How to: Lucid Dreaming Options

For those who are unaware of what lucid dreaming is (and I doubt most people here are), it's the ability to consciously act within and control your dreams.

Lucid dreaming involves the use of two paradoxes, but I'll get to those as they pop up.

The gist of what is involved is as follows:

1) Identify that you are dreaming
2) Prevent this realisation from waking you up
3) Do what you wish

Please note, that this is taken from my personal experience, and may not be true of all people.

Step 1 - Identify that you are dreaming
This is the first paradox - it requires some amount of already extant consciousness to perform. Realising that you're dreaming is quite hard for that reason. Generally speaking, when people are dreaming they have no recollection of what has happened "before". What this means, is that they have no thoughts about why something is wrong or shouldn't work, because they have nothing to contrast it to.

So this is the trick - you have to be able, without remembering anything from your waking life, find a paradox within the dream*. Something that of itself, when contrasted to something else within the dream, shouldn't work, or has no reason to be. Once this has been identified, and you've realised you're dreaming, move on to step 2.

* This in itself may be impossible for some individuals. It depends entirely on whether you feel you have control over your actions in your dreams, or they just happen. In the first case, this will be possible, however, if you feel you have no control over your actions in dreams, then you will find a lot of difficulty in this first step.

Step 2 - Prevent this realisation from waking you up
The problem with this kind of realisation, is that it brings your consciousness to the fore. Obviously, once consciousness is reached, your mind will go "wakey time!". Not what you want.

So here is where you have to accept a paradox (the second one). You have to be able to accept that the dream you find yourself in is the world, but it's also entirely mutable. If you instead manage to pick up your memories of the real world, chances are your mind will reject this "world" it finds itself in.

Step 3 - Do what you wish
Just as the title says, if you've passed through the first two steps, then you're free to do whatever you like within your dream world. It may be possible to even perform some sorts of magic within the dreamworld, but of that I have heard very little (ie, none).

So I hope that helps. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Sorry, even though I'm a Christian, I have trouble looking for the purpose of something that just exists. I find "what's the meaning of life?" to be a nonsensical question.