I can hardly stand to do most of this stuff, and keeping a journal is very difficult for me, but when I have done it, I got good results.
State Testing
Once you can remember your dreams you will start realizing you are missing some pretty big clues while asleep. You will hate yourself for not recognizing that the talking dog probably wasn’t normal and should have alerted you to the fact that you were dreaming. You have to develop a system that will allow you to better recognize what is “real” and what is “fake”. During normal waking consciousness, you take way too much for granted. It takes a pretty serious breach of your established preconceptions to make you actually question reality. You just walk around in a daze accepting that everything is as it should be… you might see a man in a dress or a dog riding a skateboard and just think, “ha, that’s some crazy shit.” what you don’t do (unless you are crazy) is allow these things to break your sense of reality.
So, the next thing you must learn to do is really question these things. Not just when something bizarre happens, but all the time. Question it in a way that actually disturbs you. You want this to be scary. You want to blur the line between real and fake until you realize that everything is fake. You should allow your awareness of this fakeness to be there in the background all the time, so that you start thinking things like, “it wouldn’t matter if I killed that guy, because this is just fake”, then you back off just a notch before you actually kill that guy. Go crazy, it’s fun.
You also have to prove to yourself which state of consciousness you are in. Is this a dream that’s only inside my head, or is it the mass hallucination I used to call reality? Ask yourself this question as often as possible. Do it now. How do you know? “I just know” is not a good enough answer. Prove it motherfucker. Look around, is anything out of order? If not, keep looking. Ask you self, “How did I get here?” Asking, “How did I get here?” is one of the best techniques for discovering if you are awake. Then there is the book test. Read a book. Do the letters shift and change? Re-read a passage, does it make sense? Does it say the same thing as the first time you read it? Is it in ancient alien hieroglyphs?
Remember that the fake reality of dreams is just as real as the fake reality of being awake. You can feel pain and all your senses work almost flawlessly. Often dream senses can be way stronger. Smells or tastes can be hyper amplified.
You should State Test at least once an hour. Do it as often as you can. Set your watch alarm to remind you, do it every time you touch a door handle or every time you see a beautiful woman, use mental triggers to remember. State testing can lead directly to lucid dreaming. If you happen upon one of your triggers in a dream, then it might prompt a State Test. You are trying to fail the State Test. Keep trying until you fail. That means it?s a dream.
Recognition of Dream Forms.
You probably have some things, situations, people, or places that you dream about on a somewhat regular basis. For me, often times my dreams take place in somewhat dark rooms, I also dream about being in a particular supermarket and movie theatre quite regularly. After keeping your dream journal for a while, read over it and figure out if there are things that you are dreaming about over and over again. Are there any colors that are dominant? Do you dream of your childhood home? Figure this shit out. If you encounter these situations in any state of consciousness, do a State Test. Recognize your personal dream forms.
After you’ve been practicing this stuff for a while you might just start having a quick lucid dream here or there. You will flip out and be so happy and proud of yourself. But most people usually flip out right away and wake up. This happened to me for a long time. I probably had about ten lucid dreams that lasted no longer than 10 seconds because I got so excited I woke up. My advice at this stage is just to keep having as many lucid dreams as possible by paying attention and just having random ones by accident. After a while you will flip out less. Tell you self, “cool, I’m dreaming, ok… that’s fine, just relax.” Then you will relax too much and wake up. There is a balance you have to achieve here. You don’t want to freak out too much and you don’t want to relax too much. You have to engage with the dream. The best way to engage with the dream is through your Dream Body. Think of your dream body as a tool, an interface to the dream world. Your sense of touch, smell and taste are particularly useful for engaging with the dream. When you realize you are dreaming (or become lucid), you can rub your hands together in front of your face and feel the sensation of it as you see yourself do it. Walk around and touch, smell or taste things. My favorite technique is to find a sink (in dream), run cold water over my hands, and splash some on my face. Actually it doesn?t have to be a sink, or even water? chocolate pudding might work just as easily? the point is to produce physical sensations in the dream state? the more senses you can engage the better. The first time I did this, it snapped the dream into sharper focus. Just don’t get caught up in finding a sink or any other thing, because you could obsess on it and never be able to find one and then lose lucidity.
