Lucid Dreaming: Triggering Conscious Sleep
Introduction
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I have written on the subject of lucid dreaming a few times now. I’m not exactly sure why it’s such a fascinating topic for me and for other people. Maybe it’s the magic of it, or the mystery, or perhaps it’s the power that it brings? Regardless of the reason, having complete control over one’s dreams is nonetheless a pretty novel and appealing concept.
Our dreams are a place where anything is possible. They are a place (or perhaps a state) where we can see anything, or do anything. When we wake up in a dream we wake up in a world created by our own mind; a world that is often both strange and beautiful. We experience structures and colors and even beings that are unlike those that we experience in our normal reality. We also have power and control in our dreams. Depending on our level of lucidity we are able to essentially do anything – fly, walk through walls or anything that we like. The only limitation is our imagination.
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But it is also extremely challenging to lucid dream (at least for some individuals –like me). I think this is another reason why it’s so appealing and why it fascinates so many people. The challenge of it makes it mysterious and it feeds our curiosity. It also makes it something that we can work towards, like a goal or an accomplishment.
The remainder of this article will discuss some of the ways in which a person can work towards achieving lucidity in their dreams. It discusses the mindset that lucid dreaming requires and what I would call "triggers." I hope you enjoy.
Lucid Dreaming Requires Focus
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Not always, but often we dream about things in our lives that we are focused on. For instance, when we start a new job, our mind is often occupied with learning the ways and tasks required by the organization. These subtle aspects of our focus often creep into our dreams. Similarly, if we have an important deadline to meet that causes us stress, we often go to sleep at night and dream about the project or task that we are working on. Sometimes this even happens when we marathon a TV series that we like, or when we attempt to learn a new sport, talent or activity. Ultimately, when our mind focuses a lot of its attention on one particular task or aspect of our life, this sends a signal to our brain that this particular thing is very important and possibly something of a problem that needs to be solved. As such, our brain continues to engage with the activity and try to problem solve it while we are asleep.
When it comes to lucid dreaming, we can utilize this natural process to our advantage. By focussing a lot of our attention on lucid dreaming we send a signal to our brain that this task is important which will hopefully carry the idea into our dreams.
Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.
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Similar to the explanation above, our dreams often revolve around repetitive activities that we engage in over the course of our day or week. When we build or create something, or when we spend a lot of time writing a paper, we often go to sleep at night and dream about the very same activity. We may wake up frustrated by the fact that we spent our entire night dreaming about filing papers or painting the walls in our home.
One positive aspect of this mechanism that relates to lucid dreaming is that we can also utilize it to our advantage.
For instance, in order to lucid dream we often need something to trigger wakefulness within us while we are asleep. By "trigger" I mean we need something to remind us to become aware within our dream. We can do this by associating an action like looking at our hands with the idea of becoming aware. For instance, every time we look at our hands we can ask ourselves “Am I dreaming?”
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In this case, the action of looking at our hands becomes a trigger to becoming aware and it will hopefully have the effect of waking us up in our dream. Repetition also comes into play in that we need to perform the trigger enough times throughout our day that it will carry into our dreams. Ultimately, we want to dream about our trigger (i.e. we want to dream about looking at our hands).
So to combine the idea of focus and repetition we can tell ourselves that’s it’s very important that we become aware in our dreams and that when we look at our hands we will become aware. Then we perform our triggering activity many times throughout our day, hoping that we will dream about our trigger activity.
Ideas for Dream Triggers
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A triggering activity can be anything really, but the key is that it has to be simple enough that we can perform it discreetly and common enough to ensure that we will have many opportunities to perform it during a normal day. So for instance, using the example of looking at our hands, we would look at our hands dozens or even hundreds of times per day and every time we do so, we would say something like “I am awake” or “Am I dreaming?” You could also combine several of these activities to increase the chances that one of them will carry into your dream.
