Is Conscious Dreaming Fact Or Fiction?

By Allan Matacan

Lucid dreaming, also called conscious dreaming, is the process of being asleep while maintaining awareness of your dreams. While you're in a dream state, you actually know that you're dreaming. That can even allow you to control your dreams consciously.

While having the ability to control your dreams may sound farfetched, its actually something which is within your reach. Lucid dreaming isnt that hard to do and these dreams are a great place to express your true self and your desires. There are techniques which have proven effective at producing lucid dreams.

First, you have to know what your goal is; are you looking to be able to get more enjoyment from your dreams or would you like to use this ability to help you improve your life in other areas? Whatever the reason, decide what it is that makes you want to discover conscious dreaming.

After you've discovered why you want to start conscious dreaming, you'll begin to learn the techniques to get you into the right frame of mind. Lucid dreaming requires a particular mental state. Most people learning how to do this start with dream recall. This is a simple matter of remembering the dreams you've had.

If you want to begin conscious dreaming, you'll need to be able to recall all the details of the dreams you have each night. There are a number of ways to do this, but the most common is keeping a dream diary. Place it by the bed, and every morning, enter all the details you remember from your dreams as soon as you wake up. It's important to make sure you do this right away, because you start to lose information the longer you're awake.

Before long, youll find yourself able to remember more of your dreams " and your dream diary can help refresh your memory. Once your mind is trained to remember dreams, the ability to recognize them while they are happening will follow easily. You might, like many do, come to the awareness suddenly that you are dreaming!

In addition to use of a dream diary, another popular method is hypnosis. This can help you achieve the mental state required to enter conscious dreaming. Hypnosis can get people to remember the most minute details of their dreams after only a few sessions. After that, you'll be ready to start conscious dreaming.

You might find at first that you tend to suddenly wake during your lucid dreams; this is natural. In order to make a return to the dream, concentrate on the details of the dream as you drift back to sleep. This should enable you to quickly return and start controlling the events once again.

Another technique is to set your alarm for two or three hours earlier than usual then going back to sleep once awoken. It is a lot easier to have lucid dreams in the hours before you usually awake. It may even be unclear to you if these were dreams or you were just thinking as you lay awake. With practice, this technique will lead to conscious dreaming.

Try to keep track of your sleep schedule " this will help you to figure out when the best times for conscious dreaming are. Be sure not to deprive yourself of too much sleep, as you are actually less likely to have lucid dreams when sleep deprived.

However, you may be glad to find out that lucid dreaming can help to alleviate insomnia and other sleep problems. When you learn how to use the ability of conscious dreaming, you can train your mind to stop the worries which keep you up.

You may think that learning lucid dreaming takes years of practice, but in fact its not so hard at all to learn " with just a little practice, you can be a conscious dreamer too!

Conscious dreaming is easy, and almost everyone can do it. Take a little time, and use one of these methods to unleash the power of lucid dreaming for yourself. You'll be amazed at what you discover.

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