INTRODUCTION

Heya all,

This forum is full of great guides, techniques, tricks and tips on achieving lucidity. And I'm sorry to say...

This isn't one of them

Rather, I wanted to take some time to discuss something that I consider an underlying principle of lucid dreaming. Or rather, THE underlying principle. There's many factors to lucid dreaming, but one, to me, sticks out above all others as possibly the most important of all. It's on that is both quite simple and amazingly complex at the same time. Its this:

Pay attention to your dreams.

And with this I mean to ALL your dreams. I've come to believe this is the key to succes with lucid dreaming, as well as curing or preventing many of its problems and obstacles.

Let me explain why I think attention to our dreams (and not just the lucid ones) is so important. Before I continue though, a small disclaimer. Everything I write down is my opinion only. I don't claim to hold all the answers or the universal truths. It's just a theory I have formed based on my experiences


ATTENTION AND AWARENESS

Forgetting the subject of dreaming for a moment, it can be said that attention is directly linked to 'how aware we are of something'. Or to put it in different words:

The more we pay attention to something, the stronger our general awareness of it becomes

To illustrate this point, let me give you some common examples:

- You might look at a wall and see that it is grey. A painter looks at the same wall, and sees seven different color shadings. He is much more aware of colors and shades of colors in general, because of his occupation.

- Its winter and its snowing. To you, snow is snow. To an eskimo, its not. There's different types of snow, and he has a word for each one. His living conditions have forced him to be much more aware of the properties and types of snow in general.

- You're eating a meal at a restaurant, and while it is very nice, there's a certain taste there that you can't quite identify. Fortunately, your friend is a master chef. He takes one bite and easily tells you of a particular herb that was used to create this effect.

- You're an introspective person. You spend a lot of time thinking about yourself, your actions, your emotions. You know that when you are faced with strong authority, with people telling you what to do, you tend to get angry. Your boss tells you to do something, and you get get angry, but you know why. Your friend is the same, but he's never taken a look at himself in his life. He gets angry too, but he has no idea why.

- John is an accountant. He is great with numbers, but his job often leaves him with little time to work out. He often has tense muscles, headaches, and gets out of breath a lot. His wife Marie is a Yoga teacher. She is much more aware of her body and her breathing, and knows far better how to keep it healthy and ailment free. Consequently, John always turns to her for advice when his body is acting up again.

- To our Western Culture, dreams are not real, and something that has very little relevance to our lives. To Tibetan Monks, dreams are very important. Consequently, their culture and their upbringing makes them pay lots of attention to their dreams, and the things they can do with their dream sounds utterly fantastical (or even absurd) to us.


In each of the above examples, one person is more aware of a particular thing then another, why? Because he's spend his life paying much more attention to it in general. The correlation is, I hope, quite clear. Paying attention to something tends to build increased awareness of it.

(There's a psychological explanation for why this is, but I think the examples are more clear then the theory will be, though if someone asks for it I'll be happy to provide )

Increased awareness has many advantages. You can identify certain things easier, and identify more different types of what others consider the same thing. (Like the painter and the master chef and the eskimo). Additionally you can understand things while they are happening, and why they are happening (like our introspective friend), and you can adjust your own actions to take advantage of this increased awareness. (like our yoga teacher). Its easy to see why being more aware of something would be beneficial to you.

Now we come back to our topic: Dreaming, and particularly Lucid Dreaming.

What is Lucid Dreaming? It's knowing you are dreaming while in a dream. That's the basic definition of it. Another definition, which is basically saying the exact same thing:

A lucid dream is a dream in which you are aware of the fact that you're dreaming.
The key concept here ofcourse, is awareness. And you probably saw this coming a mile away, but just like the above examples: If we want build awareness of dreaming and about dreaming... we have to pay attention to our dreams!


ATTENTION AND VARIOUS DREAM TECHNIQUES TECHNIQUES

There's dozens if not more techniques on how to become lucid, ranging from the commonly quoted to the rather obscure. One thing that almost all of them have in common though, is that they are a 'ritualised way of making you pay attention to your dreams'.