The following is a list of some trigger behaviors and activities that can be used. It’s best to do something that feels comfortable for you or something that you already do quite often:
1. Walking through a doorway
2. Looking at your phone
3. Turning on a light switch
4. Seeing another person
5. Looking at a watch or bracelet
6. Playing with a necklace
7. Sitting in a chair
8. Standing up
Conclusion
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Lucid dreaming is an incredible experience that I would highly recommend to anyone. Though it can be quite challenging to accomplish, there are many tricks and techniques that can be used to increase a person chances of waking up in a dream. This article only discusses a few of the techniques that I use, so if lucid dreaming is something that you are interested in, I highly recommend doing some more research or asking questions of others. It is definitely worth it!
Feel free to share your own lucid dreaming experiences and techniques or to ask questions in the comments section. I always like hearing from others.
For other articles that I have written on the subject please see the links below:
Lucid Dreaming: Techniques to Induce Conscious Sleep
Sleep Paralysis: An Unpleasant Side Effect of Lucid Dreaming
If difficult to actually remember to perform the triggers during the day, one can initially set an alarm or tone on a watch (or phone), but still verbalise the command so that the synthetic trigger can eventually be removed.
Awareness Now!
Upvoted and has been added to the latest MAP Resteems post.
yeah! I really like that idea. I never thought of using sound triggers. I think that would especially work if the sound is quiet enough that it could be used when we sleep as well. Like set an hourly tone on a watch that will maybe get carried into our dreams. Great idea. Sounds like you know some stuff on the subject.
Hadn't thought of carrying it on during sleep - sounds like an experiment is in order!
yeah for sure. Let me know if it works out! :)
About three or four years ago (roughly), I used to do a lot of meditation on consciousness, in a rather desperate attempt to astral project. Seemed like a real starry, magical experience to me (much like lucid dreaming). Though I've long since stopped in an effort to pursue a more meaningful spiritual bounty, I recall that this prolonged, if occasionally real-life interspersed effort at conscious sleep (one can obviously go either way once this state has been achieved) had a rather intriguing, though somewhat obvious, effect on my sleep states, expounded somewhat already by you in the post above.
Rather than directly influenced by anything I was doing in my day-to-day life, I found that my dreams more and more encompassed those aspects of existence whose energies I was delving into. So when I meditated on the nature of the third eye, or space, I had a lot more dreams, often semi-lucid (by this I mean I was able to half-consciously control my own actions in the dream like I would in real life, and kinda knew it was a dream, but still couldn't control everything else in it, which meant that physics was still guided by nature and not by myself), that involved travel to different places I'd never been to, or meeting exotic lifeforms no inquisitive scientist could hope to find on our plane of existence. Or if I meditated on my past lives and what I might potentially have experienced, glimpses of both past and future lives (since they're all relative to where we are) came to me in sleep, with less control from exerted over the past and comparatively more in future lives).
The most profound however, was when I meditated on people or characters from real life or mass media (i.e, a classmate or Harley Quinn from Batman), in an attempt to read more into the subtler energies that their compositions either from birth or their design conception might have had a role to play in shaping them into who they became later on, and how the effect may have occurred. Strangely enough, this actually worked better with the characters than the real people, and when they showed in my dreams, for reasons I cannot fully fathom, my interactions with otherwise non-existent characters were actually more detailed, engaging, 'lifelike', and realistic (within the environments they were usually found in, that is), than with people I've met in this reality.
Anyway, that was just something I thought I'd share.
Cool post, friend :)
Enjoyed the read...might try some of that sometime, if I take any sort of hiatus or hit a wall on my current pursuit.
This is something I told someone before, they always talk about flying while conscious in the dream or walking through walls but really, those are semi-conscious actions, when you are fully conscious in a lucid dream or oobe, the physics remain the same. This is the way I see it. (the more conscious you are, the more stable the physics is. It's the semi conscious ones walking through walls and such). I have often found levitating itself a trigger, it happens in the almost conscious dream and leads to a fully conscious one.
Also, someone I read once suggested that the seeming consciousness is probably a dream in itself, like you're dreaming of being conscious (that's interesting to think about).
Also I find your meditation on fictional characters interesting, there was this popular comic artist that dabbled into "magic" stuff who used to talk about "evoking" characters (fictional or real) . You can pick one, focus on them to enter the energy that makes them up. I never tried it but your report is interesting.
I wonder if that has something to do with how our consciousness perceives its reality. We invest all our awareness in the gross physical nature of the world, so if one is fully conscious in a dream, perhaps the physics of that dream are simply being enforced by the comfort zone the consciousness naturally falls into.
