Another member asked me to post this due to a conversation in the chat room. A spirit helped me last night with some great advice. For the last six months I have been spending a great deal of time attempting to master the art of lucid dreaming. I had my first lucid last night during normal sleep for the first time in a year. As I laid in bed after half an hour of self hypnosis a spirit took pity on me and gave me some advice that may have caused me to have my lucid dream. I will have to repeat the advice and see if their is a marked improvement in success rate but the method makes sense.
First some background. We all know that some very strange, even impossible, things can happen in our dreams yet we treat these dream events as if they are perfectly normal. This is the most peculiar aspect of our dreams. Perhaps the most common method of having a lucid dream is the D.I.L.D. (Dream Initiated Luicd Dream). Basically this means that at some point the dreamer sees something in a dream that makes them say, "Hey that just doesn't happen in real life so I must be dreaming." This sounds easy in theory but in practice usually takes several months, sometimes even years, of practicing awareness skills during waking life.
Along comes the spirit. As I was laying in bed waiting to drift off into sleep a stream of thoughts came into my mind with a slight hint of personality other than my own. I am getting quite good at discerning the difference between guidance from a spirit and my own random thoughts. Anyway the advice, in a nutshell, was to get my dream journal and to replay a whole bunch of dreams in my mind and when something strange or impossible took place in a dream I was to imagine that I was questioning the dream events and to realise that I was dreaming. So I did this with five recent dreams, imagining that I was reliving the dreams and becoming aware of the dream events that were too strange to be real life and saying to myself that I must be dreaming.
I went off to sleep and had a dream four hours later. The dream was quite strange and I even missed this clanger of a shopkeeper charging me £71 for two bars of chocolate that I ate before paying for them. But then I went for a walk along a road I know well and it was very dark. No car lights, no house lights or streetlamps yet the surrounding areas of the city were lit up like normal. So I thought that this was strange for about two seconds and then realised that I was dreaming.
Voila!!!
I have little desire to be Neo from the film 'The Matrix' though I must admit that later in the dream I ran across the floor of a really high department store, dived through the glass window and flew around for a while before landing on the street below. Now that was fun but I used my time wisely. My desire for this ability is to practice certain magickal rituals that cannot be performed in the waking world but I have to learn to walk before I can run. Many people complain that their lucid dreams fade quickly and they wake up. That started to happen to me and I rubbed my hands which brought the dream back to full clarity and vividness and then it started to fade again so I spun my dream body at high speed and again the dream stabilised. It quickly started to fade again and I remember someone posting on a forum that touching prickly things works really well. Unfortunately there wasn't a cactus to hand so I rubbed my hands on the carpet of the room I was in and that worked fantastically well and the dream stabilsed for what seemed about ten minutes. I was surprised at the length of the dream considering my impatience of the last six months and nothing kills a lucid dream faster than over-excitement.
I don't know who the spirit was but the advice makes perfect sense for training oneself to attain lucidity via the DILD method so hopefully my progress will be a little more exciting from now on. And of course maybe it will be of use to others too.