Summary
- LaBerge is the father of lucid dreaming and in this book he describes why lucid dreaming is beneficial, how to enter the state consistently and what to do once you’re in the state.
Key Takeaways
- Lucid dreaming has the potential benefit of also improving your waking life by helping you become more grateful, overcoming fears, gaining empathy by taking other people’s point of view and more
- Motivation and practice is vital to consistently enter lucid dream state
- Feelings from lucid dreams can spill over into waking life
- Dream journal helps with recall which helps you identify dream signs which helps you enter lucid dreams more consistently
- Dream recall is a prerequisite to lucid dreaming
- Minimum recall of 1 dream per night
- Sleep more
- Lie still before sleep and try to determine what you want to dream about
- Emotional reactions, sketches and as much detail are all helpful to improve recall
- Dream journal great for determining dream signs
- Inner awareness, action, form and context
- Goal setting for lucid dreams and what you want to get out of them
- Dream recall is a prerequisite to lucid dreaming
- To the brain, dreams are real
- dreams are interactions between the conscious and unconscious mind
- Embrace the fear/unknown in dreams. Confront scary figures, situations, etc. and you might find it carries over into waking life
- Test to see if you are in a dream state by jumping and trying to fly, reading and then rereading anything (if it changes, you’re in a dream state), look at digital watch
- Can remain in dream state longer if you are engaged, talking to self, spinning
- Dreams can help model search between truth and meaning in life
- Lucid dreaming can be seen as the ideal training ground for any skill as it is the strongest type of mental imagery we can conjure. Help establish neural links
- Creativity and illumination can increase through increased dream recall and lucid dreaming
- The less likely we identify with who we think we are, the more likely we are to discover who we truly are
- Must be willing to surrender control to true self
What I got out of it
- Some fascinating tips, tricks, reasons and stories into how to enter and get the most out of lucid dreaming. Lays out great detail and images for the tools, tips and practices within the actual book. Considering some estimate our unconscious to be 10m times stronger than our conscious, developing any insight into this “other” world could be greatly beneficial. If nothing else, fun to be able to recall and at times control your dreams