I believe that might be the notion of consciousness and 'dreaming' being relative. It's a philosophical theory that our dreams are simply our consciousness ebbing away from our existing reality into an adjacent reality, and that our "normal" reality may simply be a 'dream' state adjacent to an even more profound one. It follows that even in our everyday reality, we are still not at "full consciousness", and that this reality is simply a much longer, more drawn out "dream".
Haven't heard of this before (and frankly I wasn't sure anyone else had even bothered to try this), but I think I may have accidentally, or rather curiously wandered right into this field of exploration without knowing it. I could actually feel the energies that comprised these people, with little to no difference between them. Like the distinction between non-existent character and existent human being was itself fiction.
Ah, thanks :D
Planning to start now? ;)
I believe this is exactly whats happening. I think our consciousness is trained by our physical realities so the more of it you bring to a dream, the more "physical" stability you bring to the dream. You could usually be semi-conscious and experience flying, random scene changes or even people changing and other strange scenes but I think the more conscious we are, the more stable the dream is.
This is possible. Maybe we will wake up someday and realize we've all been dreaming, or maybe it's just a single person dreaming about us (now that's going metaphysical).
It's loosely related with "assuming God-forms" in western magic (these esoteric people). I believe it was Grant Morrison (comic artist) who mentioned it once. I saw a video where he talked about a few strange stuff). I believe he extended the traditional teachings to assuming the form of fictional characters like (superman
Lol. my concentration and meditation skills are not really good. besides I'm up and about these days. I use to do these things back when I was in Uni (life wasnt crazy back then. lol)
That is very interesting. I never really thought about it like that but I see your point. I once had a very lucid dream in which I was flying. I had previously set the intention to fly into space prior to going to sleep. In my dream, when it came time to cross the threshold into space I became afraid and unable to push myself further. This was because going into space in normal reality would lead to death and because the dream felt real I was uncertain if I would die in my dream if I continued on. In regards to your theory - the fact that i could fly suggests that I wasn't fully conscious, but the fact that I was afraid may suggest that I was quite conscious. That gives me something to think about :)
I would like to see my theory as being flexible and adjustable too but just from personal experience, it seems the more conscious I am, the more I can't do anything special. When I'm semi conscious, I often get triggered into a lucid dream in the middle of flying and my thought is always streamlined, e.g im only driven by a single thing I remembered from real life, like find a special book. but when fully conscious, I have access to a few goals from real life (also limited to a few things). Since there is no science behind it, it's hard to say this opinion is the fact.
One night, not long ago, I was on a drug so I slept early, woke around 530 or so and went back to bed, I laid around trying to sleep, while there I could partially feel my body going numb, then I think I slept off only to realize I was standing in my room. Then I realized I was dreaming/oob, I went to the door and the first thing on my mind was to walk through wall or the door, I couldnt, so I just opened the door and walked out to see someone I didnt know standing at the door. The whole lucid dream thing just happen anyhow, I cant really say anything solid about it.
Sounds like a very cool experience. I don't know if I've ever had that where I thought I was awake but was actually dreaming. Though I have heard about it many times so I know its common.
Yeah, it's common. I think if you wake up before your usual time and get back to bed in lesser than 10minutes after, it usually triggers itself. It's hard to force or control.
yeah sometimes its just sporadic
Once more, I am wondering if your inability to walk through the wall stems from a conscious reinforcement of the notion that it is impossible to walk through walls because it does not work that way in our world. Perhaps in a state of semi-consciousness, this constant mind-enforced idea of physics is mitigated somewhat, since physics and its natural knowledge is subconsciously programmed to the point where it isn't a conscious thought to us, until confronted with the active prospect of just spontaneously achieving flight or walking through a solid object, at which point the normally passive subconscious rule springs into conscious thought. If our actions in lucid dreams can be controlled by us through awareness of the experience being a dream, I can't seem to shake the idea that the physics and occurrences of a lucid dream may also be shaped by us, channeled through the desires of the subconscious. Kind of a like a loop of personal control, until a breakaway is achieved.
