I am currently reading Dream Yoga. I am about 1/2 way through and decided to put it down for a bit while figuring out what practices work for me (and I switched to a fictional book about lucid dreaming). Writing down quick notes during the night about my dreams has helped with dream memory and I have spotted some patterns. I have started meditating when I lay down to sleep and I have played around with laying on my right side and closing that nostril before I fall asleep.
As for daytime practices, I have been setting my intention to remember my dreams, to have good dreams, to have many dreams and to wake up within my dreams. I have been reminding myself throughout the day that when I am âawakeâ things are dreamlike. I have also started jumping up during the day and looking for my reflection, shadow and the moon and the sun.
I feel like this is about all I want to try for now and that adding anything else could become overwhelming. I donât think I have had a lucid dream yet. One block could be my confidence in having one. When I get to the intention part of, âTonight I will wake up in my dreamsâ there is some doubt that I will not.
Does anybody have any pointers or suggestions regarding what techniques they found helpful?
Sounds like youâre making a fine effort. My only suggestion is to keep reading Andrewâs book and focus on the visualizations. Iâve heard so many people say doing those visualizations activities worked for them.
Itâs called The Shadows. Some teenage boys lucid dream. They actually start to meet up in their dreams and commit violent crime. One ends up being killed by the others. Fast forward 20 or so years and the murders are still happening. A detective is investigating and one of the boys who lucid dreamed with the others but never committed a crime with them my be a target.
It talks about setting the intention to have lucid dreams and at what stage of sleep you are more likely to have lucid dreams. The boys also journal. Itâs a fun book. The author sets a creepy atmosphere.
Cool, Adam1. The Shadows is the next novel I plan to read â it came to my attention after Andrew recommended it recently. I am currently reading his earlier novel The Whisper Man, having been intrigued to learn (in an interview on the bookâs Amazon page) that a minor character in The Whisper Man is a major character in The Shadows.
From the same interview:
Lucid dreams play a major role in your new book. What is your experience with lucid dreaming?
Lucid dreams are when you âwake upâ in a dream while remaining asleep. I was obsessed with them as a teenager, and have remained so to an extent as an adult. The appeal was always the idea of escape: of being in control of the world and able to do anything you want.
One of the key things is keeping a dream diary, which I have done intermittently over the years, but which is ultimately a bit more work than Iâm prepared to put in. These days, having a lucid dream is a nice surprise once in a while, but I donât chase them anymore. That said, I thought they were fertile ground to explore â that isolated teenage boys in a drab community might seize on them as means of escape. And that things could become sinister very quickly, especially if one of them began manipulating the others. (LINK)
Iâm enjoying The Whisper Man and looking forward to The Shadows.
Recently I enjoyed the movie Lucid (2019) . âZel, a lonely young manâs life changes when his enigmatic neighbour offers to help him overcome social anxiety.â
I have quibbles with it â e.g. I wish they had gone into more precise detail on reality checks â but I liked that it dealt fairly realistically with lucid dreaming, and portrayed it as producing psychological growth if approached in the right way.
It is available on Amazon Prime: LINK [NOTE: there are other things on Amazon Prime with the same title]