Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Is Conscious Dreaming Fact Or Fiction?

By Allan Matacan

Lucid dreaming, also called conscious dreaming, is the process of being asleep while maintaining awareness of your dreams. While you're in a dream state, you actually know that you're dreaming. That can even allow you to control your dreams consciously.

It may sound like something out of science fiction; but conscious dreaming is very real and is something that you can do with a little practice. Lucid dreaming is not hard to do " and being able to control; your dreams can help you to find out more about yourself and serve as a valuable place to express yourself. There are some techniques which are tried and tested for bringing about lucid dreams.

Before you get started, you should decide why it is that you want to become a lucid dreamer. Do you want to use your conscious dreams to help you achieve goals in life, or just as a way of enjoying your dreams more?

The next step is to begin practicing the techniques which can produce the appropriate state of mind for lucid dreaming to occur. The first step for most people is dream recall, which is simply training yourself to remember your dreams.

If you want to begin conscious dreaming, you'll need to be able to recall all the details of the dreams you have each night. There are a number of ways to do this, but the most common is keeping a dream diary. Place it by the bed, and every morning, enter all the details you remember from your dreams as soon as you wake up. It's important to make sure you do this right away, because you start to lose information the longer you're awake.

Slowly, you'll begin remembering more and more about your dreams, and you can use your dream diary to jog your memory. Since your mind is already primed to remember your dreams, becoming aware that they're happening is an easy next step. Many people simply "wake up" suddenly in a dream, becoming aware that what's happening isn't real.

Other than keeping dream diary, many find hypnosis helpful. Hypnosis can help you to quickly reach the appropriate state for conscious dreaming. In fact, hypnosis can help you to recall every detail of your dreams in only a few sessions! Conscious dreaming is easy once this is accomplished.

At first, you may discover that you occasionally wake up suddenly during a lucid dream. That's fairly normal. All you need to do is recall the events of your dream as you fall back to sleep. Try hard to remember them, and you'll be able to get back into the dream, and even be able to make it do whatever you want it to.

Another technique is to set your alarm for two or three hours earlier than usual then going back to sleep once awoken. It is a lot easier to have lucid dreams in the hours before you usually awake. It may even be unclear to you if these were dreams or you were just thinking as you lay awake. With practice, this technique will lead to conscious dreaming.

Be aware of your sleeping habits. Youll be able to determine when you are most likely to have lucid dreams. However, dont lose too much sleep " fatigue and conscious dreaming dont mix.

The good news is that lucid dreaming is actually effective against insomnia and other sleeping disorders. Using conscious dreaming you can teach your mind to shut down troublesome thoughts that are keeping you awake.

You may think that learning lucid dreaming takes years of practice, but in fact its not so hard at all to learn " with just a little practice, you can be a conscious dreamer too!

Conscious dreaming is easy, and almost everyone can do it. Take a little time, and use one of these methods to unleash the power of lucid dreaming for yourself. You'll be amazed at what you discover. - 14130

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