I also think the "conscious reinforcement" is what maintains natural physics in dream state. I see the point of the "loop of personal control" but I don't know if it is that easy. although I have slight recollection of having been able to maintain flight in some cases as a teenager when dream flight triggered lucidity. but in most cases where I simply became lucid randomly, I'm usually unable to do anything beyond natural even though I'm aware it is a dream. Maybe I need to reinforce the idea that dreams have separate realities and maybe that could change how things work out.
Did this fear otherwise disturb the realism of the dream, or jar it somewhat? Like, were you in any way pulled back into waking conscious, even in the slightest because of it?
That's interesting. Typically it is death in dreams that yanks us back into waking consciousness, so I find it intriguing that instinctual self-preservation was so immensely present in a lucid dream that you feared dying in something you knew to be a dream. Perhaps this suggests that in some ways at least, we feel at home with certain precepts of life, regardless of what state of consciousness or reality we currently inhabit.
Isn't fear a very subconsciously-rooted response tho? Like, wouldn't it be possible for one to experience it outside of complete consciousness whilst in in a dream-state?
In my experience and study alike, I have found fear to be a very natural, instinctual response to things we are otherwise unsure of, or just know inherently to be afraid of. I think the constant programming of what to associate fear with would easily transcend any dimensional limitations of one conscious state to another. Thoughts?
I don't think so. I remained in lucid sleep for some time afterwards before actually waking up or drifting back into sleep. This happened a while ago so the exact details are a bit foggy.
Very interesting. i never thought of it that way but that makes sense. I will be thinking about that more.
Yes i agree with you that fear is a subconscious response. I think it would have made more sense if i worded my thoughts as follows: "the fact that I was afraid may suggest that I was quite lucid in my dream." I also believe that one can be fearful in a dream-state - even when lucid.
wow that sounds very interesting. I've always been fascinated with meditation. I don't do it as much as i would like but I know intellectually that it has many benefits. Your experience sounds incredible. Thanks for sharing that with me :)
Indeed it does...meditation is a means of stilling the torrential chaos of sensory stimulus the world around us offers, and journeying within to the depths of oneself, to a place of sublime peace. At one point in that prior meditative career I mentioned, I had arrived at a place wherein I could easily just retreat into my inner peace in the midst of a classroom full of raucous guys exhibiting their most outlandishly hooligan ways possible (with the girls just playing passive observers lol), and experience quietude of the utmost measure. Like a dog in its kennel during a storm.
It was, thank you :)
Learned a great many things during that time, both the easy way and the hard way.
You're very welcome, friend :)
I've done meditation on and off. I think it helps in developing empathy and maybe become less reactive, I never experienced those alt state of consciousness they talk about on meditation sites. Lol. Maybe I've been doing it wrong.
Ah, yes...the "fitness" expression of meditation I've friends who have indulged in. They use it for similar purposes, as well as to develop concentration, focus, improve sleep, or just to explore their own minds and root themselves more firmly in who they are (helpful for those are constantly being told to be something they're not). All very useful day-to-day applications of this tool.
However, meditation is a bit like a gaming laptop, or even just a really powerful EVGA graphics card or something. It could be used as a paperweight or to beat the daylights out of a home invader. But anyone who has even the faintest clue of what either really is knows it can be so much more. In deep meditation, it is known that the true extent of its potential is supertemporal inherent.
My attempts at attaining said alternate states of consciousness also encountered similar incumbrances. And I used to think there was something off about my method as well. But when it comes to discovering one's meditative capacities on one's own, I have found it to be less of a definite science, and more of just a process of exploration. It's the difference between being told how to ride a bike without training wheels, and actually doing it. You just gotta explore what your own body's capabilities are. You just kind find your own way.
The other part is dedicated practice. It's like business. The more you put in the more you get. This too, was my mistake...I simply wasn't doing enough. I see now that that was probably a good thing in hindsight, but at the time it was pretty darn frustrating.
Of course, it should also be done with determination of the goal in mind. Doing it lightly, a way of just "seeing what happens" seldom ever yields results in meditation. This was the shortfall of the attempts some I knew made.
It's a shame I can't really dedicate more time to it these days but I believe you are right about meditation being a tool that needs dedication. Maybe some days I will be able to explore it better and put in more time.
interesting