Tag Archives: Mantras

10 Steps to Guarantee a Lucid Dream

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Here are my top ten steps for guaranteeing lucid dreaming. If performed diligently, they will result in lucid dreaming for sure;

  1. Avoid any artificial substances. Artificial means anything that does not grow naturally. Specifically avoid substances known to interfere with sleep such as stimulants (drugs, caffeine, energy drinks, etc), and depressants (alcohol, cannabis, sleeping pills, etc), avoid refined sugars and artificial sweeteners.
  2. Drink clean natural water. We were built to drink water, not sodas! Fizzy junk drinks are absolute poison for the body and mind.
  3. Spend as much of the day as possible in all day awareness.
  4. Spend as much time as possible outdoors and around nature. Try and avoid extended periods being blasted with radiation from computer screens and cell phones, or working from dawn till dusk in an artificially lit, artificially air conditioned room.
  5. Perform reality checks constantly. Perform them with focus and intention, not ‘by the way’.
  6. Try not to eat at night. I would suggest not eating for least 3 hours before getting into bed.
  7. If possible, try to spend those 3 hours from 5. above in meditation alone. After which, get straight into bed. Try and avoid TV, computers, games, or anything else that sucks your energy and awareness. Watching TV before or in bed is not a good thing. Television is proven to induce slow alpha waves within the brain, not only slowing your brain down to a halt (and not the good slowing down either), but also putting you in a highly susceptible state to receive the rubbish adverts being blasted at you in quick succession. TV and diet alone are probably the two biggest causes for the dramatic increase in attention related disorders that everyone seems to have or know someone that has these days.
  8. Saturate your mind with lucid dreaming related material as close to bed as possible. Instead of that television time, read your dream journal and read lucid dreaming related books.
  9. As you drift off to sleep, focus your attention on dreaming. If you’re good at visualizations, then picture yourself in a dream, lucid and aware. If, like myself, you’re no good at visualizations, stick with a mantra. “I am dreaming right now,” and mean it.
  10. Set your alarm for 6 hours after you go to sleep, ready for your WBTB into lucid dreaming! Whatever happens, make sure to make as detailed an entry as possible in your dream journal. Enjoy!

 

Setting up Dreamscapes

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To some degree or other, our dreams are all made up of things on our mind, and things that we’ve been thinking about that particular day. The closer you get to sleep, the more your thoughts have an effect on your dreams. This makes setting up dreamscapes, or “dream scenes” very simple to do. Much like the MILD, or mantra induced lucid dreaming, we can use a mantra to induce any type of dream scene, including or not including lucidity. That said, it is unlikely that repeating a paragraph long mantra about how your dream is going to take place will be that effective. Instead, run through mental visualisations. If your visualising capabilities are poor like mine, that’s OK too – when it comes to things like this, it really is the thought, or should I say intention, that counts.

Your visualisations should be as accurate and powerful as possible, and if you can base them in any way on a real memory that you have and that you are trying to incubate as a dream, then even better. Run through the visualisation over and over, trying to picture the finer details of the scene you are trying to create. For lucidity, picture yourself within these visualisations actually lucid and performing constant reality checks.

As you feel yourself slipping into sleep, hold on to the visualisation and continue running through it. As it’s night time, it’s unlikely that you’ll fall into a WILD however it’s never impossible! The plan is that you fall asleep with your visualisations in tact, and they become the basis for one or more of your dream scenes that night.

Real Meditation

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I have posted three popular types of meditation that I have always preferred to use, the breathing meditation, the all day awareness, and the focus meditation. These are three very powerful awareness practices, that I use on a daily basis. The ‘real’ meditation however, is just sitting in pure awareness. The breathing meditation entails resting your awareness on your breath. The all day awareness  is practiced by placing your full awareness on anything and everything you happen to do throughout the day. The focus meditation uses a mantra as the object of awareness.

Real meditation is the awareness of awareness itself. You will have found real meditation with practice of the previous techniques. With the breathing meditation, the real awareness is found during the silences after the out breath. With the focus meditation, you will find awareness in the periods between the mantra.

Just sit in a comfortable meditation pose, and sit silently being aware of whatever may pass, any thoughts that may obtrude, and simply return back to the awareness of pure awareness.

Focus Meditation

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The idea of the focus meditation is to use a single word to fall back into deeper and deeper meditation, or awareness. It’s important to select a simple word that has absolutely no meaning. For example – looga to be pronounced, ‘loo-gar’. Picking a mantra word like ‘flower’ would not be a great idea, as you meditate on it, you’ll just be thinking of everything you’ve always associated with a flower.

Sit comfortably in a relaxed pose, ready for meditation. Start by repeating the word out loud, once every second or thereabouts. Then slowly quieter, and quieter, until you are just mouthing it, and can barely hear the mantra. Then stop moving your lips, and just repeat it in your mind. Remain aware, and begin to repeat it slower, slower, and then slower. Then, with your full awareness on the sound and vibration of the word, repeat it quieter and quieter in your mind, remaining fully aware, repeating it as quietly as you can.
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Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dream (MILD) Tutorial

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MILD stands for Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dream. The idea here, is that you set your intention and focus as clearly as possible on your goal of dreaming, and that you then repeat a phrase or ‘mantra’ affirming this, over and over again. Not just on autopilot, but retaining awareness and clear intention throughout.

Clear and concise mantras work best, choose one that resonates with you. I try to avoid ones that talk about lucid dreaming as such, and I personally often vary it whilst I’m repeating it, to avoid going into autopilot, e.g. “I am dreaming. I am dreaming. Am I dreaming? I am dreaming. I know that I’m dreaming. I am dreaming. I’m aware that I’m dreaming. I  am dreaming. I love dreaming.”, remembering to clearly concentrate and focus your intent on what you are saying. Conventional wisdom however, is to remain with a single short mantra. The mantra certainly does not have to be repeated out loud, but you can if you wish.
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