Yoga For Your Health

Many people want to dream lucidly. If you’re among them, the first thing you need to think about is how you want to go about learning.

Knowing why you have chosen to pursue lucid dreaming is important. How can it benefit ou personally? To know this we can work backwards from what it considered normal sleep.

Normal sleep helps us refresh ourselves for the next day. However, if you were a lucid dreamer, you would be able to control the period of time when you were dreaming.

Normal sleep just seems to serve the purpose of simply refreshing ourselves in order to live out the next day. But what if you could control that period of time that you have dreams?

Consider the idea of taking control of your own dreams. What would it feel like to purpose what direction your dreams would take you? Explore new worlds that are only limited to your control and imagination. This is what it means to be a lucid dreamer, kind of the ultimate fantasy world where you call all the shots.

If you want to become a lucid dreamer, there are two major ways to accomplish it. The first way is called DILD, or dream-initiated lucid dream. That’s when you’re in the process of having a dream, realize that it’s happening, and retain your sense of consciousness inside the dream.

Another popular method is to have a wake initiated lucid dream (WILD); this is a straight shot from awake to asleep with no lapse in your consciousness. This is usually achieved by purposefully retaining awareness during the hypnagoogic state, which directly precedes sleep.

How exactly do you induce either one of these lucid dream states?

Dream Recall

If you’re interested in being a lucid dreamer, one of the most successful methods you can use is dream recall. This is the ability to remember your dreams. By developing this ability, you’ll be more readily able to recognize them while you’re asleep. That’s because you’re likely to have the same dream or dream elements on more than one occasion.

To make dream recall easier you can keep a dream journal. This is a notebook or pad of paper that has the sole purpose of recording your dreams. Whenever you have a dream, you should write all you can remember in the journal as soon as you wake up. The longer you are awake the more details of the dream that will be lost.

Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams (MILD)

Developed by Dr. Stephen LaBerge the idea is to tell your self to recall an object or situation from your dreams, before you go to sleep. You can look back to your dream journal for an example of a recurring them like a pink haired woman. Anything that when you see it in your dream will tell you that you are in fact dreaming.

Wake-Back-To-Bed (WBTB)

To use this method, first go to sleep. Set an alarm beforehand to wake you up a few hours later (about five or six). Once you wake up, don’t go back to sleep. Read for a little while, or think about lucid dreaming for a while, then head back to sleep.

According to Stephen LaBerge, there is a 60% success rate of this technique. The reason why is that you would have woken up during the process of sleep, meaning that your mind is not fully aware of this, and are still in the middle of REM cycle. So basically, it’s like going to your mind and telling it that you want to lucid dream.

Cycle Adjustment Technique

This technique was created by Daniel Love, and involves setting an alarm that will wake you an hour and a half before you’d normally get up. Once you’re used to waking up early, alternate between the early alarm and your old alarm. When you’re waking up normally, your body will already be expecting the early alarm, and make you more likely to “wake up” in your dream.

Wake-initiation of Lucid Dreams (WILD)

This method was mentioned above. To achieve a lucid dream using it, all that’s needed is keeping your mind awake while your body falls asleep. This is one of the most interesting ways of having a lucid dream. It’s as if you’re getting ready to watch a movie – you start in the real world, sitting on the couch, and turn on the television and press play (when you start to sleep). The screen begins black, just like when your eyes are closed, and all you need to do is wait for the movie or dream to start.

A number of ways to stay aware are counting, imagine climbing or descending stairs, chant, control your breathing, count your breaths, and concentrate on relaxing the body from their toes to head. (This all falls under the term ‘self hypnosis’.) It is best to do this when you are not tired, like in the afternoon.

Technology has moved on in recent years, and there are various devices like dreaming masks and other scientific appliances which contain such things as strobe lights to induce lucid dreams.

Definitely the easiest and most reliable way of inducing a lucid dream however is by listening to binaural beats sound frequencies via headphones.

The sounds bring the two sides of the brain in synch. Your brainwaves are then converted to REM waves the time during sleep when you dream and the frequency at which lucid dreams occur.

Combined with the self hypnosis sessions and affirmations to prepare your subconscious mind beforehand, becoming a lucid dreamer is something that everyone can now experience!

Lesley Groft is a writer for the http://www.luciddreaminginfo.com website. Discover the amazing experience of being a lucid dreamer and you can try it yourself when you get twenty nine Free lucid dreaming Audios when you visit here.