Prepare Yourself Mentally
If you want to engage in lucid dreaming, you have to mentally prepare yourself for this process and make dreaming a priority. To do this, you have to have the right mental foundation. This foundation should allow you to maximize your lucid dreaming success. If you do this before you begin to attempt to dream lucidly, you will be more prone to manage your thoughts accomplish your goal. To truly prepare to dream lucidly, you need to replace any doubt with confidence, and turn all your skepticism into belief. Preparing yourself mentally to dream will help you dream lucidly quickly and it can also positively enhance other parts of your life as well.
Increase Dream Recall
If you are trying to increase your dream recall, you will want to try the following techniques.
- Lie completely still, and don’t open your eyes, upon waking up
- Try to wake up as slowly as possible and do your best to focus on your dream. This will allow you to remember your dreams naturally.
- When you start to remember your dream, you need to keep yourself relaxed. Staying relaxed will allow other parts of the dream to come to you naturally.
- Run a dream checklist as soon as you wake-up. Sometimes, you will have absolutely no recall of your dream. However, you need to do a dream checklist anyways. Doing this checklist may trigger you to remember a dream that you may not have otherwise.
If you go through these steps and you still can’t recall your dreams, you need to keep trying. Eventually, it will happen.
Keep a Dream Journal
Keeping a dream journal is one of the most important things you can do to help yourself improve your dream recall. The journal will engrain in your mind that your subconscious is important and as you continue to write down your dreams, you will also be creating a habit of naturally recalling your dreams. It doesn’t matter how you journal your dreams, just that you do it. Most people go through a bit of trial and error before they find the type of dream journaling that works for them. If you are serious about learning how to dream lucidly, you have to keep a dream journal.
Expand Your Awareness
As you begin to lucid dream on a regular basis, you become more aware of dreams. When this happens, places, people, and even certain activities will become more familiar. As familiarity increases, you will begin to develop dreamsigns. Dreamsigns are patterns that occur in your dreams. For instance, you dreams may begin to take place in the same environment, or may always star you as a hero. Once you are aware of what is going on in your dreams, you will be one step closer to being able to accomplish lucid dreaming.
Link Your Awareness to Your Dreams
After following the steps above, you should be able to link your awareness to your dreams. This awareness is created by mindfulness. To link your awareness to your dreams, you need to think about how truly aware you are. No one has an exact answer to this question. Instead, it is all a matter of personal awareness. To increase your own awareness, you should meditate and follow all of the steps mentioned above. Another bonus is to regularly give yourself reality checks by using your own common sense. You also need to keep track of your dreamsigns and the common factors in your dreams.
*Featured photo by Ginny
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