I got really into lucid dreaming for about a year and a half after a friend told me about a book he was reading, but haven’t done it in a while. Now I’m getting psyched to get back into it! Dream recall is without a doubt the most important thing to work on, and valuable in itself, even if it never leads to lucid dreams. When you can recall more than one dream every single night, you start to learn a lot more about what your unconscious mind is really concerned with, and what themes and problems you are working through in your life that you might not even be aware of.

After recall is pretty good, reality checks are the #2 thing. I recommend choosing ONE thing you can and WILL remember to do every time, i.e. examine your hands every time you go through a doorway, or stare at your digital watch every hour on the hour (digital readouts will always shift or disappear in dreams). Once you start to have lucid dreams, and even before that point, when you are recalling lots of dreams, the waking and dreaming worlds start to blur, or did for me at least. Weird things can happen. You can start to sort of see things that were always there, but that people don’t normally see or notice. It’s like seeing through reality. You have to be careful to act “normal” when you’re awake, which can get difficult, and make sure you’re really dreaming when you think you are before doing or saying anything weird!!!

Once you start having them, there is no end to the stuff you can do in lucid dreams. Of course you can fly everywhere, pimp slap your boss, have tons of wild sex, eat whatever you want, etc. But beyond that I have done a lot of other cool stuff, such as physical transforming and molding objects with my hands, causing flowers to turn into birds and suddenly burst from trees and fly away, teleporting, floating through space and swimming around under water without needing to breathe, fighting people and creatures a la The Matrix, and having bizarre conversations with dream characters. One character in the beginning even tried for several minutes to convince me that I was mistaken thinking I was in a dream, but when I finally caught him in an inconsistency and proved it, he actually grinned and shrugged, and then said “Isn’t it weird how it is in dreams?” (meaning how it seems so real). The strangest thing is that that guy was actually my own mind screwing with me. Totally weird, cool stuff. I can’t wait to try tonight!