In short, what these techniques do is focus your attention on your dreams, usually either on what it feels like to dream, or on what you want to dream about.

Often these techniques have visualisation aspects or aspects that will draw your attention away from the waking world around you. Again this will help make it easier for you to focus on dreaming itself. WILD techniques are a great example of this. With these techniques, you basically want to completely withdraw your attention from the world around you and turn it inwards, focussing it entirely on the act of dreaming.

Another example are reality checks. The idea is to set the habbit of doing them in your dream too, but equally important is that they bring your attention back to 'dreaming' during the day. Each time you do a reality check, you're thinking about dreaming too.

MILD and VILD are very strong forms of attention-focus techniques too.

And above all, keeping a dream journal is so utterly important not because it helps you remember you dreams more, but because it forces you to pay attention to your dreams.
(It's actually the fact that you ARE paying attention to your dreams that makes you remember them better, not the fact that you're keeping a dreamjournal).


LACK OF ATTENTION AND ITS EFFECTS

Along the same vein, we very often see the lack of attention to our dreams and its effects on things such as dreamrecall or even the ability to lucid dream.

Its very easy to get so caught up in the idea of lucid dreaming that you forget to appreciate your regular dreams. Additionally, getting stressed or frustrated again withdraws your attention from your dreams, and focusses it on your failure. It can even happen that your mind is so set upon your dreamgoal that you give the goal more attention then the dream itself.

And I can't begin to describe how often I hear phrases such as:

- "I'm having a dryspell... I haven't had a lucid dream in two weeks. All I can remember is a few crappy normal dreams"

- "No lucidity today, just a few normal dreams"
- "My recall is gone to hell. How many dreams do I normally remember per night? I don't really know, I only write down my lucid dreams in my dream journal."

Being dismissive of something pretty much implies not paying attention to it. In the above cases, my first thought is usually: "Well that figures"

I've come to believe that many 'problems' such as sudden dry-spells, sudden lack of recall, inability to have lucid dreams, and what not can often be attributed in large part to the person not paying basic attention to his dreams in general.


WAYS TO PAY ATTENTION

So how do you pay attention to your dreams? Well, first and foremost, I would say learn to appreciate them. Don't consider non-lucid dreams as failures. Every dream has inherent value, and the ability to teach you more about your nightly life (or daily life if you sleep during the day )

Spend some time thinking about your dreams, write them down preferably, and consider the various aspects of your dreams.

Some questions you could ask yourself:
Are there reoccuring themes, persons, places in your dream? Do you have many nightmares? Do you have many dreams about your work? Are you yourself in your dreams?

Are your dreams mostly visual? Can you remember a taste? A sound? A smell? Do you think there's meaning behind your dreams? If so, what could it mean? Did the dream evoke a particular emotion? Which is your favorite type of dream? Do you often have dreams that make you feel bad or that you don't like having? If so, what don't you like about them?

Do you sometimes control things in your dreams? Do you sometimes have an innate sense of being aware that you're dreaming without being fully lucid? Do you often have false awakenings? Are they always in the same place?

These are just some examples. The idea ofcourse is to take the time to explore your dreams, and more then that, get familiar with them. The more you do that, the more your general awareness of dreaming will grow.

It might not make you lucid, but combine those with the great techniques invented by others, and you'll likely have a lot more succes then simply focussing on the technique alone.



SUMMARY

I guess what I'm trying to say is: remember to appreciate your dreams, all your dreams, and all aspects of your dreams. Doing so will help your lucid attempts a whole deal, and will prevent certain problems from rising up.

Because paying attention to something increases awareness of it, and awareness of dreaming is really what lucidity is all about. This, to me, is the single most important thing to do when trying to master lucid dreaming, and the single most important question to ask whenever things aren't going you're way:

"Am I paying enough attention to my dreams?"


Comments, remarks, critiques most welcome,

-Redrivertears-