Calling all lucid dreamers: What have you learned?

I am looking for research and exploration ideas for lucid dreaming. I will give a short example and then explain more about what I'm looking for.

A few nights ago I had a lucid dream in which I was speaking with a friend of mine in a large room. When I walked into the room I saw the left side due to my entrance, and then preceded to focus my attention on my friend. While my vision remained centered, I noticed the area behind and to the right of my friend was dark. I continued to talk with them as I kept a mental note of the darkness. Then I remembered a tidbit from my sensation and perception course, most of our visual attention focused on only ~50% of our visual field, this area is called the fovea. My next step was to conjure a mental map of the room, and when I did, I 'sensed' a disjointed shape that would approximate with the lit portion of the room. I figured that establishing base information for the entire room would help maintain the lucidity (which I'm always trying to do, or become better at).

After surveying the room and 'lighting' everything up the dream became a bit more lucid or concrete. This got me thinking. Without the extra sensory information, my stability or comfort in the dream/room was limited. But when I took the time to look at my surroundings, to touch the walls, and hear what was going on around me I became more grounded. (Which is a well known lucidity trick, but showed itself very well here)

This can easily transfer over to our waking lives. Let's say you have to make a speech in a classroom and feel uncomfortable. To increase the subconscious comfort you could walk all around the room, viewing it from many angles. You can touch the walls or objects within it. You can even stand where your speech will take place and speak to a friend in a chair. It doesn't have to be obvious, but make a mental note in your brain that this is familiar or comforting.

What else about our brain or reality can be tested and transferred to our waking lives?

The night before the above dream I had a lucid dream where I put my head into an x-ray machine. When I looked at the print out my jaw looked like it was photoshop style stretched into my neck area. I could also see my SCM muscle was colored white, as well as a few other neck/face muscles. I observed tears in the SCM muscle tissue near the attachment, and the cartilage in my jaw showed obvious damage signs.

Here's how I look at that. I have TMD, which means my jaw is really tight and I unconsciously tense it. I am currently working on my posture and stretching to improve my vocal abilities, so I am well aware of my tension. I was not aware that I was visualizing my jaw being lower than it was, and the sight of the picture has helped me relax it by maintaining a better neutral position. It also helped me focus on which muscles may be causing most of the tension problems.

It would appear that my subconscious gave up more information in my state of lucidity, through a means less abstract than attempting to identify specific muscles by internal sensation. I want more access to this valuable information, whatever it may be.

I won't be going for my masters in psychology for a little while, but I believe dreams, and specifically lucidity, will be my area of focus. I would like to start compiling ideas now for specific scenarios or attributes to study. I have lucid dreamed for years, so I don't need the 101 on it, I would just like your input or things you have seen and learned from your dreams. I've admittedly experienced a few unexplainable things in my dreams but I'd like to start with more concrete, and less 'supernatural' areas. Thank you for taking the time to read this and your help.


[edit on 5-7-2008 by Parabol]

Interesting to me your studies and recounting of your experiences. I have nothing to contribute to this, as I've not done any concerted training in lucid dreaming. I'm often conscious in the dream, that I AM dreaming. Those are particulary vivid and detailed dreams, as the situations presented are not necessarily taken in context within the dream framework. I'm describing this badly. When in a dream, you react to the strangeness that your subconscious creates... if you KNOW it's a dream, you might not be able to control it, but your responses are different. I'll stop there.

Just proves once again that you can't dig yourself out of a hole. ha

Cheers

reply to post by argentus


I get what you're saying. Sometimes you are conscious that you are dreaming, but you still get wrapped up in the plot or context of the dream. The best dreams are the ones which give you total control. I usually only get those when I go from a waking state directly into the lucid dream, it seems a bit more difficult to gain control when you randomly realize you are dreaming.

Very good of you to bring this up, this is a side of dreaming that I do not think about enough. One practical thing I think dreaming has helped me with (or taught me how to do) involves my perception and self-conciousness in the real world. But now it's not really self-conciousness as in watching what I say and do in front of people, it's really like keeping tabs on everyone in the room, not just self concious, but concious of everyone.

I think you develop/strengthen this ability to perceive more through dream experience. Dreaming itself becomes an automatic mental excersize of sorts that carries over into the real world, you are definetly using a part of your brain that most people hardly even know they have.

So I think dreams help us with our perception in real life. A good example of this for me is the clouds. I used to never notice those clouds off in the horizon. If you weren't looking for them, you'd never notice. They blend right in with the sky. But when you take an extra 2 or 3 seconds to look as far as you can, you will see these clouds off in the distance. I think dreamers develop this sort of second sight, because we have excersized that part of our brain that interprets what is being seen.

I personally think dreaming has made me a happier person. I've never regretted remembering a dream, still wish I remembered them all.

