Teaching lucid dreaming to dream characters
Author: Tim Post
Date: May 7th, 2011
Published in
Techniques | 4 Comments
Copyrighted material ©
It took a few weeks to reset and refocus on Lucidipedia and my lucid dreaming training. Working on outlining an entirely new chapter in our pursuit to steward the practice and study of lucid dreaming even further. There is lots that can be done, still.
Meeting Stephen LaBerge in Hawaii was awesome. It has really got me going, even after the trip :). Occasionally I find myself waking up from a morning dream in which I wondered around the Kalani retreat center, talking to Stephen or Keeling about their early days doing lucid dream research. I guess it all makes sense in my case, I have been living up to that meeting for about 10 years (I brought my edition of Stephen’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming with me to Hawaii for him to sign :D).
Anyway, I have figured out all my stuff to do, got myself a new part time job so that I can continue spending my time working on lucid dreaming and Lucidipedia, and am more ready than ever to get started.
Training IN a lucid dream
As most experienced lucid dreamers know, learning lucid dreaming does not only involve practicing how to induce lucid dreams. Once you have one, the next thing is to get good at lucid dreamING: the ability to voluntarily and deliberately apply a full range of dream control techniques.
In today’s blog post, I would like to address this underestimated part of training.
After years of perfecting my flying skills, changing landscapes, overcoming fears and many other interesting dream control practices, I devised a really fun and extremely effective way to train in a lucid dream. A methodology that I follow in almost all of my lucid dreams today.
The problem of focus
A common problem reported by numerous lucid dreamers is the problem of focus. Once you become too absorbed into a particular dream activity, chances are that you lose touch with the main event in the (lucid) dream; resulting into unwanted dream shifts, or even worse, (false) awakenings.
One of the underlying principles – that we avidly discuss on in our online classes on dream control – is the necessity of participation in the (lucid) dream. You HAVE to continuously “merge” with the main event in the dream to provide it with enough input to keep on dreaming. If you don’t and turn your attention inwards (like when focussing on training for a particular skill that has no direct function to the main event of the dream), chances are you mess up the dream and lose it.
Dream characters as students
This is my solution: start training a dream character. Dream characters function as extremely helpful agents to (1) keep you focussed on the dream (i.e. they are obviously part of the dream) while at the same time turning into your personal “hub” that you can explain your progressing techniques and applications to WHILE lucid dreaming.
Like teaching. Involve dream characters with your lucid dream activities. To me it is like the power of “self-explaining” my techniques through interacting with dream characters while lucid dreaming.
Also, you will never know how dream characters will react to your training! I have had wonderful insights and tips from DCs who were very eager to join me in my training. Start teaching your dream characters tonight and post your findings here!
Related Posts:
May 7th, 2011at 17:59(#)
Sounds fun and effective, Tim…..can’t wait to try!
May 7th, 2011at 19:49(#)
Let me know about your experience!
May 29th, 2011at 19:24(#)
In quite a few lucid dreams I try to make my DC’s aware of the fact that we’re dreaming but they always stare at me blankly. I try to invite them to do things the dream state allows us to do but somehow they always choose to stick with what they’re doing. To my disappointment…
May 31st, 2011at 16:18(#)
Wow! I had no idea this is possible!! Nevertheless, this is my new goal in Lucid Dreaming! Thank you for sharing this…P.S I just want to share with you that I managed to meet my long gone father with your help and now I see him regularly! I am so excited as I am only 16 years old, just thinking what i can achieve in later life! Thank you, and please keep posting and making videos :)