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More dream stuff....
May. 19th, 2014 05:31 amMany years ago, I took an interest in the practice of lucid dreaming, and for a while, I used the practice on a fairly regular basis. ...I don't do it actively so much, anymore, but it's still a tool I keep in my box, and my dreams are at least partly lucid several nights a week...
Anyway --
One of the best and simplest exercises I came across for training my brain to dream lucidly was this:
1) Double check that you are awake several times a day, and once you notice you that you are, tell yourself: "This is what being awake feels like. The next time I'm asleep, I'll be sure to notice the difference."
2) And the way you double check is to read something, anything -- might even be a single word -- look away for a moment, and then, look back. If the word remains the same, you're awake. But if it has changed, then you're dreaming.
I really like this method because it's subtle (no one else need know you're doing it), painless (none of that pinching yourself nonsense), and easy to do often, especially in our era (practically everything, these days, has words printed on them -- a brand name, if nothing else).
And now (finally!), I come to my point: When reading does come up in my dreams (as in the waking world, it's surprisingly often) I've noticed that the words tend to change by shifting into either a paraphrase of what they were before, or they change to express the next "logical" idea my mind comes up with (for example, the first time I read a sentence, it might be: "The castle stood high on the cliff," and when I 'reread' it, it will have changed to: "Be careful of falling rocks.").
But this morning, I dreamt that I was being asked to write my email address -- basically, an abstract thing which stands alone... There is no "paraphrase" of it, and no idea that can come after it. My subconscious got around that problem by having me write it out in marker on flimsy plastic wrap, so that the material broke apart, and the letters smudged into the shape of other letters.
If I may say so: I think my subconscious is pretty clever! ;-)
Anyway --
One of the best and simplest exercises I came across for training my brain to dream lucidly was this:
1) Double check that you are awake several times a day, and once you notice you that you are, tell yourself: "This is what being awake feels like. The next time I'm asleep, I'll be sure to notice the difference."
2) And the way you double check is to read something, anything -- might even be a single word -- look away for a moment, and then, look back. If the word remains the same, you're awake. But if it has changed, then you're dreaming.
I really like this method because it's subtle (no one else need know you're doing it), painless (none of that pinching yourself nonsense), and easy to do often, especially in our era (practically everything, these days, has words printed on them -- a brand name, if nothing else).
And now (finally!), I come to my point: When reading does come up in my dreams (as in the waking world, it's surprisingly often) I've noticed that the words tend to change by shifting into either a paraphrase of what they were before, or they change to express the next "logical" idea my mind comes up with (for example, the first time I read a sentence, it might be: "The castle stood high on the cliff," and when I 'reread' it, it will have changed to: "Be careful of falling rocks.").
But this morning, I dreamt that I was being asked to write my email address -- basically, an abstract thing which stands alone... There is no "paraphrase" of it, and no idea that can come after it. My subconscious got around that problem by having me write it out in marker on flimsy plastic wrap, so that the material broke apart, and the letters smudged into the shape of other letters.
If I may say so: I think my subconscious is pretty clever! ;-)
