Waking up for good

[cygnus]

I don't really have a technique for lucid dreaming - "lucid living" is closer to the way I approach it. I try to focus mostly on personal development and integrating what I learn from many divergent sources. I found that I got a lot from dream yoga, but also use WILD concepts, trance, visualization, etc. I have a pretty regular sleep pattern (I go to sleep around 10), and my most vivid dreams (and many lucids) often occur between 12 and 1 in the morning. What I am working toward is the ability to enter a trance after I go to bed (around 10 pm), obtain lucidity in those early hours (if not straight out of the trance), and maintain that until the time I wake up - sometime around 7 in the morning. Staying mindful isn't too hard because I meditate daily, but the trance thing is tricky. And I'm not worried about that "REM sleep timing out" stuff because I have a lot of dreams during nREM sleep. This means being lucid continuously - during day and night. I know it's possible but non-stop lucidity requires some patience, of course. I thought I'd see if there are other people doing something similar, and if we could have a thread dedicated to waking up from the dream which is life.

[Mikey Nick]

this sounds really cool can you go into more detail about this "trance" ? it sounds like something worth trying, but i wouldn't know where to start. maybe you could make your own little tutorial! but yea, that'd be great if you could go into enough detail to give an idea of how to give it a try! cause trying never hurts

[cygnus]

How I enter a trance is kind of a compilation of Sythix's tutorial (http://www.dreamviews.com/community/...ad.php?t=29491) and Robert Bruce's technique from Astral Dynamics. Before bed I try to do something involving stretching and stimulating acupressure points to relax my body. When in bed I bring my awareness throughout my body starting at my feet and I try to relax everything. Inducing a trance then involves reverse blinking, visualizing climbing down a ladder (for a falling sensation), twitching my arm muscles very slightly if it's taking a long time, and then doing some kind of visualization or just following the breath... It's easy to either fall asleep surprisingly fast or just lay still in bed for a while with nothing happening - I think it's just a matter of familiarization. There are plenty of WILDing tutorials, but taking them out of the context of waking up early in the morning may require some trial and error. That's something I expect other people to know more about than me, and hopefully they will respond here. I think a very important aspect of lucid living is to not treat it as a technique, but as the integration and continuation of personal understanding which depends on knowing yourself, not strictly what a tutorial is telling you.

[jamous]

ever think there might be a reason we aren't naturally conscious while we sleep? Seems like you're gonna wear your mind out.

[cygnus]

Well, my understanding is that it's not far off from letting your thoughts control you as opposed to training yourself to be more aware of them. Throughout the day you might pay little attention to what you are doing, but when you practice mindfulness you see that your initial disposition wasn't too dissimilar from "unconsciousness." 24hr. lucidity doesn't mean you're dreaming the entire night, it also involves awareness during dreamless sleep. This is what sleep yoga aims for and is associated with a profound experience of bliss and emptiness. It's possible to shift from dreamless sleep to dreaming (and vice versa) without losing awareness. It's not tiring at all, it's liberating (I think, haha ).