How to Lucid Dream

“If I can walk through a wall, I know I’m asleep.”

By Ryan Brown

By day, Maria Aleman, a 47-year-old mother of two, works about town as an Internet server supporter. By night, the Miami resident works on her lucid dreaming, or the act of perceiving and recognizing that one is in a dream while asleep.

“I had a lot of nightmares when I was young, and my dad had also, so, he sort of taught me how to do this,” Aleman says.

The ability to lucid dream arguably gives the dreamer control of a sort of alternate reality.

Numerous studies have been conducted by neuroscientists, hypnotherapists and other specialists about lucid dreaming. The only solid conclusion seems to be that lucid dreaming is extremely difficult to do consistently.

Aleman offered the SunPost a few tips.

DON’T BE TOO TIRED

“You have to be rested, and kind of put yourself to sleep, but not too deeply,” she says. “This way, for me, when I begin dreaming, I’m more likely to be able to take control; I’m not too deep into the dream world.”

DON’T DRINK OR TAKE DRUGS

“You have to be alert when attempting to lucid dream. If I take like an antihistamine or something, I know it’s not going to happen. Avoid anything that will make you drowsy or put you to sleep.

“Along those lines, some actually confuse lucid dreaming with hallucination. It’s actually the opposite. It’s about learning more about your mind. When you, for example, take certain drugs and hallucinate, you’re actually going outside of your mind.”

BE LEFT-BRAINED

“I’m very left-brained. I’m not an artist or a super-creative kind of person. I’m a very rational thinker. Part of being able to lucid dream is to be able to realize when something is happening that isn’t plausible in the nondream world. If something doesn’t conform to the laws of the regular world, it sticks out to you, and you know you’re dreaming.

“The dream world has its own logic — you have to avoid falling too deeply into that world, and accepting its logic.”

KEEP TRACK OF YOUR DREAMS

“It can be very hard to remember your dreams. I keep a notebook right next to my bed so I can write them down the second I wake up. The more you think about your dreams when you’re awake, the more you’ll understand them, and the easier it will become for you to spot a dream.”

DEVELOP A TIP-OFF

“One night I woke up smelling a burning smell, so I woke my husband and we went downstairs to check it out. When we came back to the bedroom, we opened the door and inside the room was a crematorium. I know my bedroom is not a crematorium, so I realized it was a dream. But sometimes you’re not sure. A trick I came up with for myself is walking through walls. It’s the first thing I do in a dream. If I can walk through a wall, I know I’m asleep.”

BE CAREFUL

“There’s a door on the second floor of my house. I guess a balcony used to be there, but in my dream I would always go flying from that door. It occurred to me one day what if I’m awake!? How would they explain that to people? ‘Oh no, she didn’t really jump to her death on purpose. She was just trying to lucid dream.’ So anyway, I put a bookcase in front of the door.”

PRACTICE

“Everybody pretty much has had times when they realize they’re dreaming, and they’ll usually wake up. The hardest thing is to realize you’re dreaming and stay in the dream. That’s when it becomes lucid dreaming. You start to have control over what you’re dreaming. This takes practice. You have to do it a lot, and you have to really want to do it.

Also, when you are able to do this, a new problem arises, the exact opposite of the previous problem. You realize you are dreaming and feel trapped in the dream. This can be very scary, so you have to learn to force yourself out of the dream. How to do this I can’t really verbalize well. It’s sort of a push. You have to really push yourself out of the dream very hard.”

RESEARCH

“There’s tons of information out there about lucid dreaming. Two of my favorites are dreamviews.com, which offers tutorials and a message board, and dreaminglucid.com, which has several challenges to attempt while lucid dreaming.”

Read Maria’s blog at www.maria8airam.blogspot.com.