Practical things though, I used to think that you could use a lucid dream as a chance to solve a math problem, or maybe practice a speech or practice playing a musical instrument, something like that. I never could do math in my dream without waking up. Imagine though if you just sat down in a dream and wrote a whole book. You would wake up and you might remember one or two things out of that whole book, and you would feel better just having remembered the experience of sitting there and writing that book. More and more I think it's all about the experience. But if I could use my dreams for any purpose, it would be to practice OOBE inside of them, and maybe enter OOBE through them. I'm sure it's helped a little. Maybe you could use it to learn (or at least experience) psychic reading, maybe mind reading. Wouldn't that work? Then see if you've picked up anything useful in the real world when you are talking to someone. Next time you go lucid try to read your dream characters' minds. There is an idea, I'll be sure to try that one next chance I get.

I've learnt: Don't roll over in your sleep when youre flying
i stop breathing and fall.
most of my lucid dreams end when i cant breathe

Lucid dreaming for myself offers a chance to explore the deeper realms of the subconscious. Almost always, when I am in a dream I encounter some spontaneous idea or knowledge, and I fully understand them as soon as it occurs. The dream's significance sometimes becomes so apparent that it literally disassembles my ego as soon as I wake up, yet a few hours later I forget most of what occurred in my dream. I've had instances that were truly mind blowing in my dreams, the euphoria and the general safety and comfort of my own made up reality is truly ecstatic. What are the chances that, this truly amazing ability that we ALL have would come up in Human evolution.

I am by every definition, a God, it depends though on how my awareness and my ego is, in contrast.

Perhaps it is a natural way of the mind to assess different probabilities, even more so to experience different probabilities, in a lucid dream.

My dreams have started becoming more and more vivid lately, the more I meditate. In fact, I actually had an experience today where I was meditating and my eyes shot open and I thought, "the phone is about to ring" and lo and behold, the phone rang. It freaked me the hell out.

But anyways, I have been writing down my dreams alot lately in order to become more adept at lucidity and have found that, the more I write them down, the less I have to write them down because I am remembering them more easily due to writing them. I have not actually developed lucidity yet, but I hope to soon.

I have started constantly asking myself what time it is in my waking life in order to become accustomed to it in my dreams so I can invoke lucidity. Hopefully this will work.

Thanks for the thread man. I enjoy this topic immensely.

I have many different types of lucid dreams. My favorite kind are the empty room, "dark room" dreams.

I think I learned that we exist outside of Time and Space, with all possibilites existing at the same time.

Keep meditating. When you dream, try to remember the dreams in which you seem "outside of the matrix", where people seem more real than Reality. They may look sharper that people look when you are awake.

When you have one of these "dark room" dreams, look at the people in the dreams and check their ages, and see if they are the same age as they are now. You might see people you don't know...yet.

Also, you will be emotionally closer to the people in the dreams than you are to them in real life...And you may find yourself talking about secret plans, or adhering to a "script."

NOTE: Sometimes in these dreams the dark background is replaced with a white light background.

Also, here's a cool lucid dream trick...

When you are lucid dreaming, try to read the pages of a book...

The letters of the words will be scrambled! (They are for me anyway.)

I don't think the "dream engine" can handle the written word.

So...a sentence on a page may read like this:

"GLUCOFED FEF VRABE EDFA EZ. EDFWE FWE! "EFAQ, FEFEGJRIS!!!"

It's pretty freaky when I see it, but I never wake up...Sometimes I laugh, and then I really know I'm dreaming when I see those pages.

I seem to have a lot of Angelina Jolie / Brad Pitt dreams. They show up a hell of a lot. (Not the "Wanted" Angelina Jolie, but the "humanitarian" Angelina Jolie.)

Does anyone else have Angelina Jolie dreams?

I'm an art director by trade, and sometimes when I work on a project that's more than a bit difficult, I find myself dreaming about it. In my lucid dream world I have a tendancy to come up with alternative artwork for the task at hand. For example, if I'm designing a logo for something intangible like a service, I will often find my ideas for that logo pushed into a different direction that I had not considered in my waking hours. I find this type of lucid dreaming especially insightful.

My favorite type of lucid dreams are the flying dreams. However, I do encounter a strange little quirk in these types of dreams. I can fly to remove myself from a nightmare to a safe place and a better dream. I can fly for the sheer enjoyment of it. However, I cannot fly very well if I would like to get from point A to point B and I'm to lazy to walk. I look like a stupid chicken who can only get a few feet off the ground only to fall back down again. How silly is that hangup? I'm sure a few of our armchair psycho analysts would have a field day with that one!

I did experience a rather loopy lucid dream about a month or so ago. It was more of an anti-dream lucid dream. It's a little hard to explain, but in essence, I stumbled into what I preceived to be a more of the behind-the-scenes look at my dream instead of being an active participant. In fact, it had a very corporate feel to it. Anyway, might be worth a read to you.

Great topic! I certainly hope this helps.

[edit on 7/6/2008 by maria_stardust]

Originally posted by windwaker
Also, here's a cool lucid dream trick...

When you are lucid dreaming, try to read the pages of a book...

The letters of the words will be scrambled! (They are for me anyway.)

