as per lucid elucidations
Imagine what it might be like to live in a world where the air outside is unbreathable.
Pick a destination you want to reach (your home, a bar, a park…). As you step outside, hold your breath as long as you can and keep walking. When you need to breathe again, step inside the nearest building. Only take a breath when you are indoors. Breathe deeply a few times then go outside again and continue walking until you run out of breath. Repeat until you reach your destination.
Imagine a world where you must surround yourself with plants to be able to breathe.
Task A: Hold your breath while walking through the city until you see a plant. Go up to the plant and breathe deeply a few times. Then move on without breathing until you see another plant. Drift through the city from plant to plant, breathing only when you’re in close proximity to one.
Task B: Acquire air-purifying plants and plant them in your living room.
Task C: Offer air-purifying plants to your loved ones.
Meditative exercise: Broadening awareness
The first step in lucid dreaming is to open your awareness. You can do this through meditation. Imagine your attention is like a flashlight. Focus it into a narrow beam illuminating only your breath. Then broaden it to include your whole body, then the room you are in and its objects and sounds. Broaden your attention to embrace your thoughts and feelings and finally encompass everything around you, near and far, and feel your self dissolving, ebbing in and out of existence…
Reality Check: Dream body
Look at your hands and feet. Are they the usual shape? Do you have the right number of digits?
Is any part of your body more disfigured than usual?
Can you breathe even when you tightly seal your nose and mouth shut with your fingers?
Try to find a mirror. What does your reflection look like in the mirror? If your body image strikes you as unexpected or unusual in some way, you are either dreaming or have seen through the illusion of your ideal self.
Reality Check: Dream physics
Test your strength and abilities. Can you fly or lift extremely heavy objects?
Look at the ground beneath your feet. Does it look “normal” to you? What happens if you walk on it?
Try jumping on the spot. Can you jump over the moon, or maintain a jump for an abnormally long period of time?
If you appear to have gained supernatural abilities, you are most likely not awake. However, it might be worth performing a few other checks: have you taken drugs or have you been poisoned? Are you an accident victim? Are you hallucinating? Might you be suffering from concussion or some other injury?
Reality Check: Where are you?
Are you able to remember how you got here, why you are here and what happened an hour ago?
Are you able to shift objects across a room or other space without going near them?
If the physical world appears more malleable than you are used to and you are aware of it, you are likely to be lucid dreaming. Feel free to change the world as you see fit.
Reality Check: Comprehension
Do sentences change when you read them? Try reading the sentence, turn away and repeat it to yourself, then turn back and read it again. Do this twice.
Does a watch or clock tell time that is likely to be consistent with other circumstances? Are you even able to read the time off it? Sometimes clocks have the wrong number of hands, or have strange symbols. Try reading the time twice. Note: Digital clocks often work better for this reality check.
If repetition changes your comprehension, you are likely to be creating your own reality. Stories within stories within stories. In this case, attempt to sit back, relax and enjoy.
The world behind your eyelids
Make yourself comfortable, close your eyes, focus on your breath. Breathe in, you are a blade of grass. Breathe out, you are fresh. Breathe in, you are a mountain. Breathe out, you are grounded. Breathe in, you are a lake. Breathe out, you reflect everything around you, without distorting it. Breathe in, you dissolve into space. Breathe out, you are the world. Keep your eyes closed and look around: what can you smell, touch, hear, see, taste? Breathe in the world behind your eyelids. Then slowly open your eyes and come back.
Imagine what it would be like to live on the Lucid Peninsula.
First make sure you are relaxed. Your brain begins to empty out and you are becoming sleepier. Visualize a dream which you have prepared beforehand. Here is an example of a prepared dream:
“I am in the Dragonfly pilot’s bathroom. I am the pilot, citizen of the Peninsula. Plants are filtering the air I breathe. I am in the shower, cleansing the toxins accummulated during the flight. When I step out of the shower, a friend next to me asks me to show them what a reality check is. I do my reality check which shows that I am dreaming: I open the window and try to breathe. If I can’t breathe outdoor air, I am dreaming. I tell my friend that I am dreaming, and head towards the door to the bedroom.”
Visualise this dream slowly three times, to make sure that you know every detail. Then visualise the dream over and over. You should visualise the dream as though you are looking through your own eyes, not from a third-person perspective. If you find your thoughts drifting, ignore them and continue to visualise the dream continuously. Be patient and remember to thank your friend before going through the door.
Auto Suggestion
As you are falling asleep, suggest to yourself that you will have a lucid dream in the near future. You can use a mantra, such as “I will know that I’m dreaming”. Don’t try too hard. Let yourself think expectantly about the lucid dream you are about to have, but be patient if you don’t get one right away.
Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams
As you are falling asleep, concentrate on your intention to recognise that you are dreaming. Silently repeat a short mantra, such as “When I’m dreaming, I will remember I’m dreaming”. Imagine that you are back in a dream you’ve had recently, but this time you recognise that you are dreaming. Keep repeating and visualising the mantra until you are sure that your intention is set in your mind or you fall asleep.
“With intangible breath in center of forehead, as this reaches heart at the moment of sleep, have direction over dreams and over death itself.” -Parvati by Shiva
Lie down and make yourself comfortable. Begin by focusing on your breathing. Feel the air as it passes through your nostrils and into your lungs and belly. In and out, in and out. After a few minutes visualise yourself breathing through your “third eye”, in the centre of your forehead. In and out, in and out, in and out, until you fall asleep and begin lucid dreaming.
Hypnagogic dreaming
Stimulate your thinking patterns by constantly switching your attention. After doing this long enough, the images and sounds should begin to develop a momentum on their own, becoming very strange and illogical. You are entering your own dream at this point and can quickly become lucid. It might feel like being flipped upside down, spun around, or tugged by an outside force. You can expect strange auditory hallucinations, dark beings and feelings of flying. Focus on the sensations of your physical body.
Incubating a dream
To incubate a dream about a specific topic, first think of a phrase that summarises that topic, e.g. “I want to go to to the Lucid Peninsula”. It may help to write the phrase down. If there is something you want to do in the dream, think of a phrase to summarise that too, e.g. “I want to become a Dragonfly pilot”. If you want to become lucid in the dream, write something like “When I dream of the Lucid Peninsula, I will remember that I’m dreaming” beneath your topic phrase.
As you fall asleep focus on your topic phrase. Visualise yourself dreaming about the topic and realising that you are dreaming. Make sure that the last thing in your mind before falling asleep is your intention to lucidly dream about the topic you want to dream about. You might want to wake yourself up when the dream starts to fade so that you remember more of the dream. Perform a reality check when you (think you) are awake.
Dream Yoga
All phenomenal experience is a dream. Dream is only one type of illusion. Wakefulness is another.
Try living your life for one day while meditating on physical reality as an illusion. Begin by meditating on the question, “Who is aware?” Gradually continue to visualise the whole universe as it arises and dissolves like a mirage, an echo, or a city in the clouds. Everything around you, no matter how solid it appears, is likewise a dreamlike phenomenon. Keep this in mind as you go about your daily routine. At the end of the day, as you are going to sleep, remind yourself that you’re just passing from one dream state to another.
After several months’ practice you can move to the next stages of this exercise. From the recognition that you are dreaming, you can move to transforming, multiplying and unifying the dream through the luminosity of true nature. Be patient. You might reach the last stage only at the moment of your death.