Are We Lucid Yet?
In between writing a major post for someone else’s blog and jump-starting a new website of my own, I have had precious little time for posting dream tidbits on this blog. Well, all that is going to change, starting right now.
The folks at the Lucidity Institute are running an experiment to test Tibetan Dream Yoga principles, and they are looking for participants, especially left-handed ones. From their website:
For over 1,000 years, the Tibetan Buddhists have been practicing lucid dreaming as a means of approaching enlightenment. In this pursuit, they have developed elaborate techniques for inducing lucidity. Some of these are esoteric beyond the capacity of the uninitiated Western mind to conceive, let alone practice. However, others bear a striking resemblance to the techniques now employed by Western oneironauts, for example, frequent reflection throughout the day on the dreamlike nature of reality.
The premise they are testing right now is whether sleep posture and “nasal laterality” (differences in air flow through the nostrils) affect lucidity and dream recall. They are going to correlate the results with right- and left-handedness, and also with gender difference.
If you are interested in collecting data from at least 16 cycles of dreaming and waking, you can download their handy pdf form here. They are hoping to gather all the dream reports by June 30th, so get cracking! Also, their website has lots of information on dream recall, lucid dreaming, and reports from previous studies.
I have never felt the need to encourage or induce lucid dreams since my regular dreams give me enough information to process already, but I’ve had their form printed out on my desk for a couple weeks now, so maybe I’ll give it a try, too. (Plus, I’m left handed! They need my data!)
May 31st, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Lucid dreaming as well as regular dreaming requires a reliable and practical system for dream interpretation. I have discovered a very effective method of dream interpretation that I have been using for almost 25 years, and I find it virtually 100% accurate. Here is the technique: The moment you wake up from a dream, preferably in the morning, don’t move your bodily position and don’t open your eyes.
Remember, the last dream symbol you saw, and now give it a voice and a personality. Visualize it and talk to it mentally as though it were a person now sitting on your sofa and visiting you. You would mentally say something like, “Purple cow, who are you and what is your message to me?”
Now here is the key. The FIRST thought that pops into your mind is the answer! The tendency at this point is to have the rational egoic mind come in and begin to doubt the message with thoughts of, “No, that’s not good enough. That couldn’t be it.”
The problem is not that dream interpretation is all that difficult. The problem is that when we hear the answer, sometimes it is not what we WANT to hear. Remember what Jack Nicholson said in the movie A Few Good Men also applies to dream interpretation. “You want the truth! You can’t HANDLE the truth!”