I don't think the "dream engine" can handle the written word.

So...a sentence on a page may read like this:

"GLUCOFED FEF VRABE EDFA EZ. EDFWE FWE! "EFAQ, FEFEGJRIS!!!"

It's pretty freaky when I see it, but I never wake up...Sometimes I laugh, and then I really know I'm dreaming when I see those pages.

I've had the same experience with my dreams. Anything written that I try to read is uncypherable. I'm thinking to myself "if I can just read this ,I'll have the answers I've been searching for. It's very frustrating..

my flying sucks too. I run into anything and everything, and if there isn't something there, my dream will put it there. Even the act of flying in the first place is cumbersome. I have to run, jump, and then glide about 3 inches off the ground. As far as any altitude? I am always holding onto a rope attached to some unseen whatever, I have never looked up. I am clutching the rope and it is trying to throw me off or take me into a bunch of trees or bldgs.
I'm on the fence about "lucid" dreaming, so I like this thread and topic but
Until someone shares "anything" unique that would be tough to explain away as a dream.....like, "some dude in my "lucid" dream told me that the secret to, the secret off, the people from, the winning number is, the planet of, etc...... I will remain a skeptic, but a hopeful one.

I have learned that the physical reality is stranger to me then any place else. I took that with me after an astral projection. I also learned more about the ego and sense of closed-off individualism we seem to cling to. I have learned a great deal between past, present and future and these concepts we call time and destiny.

Novise

I agree that it helps your perception of reality, or the waking reality. It's very interesting to see what your mind will come up with when no external sensory information is provided. A wonderful chance to look at the underlying 'code', so that we can better us it in our lives. I'm a musician and have played in my dreams before, it's an awesome feeling to see what you hear in your head immediately translated without any playing errors. It's also useful to practice singing without any muscle tension, it helps me with my timing and flow.

MadHatter

In addition to checking the time, start touching a lot of things you see. If I'm non, or slightly lucid, making contact with my environment greatly increases the experience. You have to force your mind to believe you are actually there, the more you can show your mind, the less it randomly creates without your consent. Maintaining lucidity almost requires a constant awareness of your environment, which I think translates well to the waking life.

windwaker

I know what your talking about with the jumbled characters, though I have read things in dreams before. Once I was opening up fortune cookies, and I 'asked' for the next one to reveal my purpose in life. I read it, it made sense, but in an instant it was gone, I tried to open another and I saw this.

"You won't remember anything you've just read tomorrow"

Ha, it was like someone was messing with me. And weird about the Angelina thing, I shutdown my computer before you posted last night, and ended up watching the movie "Wanted". Hmmmm....

Maria_Stardust

Ok, I have some flying advice that may help you. I had a wonderful flying dream last week, maybe the best I've ever experienced. It's going to sound like corny ninja advice, but you can't think about doing it. In the dream reality your mind is everything, if you immediately doubt how you're going to fly, your brain will incorporate that inability into the dream. Whenever I try to jump or do things like that, it never works well. Here's what did...

You have to imagine it almost like a videogame. Where the character is always in the middle of the screen and everything moves around it. I also changed my view from 1st person perspective to 3rd when I first lifted off. Instead of feeling the force of taking off, it feels more like two people lifted me up underneath my shoulders. I went up about ten feet, and was right next to a tree. It was a beautiful red oak in the fall, and for the moment the leaves were all I could see. I reached out and touched the leaf and everything came to life. Like a cartoon where everything is black and white, but a character touches one thing and color begins to spread. Later in the dream I found myself in a large garage like room, filled with water, about 50 feet deep or so, like the tanks at Sea World. I would fly down into the water and zoom about, then dash straight up and out like a fish. It was awesome, I just kept doing that because it was so fun. When you find enjoyment in the dream, everything becomes easier because you relax enough to allow the flying. Another thing that can transfer to the waking life, just relax and allow things to happen. Your doubts are very powerful.

Res Ispa

Hmmmn, do you doubt the full reality of a lucid dream, the total control level, or do you doubt obtaining real life information? I would definitely love to experiment with the real life factor, honestly I think it's possible, though highly unlikely to occur, and be remembered. The scientist in me is doubtful, but I'd be a fool to completely discount our brains abilities. Especially when everyone one of my psych books has to remind me that, 'well, we think this is the way it works, but we're not sure, so you can listen to these 10 ideas on development and just decide on which you agree with.' For me, it's one of the last undiscovered territories that I have access to. If you have any questions on lucid dreaming I'd be more than happy to answer. Though I think it's something you have to experience yourself. I've had more than a few lucid dreams where I could control everything but a person or two. And these people, well, attempted to teach or show me something. I know how crazy that sounds, and I don't consider myself special or anything, I think we're all capable of whatever may be possible. When you wake up, you're so sure of what happened, but as the day passes your mind begins to doubt more and more. It rationalizes most of it away, except for whatever lesson or knowledge you took from the experience. And if anything, that's what matters. Here's an old thread that sort of gives an example.