It also helps to have a plan. Something simple like, “when I become lucid I will try to fly”. Come up with a list of experiments that you want to try. Write them down in your dream journal as goals. My first experiments included: flying, sex, eating, watching TV, flipping light switches, changing dream elements, going through doors and not knowing what would be on the other side, etc… Pick a simple dream experiment before you go to sleep. As soon as you are lucid, just relax and do what you planned to do.
Once you’ve had a few lucid dreams, you are ready to W.I.L.D which stands for, Wake Initiated Lucid Dream. This is where your body falls asleep and you dream, but you never lose consciousness of the fact that you are really in your bed sleeping. This is the most rewarding for me. It has also produced the most bizarre experiences I have had. It is actually similar to having an out of body experience (at least, people who claim to have had out of body experiences report the same kinds of sensations and experience).
Ok here are the steps for W.I.L.D.: First you set your alarm to go off a couple of hours before you would regularly wake up. Get at least 4 hours of sleep. Wake up and get out of bed. Have a shower, write in your dream journal, think about lucid dreaming, do a crossword puzzle, don’t drink any coffee. The important thing is to wake up the rational side of your brain. Stay awake for 30 to 60 minutes and then get back into bed. Lie on your back and get comfortable (I lie on my back even though I usually sleep on my side. It’s easier to visualize your dream body and do other visualizations if you are on your back, but if you can’t sleep this way… then do whatever works). I do a relaxation technique where I relax parts of my body in sequence. Tense and then relax your shoulders, tense and then relax your upper arms, lower arms hands, fingers, chest, upper back, abdominals, lower back, pelvis, butt cheeks, upper legs, lower legs, feet, toes, now go back up your legs etc… until you finally tense and relax your face and scalp. You can also do some whole body spasms where you try to tense all your muscles for a couple of seconds. Your body should feel kind of heavy and relaxed. Now you can try to force yourself into pre sleep hypnagogia. I try to do this by ?cycling my thoughts?-- picturing random things hearing random sounds in my head. I flip from one image to the next and one sound to the next, not letting any theme or thought last for more than about one second. If I do this long enough it just kind of takes over and the imagery and sounds get really weird (that’s how you know it’s working). Eventually you can recognize when you are actually in the hypnagogic state. Now it’s time to separate your dream body, from your real body. Sometimes at this point I start to feel a tingling sensation in my hands legs and arms. Sometimes it actually becomes a violent electrical buzzing sensation through my whole body, this can actually feel painful, as if I am being shocked with electricity. I feel it especially in my tooth sockets? it’s such a fucking crazy feeling. This electrical vibration thing is often reported by people who think they are having out of body experiences and also by lucid dreamers in general. It is perfectly safe and you won’t die, even though you might be sure you are going to die. It is so fucking intense and weird and scary. The first bunch of times it happened to me, I had no idea what was going on (I hadn’t read anything about it and thought I had a tumor) and it was terrifying. All sorts of crazy shit can happen in this state. If you make it through that part then you are pretty much in a lucid dream automatically. But sometimes the buzzing can go on for a long time and you might have to take matters into your own hands. Sometimes you can hear a sound along with the buzzing feeling? sounds like plastic wrap being crumpled combined with a hissing, rising tone. The buzzing sensation is associated with the paralysis that is necessary when you enter REM sleep. If the body didn’t go into paralysis your mammalian ancestors would have flailed around in their sleep and attracted predators/fell out of trees. So anyway, your body shuts down just about all your access to your muscles with the exception of the eyes. The paralysis can also be totally terrifying. The main thing to remember is that it is totally normal and even if you feel like you can?t breath and you are dying… you’re really fine. Just don’t try to move. In fact for the next step you don’t want to move your real body. You want to lift up your dream hand only. Just do it. If you are properly paralyzed you will lift your dream hand and leave the meat hand safely in the bed. This is the coolest feeling. You can shift focus between the different hands and their respective stimulus inputs. Crazy shit. Just be carefull, because if you move your real hand, you will wake up. Don’t make a big action, try to sort of imagine it/do it rather than all-out do it. If you succeed in this you can try to roll your dream body out of your meat body. Then you might just fall out of bed into the dream world. It works for me most times. Then when you wake up it?s as if you discovered you had the ability to fly all along and nobody told you. It takes most people about three months to get results after starting these techniques. But then again you might have a lucid dream tomorrow just because you’re thinking about it.
There are few limitations on what you can experience once you are able to produce Lucid Dreams on a somewhat regular basis. You can just have some harmless fun, or go into some deep consciouness explorations and spiritual journeys.
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