1. Draw an outline of your lucidity tank on a piece of paper. It can look however you want it to, but mine often resembles an oil drum or a fuel tank.
2. Have a think about what kind of things make you feel more aware, more energized and more lucid in the waking state.
3. On the inside of the tank, write or draw all the things that stock up your lucidity levels.
4. Now consider what kind of things make you feel less lucid, less aware and less energized. Then, on the outside of the tank, write down all these things that deplete your lucidity levels. You can even draw little arrows going from them, piercing the tank and leaking out the chi energy. Be creative – you can’t get this wrong.
5. Finally, make a commitment to do more of what stocks up your lucidity tank and to do less of what depletes it! Keep your picture by your bed or in your dream diary as a reminder of the practice.
enhancing your lucid dreaming practice
I want to end our final toolbox with a look at where we can take our practice from here – how we can further our lucidity training and what more we can do to develop our skills.
Learn to meditate
So many lucid dream techniques are dependent on holding our mind in check and maintaining our awareness so, if you’re serious about lucid dreaming, it makes sense to learn meditation. I would personally recommend mindfulness meditation in particular if you want to develop a stabilized lucid dreaming practice. Mindfulness can be practised by people of all faiths and is based on the simple aspiration to ‘know what’s happening, as it is happening, without judgement or preference’.
Lucid dreaming isn’t just analogous to mindfulness meditation, it is mindfulness meditation – ‘knowing that we’re dreaming as we’re dreaming’ (hopefully without judgement) – so it’s the perfect practice for lucid dreamers.
I recommend the Mindfulness Association (www.
mindfulnessassociation.net) for courses around the UK and Europe, or, for courses in the USA, try Jon Kabat-Zinn’s organisation www.umassmed.edu/cfm
nap like a cat
Napping is one of the most beneficial things that you can do for both your psychological and physiological health. It charges your body with potential, and whatever activities you engage in after a nap will be executed more easily and tackled more creatively. It’s also great for lucid dreaming!
During an afternoon nap, we tend to enter REM dreaming sleep straight away and to stay there for most of the nap without much entry into delta-wave deep sleep, which means we get direct access to the dream state. To get the greatest benefits, nap for between 20 and 60 minutes.
Keep learning
This is an introductory book which simply lays the foundations of your lucid dream training but there are loads more techniques to explore and dozens of other great books out there to help further your learning, so get reading! Robert Waggoner’s book Lucid Dreaming:
Gateway to the Inner Self is my personal favourite, and then of course there is my own Dreams of Awakening, for those of you who are interested in using lucid dream training on the spiritual path.
explore the hypnopompic
As a hypnopompic enthusiast it pains me that we’ve not had space within this book to fully explore this amazing state of consciousness, but let me at least plant the seed.
As I touched on earlier, the hypnopompic state is the transitional state of mind that lies between sleep and full wakefulness. It’s the state that we experience just before our mind has woken fully from sleep and when our eyes are still usually closed.
It’s characterized by a soft clarity of mind, so you might like to hang out there if you can, resting in what’s one of the most refined levels of consciousness. To do this, either wake yourself up slowly and gradually while keeping your eyes closed or hit the snooze button on the alarm and allow yourself to rest in the broad, panoramic awareness that characterizes the hypnopompic for an extra 10 minutes or so.
The hypnopompic can be a great place to access the lucid dream state too, by allowing yourself to slip back
into the dream state through the back door. This is a favourite technique of my fiancée, Jade, who rests in the hypnopompic each morning while I’m clattering around the bedroom. In one of the lulls in my noisy activity she can allow herself to slip back into a dream with full lucidity.
Give it a try yourself.
Make a schedule
Just as you’d schedule in your weekly exercise training, be sure to do the same with your lucidity training. Dream diaries and the Weird technique need to be done every day, but doing wake, back to bed every morning or having three alarms set to practise multiple wake-ups each night simply isn’t practical for most people.
So the best thing to do is to schedule in at least one night a week for your lucid dream training, preferably on a night when you don’t have to wake up too early the next morning.
Choose the techniques you’re going to practise, and when, and then stick to the schedule with discipline.
Have fun
Schedule and discipline are great but the easiest way to stop having lucid dreams is to get too uptight and rigid about the practice. Some people get so worried about having or not having lucid dreams that they can’t even get to sleep from thinking about it. Of course we do need to make sure that we’re doing the practices properly, but at the same time try and keep a sense of light-heartedness around the whole thing. And don’t forget to have fun!
charlIe’s toolbox checklIst
✍
C Be sure to plan what you want to do in your next lucid dream, and feel free to have more than one dream plan to choose from. Remember that, once lucid, our ability to direct the dream is as much about our belief that anything is possible as it is about our level of friendship with the unconscious mind, so remind yourself that your dream plans are as achievable as you believe them to be.
C Be mindful of what stocks up and what depletes your lucidity tank. This will change over time, of course, so don’t stop exploring.
C Try not to get disheartened if you don’t start having lucid dreams straight away. Although some people have them within days of trying the techniques, most people take weeks to start seeing results, and months to have any stability in their practice. Lucid dreaming isn’t easy, but then nothing worth learning ever is, so stick with it.
C Don’t think that your journey ends once you’ve read this book – keep learning, keep exploring, and keep moving forward into lucidity!