Lucid Dreaming: How To Do It, & Why

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Lucid dreaming is the practice of developing/maintaining awareness that one is dreaming while dreaming, and then using that awareness to exercise control over the dream

  • Today’s main feature outlines one of the most foolproof methods for inducing lucid dreaming, and several pointers about things to do while lucid dreaming, for fun and/or therapeutic reasons!

• Being unable to easily participate in spoken conversations is not just an inconvenience; it’s also a [causal, fixable] risk factor for age-related cognitive decline.

  • Today’s sponsor, Hear.com, are offering the most cutting-edge dual-processing technology in hearing aids that isolate and separate speech from background noise, now with their latest most advanced device yet!

• Today’s featured recipe is for sesame chocolate fudge—enjoy a taste of decadence that’s not bad for your blood sugars, and good for your heart and brain!

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

10 Ways To Self-Soothe That Don't Involve Food Or Drink

Self-care without self-sabotage? Holistic nutritionist Selin Bilgin has a list:

Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!

Psychology Sunday

Lucid Dreaming: Methods & Uses

We’ve written about dreaming more generally before:

How Useful Are Our Dreams?

Today we’re going to be talking more about a subject we’ve only touched on previously: lucid dreaming

What it is: lucid dreaming is the practice of being mentally awake while dreaming, with awareness that it is a dream, and control over the dream.

Why is it useful? Beyond simply being fun, it can banish nightmares, it can improve one’s relationship with sleep (always something to look forward to, and sleep doesn’t feel like a waste of time at all!), and it can allow for exploring a lot of things that can’t easily be explored otherwise—which can be quite therapeutic.

How to do it

There are various ways to induce lucid dreaming, but the most common and “entry-level” method is called Mnemonic-Induced Lucid Dreaming (MILD).

MILD involves having some means of remembering what one has forgotten, i.e., that one is dreaming. To break it down further, first we’ll need to learn how to perform a reality check. Again, there are many of these, but one of the simplest is to ask yourself:

How did I get here?

• If you can retrace your steps with relative ease and the story of how you got here does not sound too much like a dream sequence, you are probably not dreaming.

• If you are dreaming, however, chances are that nothing actually led to where you are now; you just appeared here.

Other reality checks include checking whether books, clocks, and/or lightswitches work as they should—all are notorious for often being broken in dreams; books have gibberish or missing or repeated text; clocks do not tell the correct time and often do not even tell a time that could be real (e.g: 07:72), and lightswitches may turn a light on/off without actually changing the level of illumination in the room.

Now, a reality check is only useful if you actually perform it, so this is where MILD comes in.

You need to make a habit of doing a reality check frequently. Whenever you remember, it’s a good time to do a reality check, but you should also try tying it to something. Many people use a red light, because then they can also use a timed red light during the night to subconsciously cue them that they are dreaming. But it could be as simple as “whenever I go to the bathroom, I do a reality check”.

With this in mind, a fun method that has extra benefits is to try to use a magical power, such as psychokinesis. If (while fully awake) whenever you go to pick up some object you imagine it just wooshing magically to meet your hand halfway, then at some point you’ll instinctively do that while dreaming, and it’ll stand a good chance of working—and thus cluing you in that you are dreaming.

How to stay lucid

When you awaken within a dream (i.e. become lucid), there’s a good chance of one of two things happening quickly:

• you forget again

• you wake up

So when you realize you are dreaming, do two things at once:

• verbally repeat to yourself “I am dreaming now”. This will help stretch your awareness from one second to the next.

• look at your hands, and touch things, especially the floor and/or walls. This will help to ground you within the dream.

Things to do while lucid

Flying is a good fun entry-level activity; it’s very common to initially find it difficult though, and only be able to lift up very slightly before gently falling down, or things like that. A good tip is: instead of trying to move yourself, you stay still and move the dream around you, as though you are rotating a 3D model (because guess what: you are).

Confronting your nightmares and/or general fears is a good thing for many. Think, while you’re still awake during the day, about what you would do about the source/trigger of your fear if you had magical powers. Whatever you choose, keep it consistent for now, because this is about habit-forming.

Example: let’s say there’s a person from your past who appears in your nightmares. Let’s say your chosen magic would be “I would cause the ground to open up, swallow them, and close again behind them”. Vividly imagine that whenever they come to mind while you are awake, and when you encounter them next in a nightmare, you’ll remember to do exactly that, and it’ll work.

Learning about your own subconscious is a more advanced activity, but once you’re used to lucid dreaming, you can remember that everything in there is an internal projection of your own mind, so you can literally talk to parts of your subconscious, including past versions of yourself, or singular parts of your greater-whole personality, as per IFS:

Take Care Of Your “Unwanted” Parts Too!

Want to know more?

You might like to read:

Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life – by Dr. Stephen LaBerge

Enjoy!

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This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between almond butter and cashew butter— we picked the almond butter (click here to read about why), as did 85% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Recipes Worth Sharing

Sesame Chocolate Fudge

If you’d like a sweet treat without skyrocketing your blood sugars with, well, rocket fuel… Today’s recipe can help you enjoy a taste of decadence that’s not bad for your blood sugars, and good for your heart and brain:

Click below for our full recipe, and learn its secrets:

One-Minute Book Review

Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin and Free – by Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson

This is a great title! It’s a great book too, but let’s talk about the title for a moment:

The “Bright Line” referenced (often used in the plural within the book) is the line one draws between what one will and will not do. It’s a line one doesn’t cross, and it’s a bright line, because it’s not a case of “oh woe is me I cannot have the thing”, but rather “oh yay is me for I being joyously healthy”.

And as for living happy, thin, and free? The author makes clear that “thin” is only a laudable goal if it’s bookended by “happy” and “free”. Eating things because we want to, and being happy about our choices.

To this end, while some of the book is about nutrition (and for example the strong recommendation to make the first “bright lines” one draws cutting out sugar and flour), the majority of it is about the psychology of eating.

This includes, hunger and satiety, willpower and lack thereof, disordered eating and addictions, body image issues and social considerations, the works. She realizes and explains, that if being healthy were just a matter of the right diet plan, everyone would be healthy. But it’s not; our eating behaviors don’t exist in a vacuum, and there’s a lot more to consider.

Despite all the odds, however, this is a cheerful and uplifting book throughout, while dispensing very practical, well-evidenced methods for getting your brain to get your body to do what you want it to.

Bottom line: this isn’t your average diet book, and it’s not just a motivational pep talk either. It’s an enjoyable read that’s also full of science and can make a huge difference to how you see food.

Click here to check out Bright Line Eating, and enjoy life, healthily!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you a lucidly peaceful Sunday,

The 10almonds Team