i had my first lucid dream last night. i guess i’ve had dreams where i’ve realised i’m dream­ing before, but this is the first one i made hap­pen. it really wasn’t too hard, but i already have an active dream life and pay atten­tion to my dreams any­way, which is the catch. if you want to lucid dream, you have to be aware of your dreams even after they happen.

how i trained myself was easy. i needed to intro­duce a visual cue that would prompt me to check out if this was real­ity. for the past month, for sev­eral times a day, i’ve been look­ing at the palm of my right hand and say­ing to myself “this is real”. then, when you are dream­ing, if you have devel­oped enough of a habit of look­ing at your hand and telling your­self this is real­ity, you’ll con­tinue your habit in your dream. as you look at your hand, it becomes less of a state­ment than a ques­tion, though, and that’s enough for your brain to catch and say “wait a sec­ond, this isn’t real at all”.

at that point, some level of con­scious­ness should come around to let you have con­trol of your actions. it’s a good idea to go to bed every night with an idea in your head as to what to do as soon as you realise you’ve gained lucid­ity: try to make it the same idea every night, some­thing sim­ple, but also some­thing that is essen­tially impos­si­ble in real­ity (the old stan­dard of being able to fly works well here). as soon as you come around, it’s quite easy to remem­ber to try what you’ve planned, and you only need to do it for a split sec­ond for lucid­ity to come around fully and tell your­self “oh yeah, no fuck­ing way this is real”.

at that point, it’s pretty easy to go do what­ever you like then. one word of advice, though: i wished it was qui­eter. when i was asleep and lucid dream­ing, i became aware of what i could hear out­side my house. it was dis­rupt­ing, and it actu­ally takes some dream con­cen­tra­tion to do what you want. at one point, i heard some kids yelling out­side, and i (lit­er­ally) thought “dammit, that’s going to wake me up”. about 30 sec­onds later, i thought “well, i’m awake now” and then 10 sec­onds after that i was awake. the inter­est­ing thing was is that i could feel the tran­si­tion from dream con­scious­ness to wak­ing con­scious­ness. also inter­est­ing is that i woke up very eas­ily and sprang from bed ener­gised. so, pleas­ant side effect to wak­ing dur­ing a lucid dream: you already have some con­scious­ness, so you’re already awake, so it’s really easy to wake.

it was damn fun, though. can’t wait to sleep again tonight. :)