Keeping a Dream Journal

The first basic thing to do in order to achieve lucid dreaming is to keep a dream journal. It's VERY important that you be able to recall your dreams. You dream every single night whether you realize it or not. Your journal can be on your computer, notebook or diary or whatever you want.

Keep the journal near you when you sleep. As soon as you wake up, write down anything you remember from your dream. Im sure your asking yourself why you need to be able to remember your dreams. Well, you need to remember them so that you can look back through them and see if you can notice and patterns or anything within your dreams. When you start having your first lucids, it will be important to be able to remember what made you realize you were dreaming. The very first lucid dream i had was when during a dream, i was reading a book and then all of a sudden the book was floating through the air. This made me realize i was dreaming.

Waking up and writing your dreams down can also be one of the steps to do with the Wake Initiated Lucid Dream(WILD) technique. I will explain my way of doing the WILD technique in a later post. If your new to lucid dreaming, your not ready for that anyway. Right now you should focus on expanding your dream memory using your journal.

What is a Lucid Dream?

Lucid dreaming is a very special hobby of mine. When i tell my friends about this, i usually get the same response, "lucid dreaming?.. what the hell is that". I usually reply "It means i can control my dreams". They usually just stare blankly for a few seconds and then change the subject.

Lucid dreaming is a subject most people know very little about. Sometimes it amazes me that something as amazing and beautiful as lucid dreaming can go completely unrecognized by most people. I hope to be able to explain the basics of what lucid dreaming is with this post. With later posts i will discuss many different techniques to achieve a lucid dream.

Lucid dreaming is being able to realize you are dreaming and then take direct control over that dream. I'm sure you have had nightmares when you were younger or maybe even recently in which you realized you were dreaming and quickly tried to wake yourself up before the monster eats you, correct? Then my friend, you have experienced a very quick lucid moment in a dream.

Now imagine for a moment, instead of waking yourself up, you decide to stay in the dream. You turn around and face the monster and shout STOP! The monster stops right in front of you. You then say "go away". The monster then slowly fades away. You feel great knowing you dealt with the monster, but now what? Now, look around you, you have an entire dream world to explore.

There is nothing off limits in a lucid dream. Laws of reality do not apply here. You can fly, meet anyone you want, breathe underwater, walk on the moon. Pretty much anything you can imagine, can be achieved in a lucid dream. Want to kill Hitler? Have sex with a celebrity? Its all very possible.

All of your senses work while lucid dreaming. Its ultra realistic. You can feel, smell, taste, see, and hear everything! In that regard, there is no difference from your real world and your dream world. With lots of practice and devotion,it is possible to have a lucid dream every single night and i have met many people that have many each night. Using many different techniques which i will describe in later posts, you can practice and master the art of lucid dreaming. Some people are natural lucid dreamers and require no techniques or practice at all, and for others it can take years to master. How long it takes you is completely up to you!

In this blog I'm gonna provide my own techniques i use to achieve lucid dreams. If you want to read other peoples techniques and tips, i will give you the links to a couple of my favorite websites devoted to lucid dreaming.

http://www.dreamviews.com/ - This is a great site, it has a huge community of people willing to help you in any way and has lots of great information.

http://www.lucidcrossroads.co.uk/index.html -A very interesting site that is sure to make you interested in lucid dreaming if you wasn't before.

I hope people will continue to read my articles because im going to provide useful tips and ideas about lucid dreaming!