All my life I have been conditioned. Conditioned to believe that dreams don't matter....
"Don't worry hunny, forget about it; It's just a dream."
"Go back to sleep, don't be afraid; It's just a dream."
Unfortunately, these paradigms cause us to forget — to not pay any attention to our dreams.
After trusting these ways of thought throughout childhood, I stopped dreaming. Maybe once every few months I would have one, quickly forgotten, dream or nightmare.
But something in the back of my mind always kept me curious.
Doctors claim that humans need to sleep about 8 hours a night. That's a third of every day...
A THIRD OF LIFE.
I refuse to believe that a third of my life is trivial.
About 5 years ago I took an English class where my teacher had us choose a Heroic Journey. "Don't worry." — she assured us. "Just choose something, anything, to learn. A language, a skill, whatever. And you'll be writing about your progress all semester." At this time I had been reading about lucid dreams feverishly for weeks. It was a perfect opportunity. I began to do multiple daily reality checks, and started writing down the few dreams I had.
— A reality check is something that you do during your waking hours to "test" if you are asleep or awake. It may sound silly, but I believe it to be one of the two most important daily activities for prospective Lucid Dreamers. My favorite reality check is to pinch my nose closed with my fingers and attempt to inhale while my mouth stays shut. While in a dream, your nostrils are actually still open and you can breath through your nose. In reality, obviously, you can't. There are many kinds of reality checks. Another is to look around you for any kind of writing, letters or numbers, and then glance to and from a few times. Often times, in a dream, the writing will change. Another is to try to push a finger through your palm. One must experiment and find what works best for them.
The Nose Technique, which I just noticed is abbreviated TNT, has always worked for me and led to explosive results ;)
I was very pleasantly surprised at how my initial intentions to dream more, immediately increased how many dreams I had — even in the first two weeks.
The second most important thing is keeping a dream journal. This will dramatically increase the memory retention of your dreams. I started by consistently writing down just a few dreams a week with minor details for a couple months. Before I knew it, I was writing 1-3 VERY detailed dreams a night that usually ended in "There's more, but I've already written an entire page so I'm done."
Here are a couple of my first dream journal entries (sloppily scattered between my phone/looseleaf/journals....)
Huge car crash 18 wheeler.
Obama shot gas tank.
Dylan went to get guy in charge of attack.
Ran from cops on scooter really drunk.
Got fired — had 2 weeks to get a job.
Army skrimish w/ real guns.
Other games were going on.
Difficult to decide who was who.
Jeff was bounding like a cheetah or something.
We were defending a house.
And here's a fucking crazy one from later on in my journey....
Walter White was tucked away in hiding. Almost everyone thought he was dead. He had a whole new life, an arsenal of weapons, and a bunker to hide in. He was hidden until some terrorist/world leader saw an ad for Mr Whites store he and his family ran. There was a pic of the disguised him and a few people. They set out to kill him for real. One of Walters allies assured him — if they were attacked, his forces would easily protect them; but soon after, tanks and infantry come over the horizon. The ally forces would not arrive for some time. Mr White had planned for this however, and grabbed a bottle of wine with a smirk and chunked it out into the battlefield, and everyone...(Cont.)
(Cont.)...ducked for cover because it was actually a crazy chemical bomb that did a bunch of damage. Finally the rest of their forces arrived. F14's dropped missiles and destroyed many of the remaining forces. For a bit, my perspective was of a soldier on the field who was injured and trying to avoid getting ran over by tanks. All of a sudden, the side of the cliff overlooking the giant plateau/battlefield, which was at least a half mile high, began crumbling.
Walter laughs, "finally, they're here." he utters. The cliff-side errupts with rock, land, and water as the Gods of the world come to aid and embody Walter. They were huge demon like creatures. Giant tentacles from the cliff began destruction as Walter runs out of the bunker where he is met by a flying, fire breathing God. Walter becomes the monster and then I have a 3rd person perspective of the monster and I begin vaporizing things and flying through huge canyons. I felt incredibly powerful. I also had dreams of a zombie survival situation which was unrelated. And another assassination attempt where I ended up wearing a wig in this cafeteria to hide, and that may have been Walter, I can't remember.
This was one of the craziest nights of dreaming in my life. But it was not lucid. There are maaaany more super wild dreams written down, and things get REAL weird as I begin to start having lucid dreams.
Which I will talk about in Journey of a Lucid Dreamer #2.
If you have any questions about your own dream journey, please respond in the comments! I will do my best to provide you with tips, tricks, and motivation!
Many people have told me that they don't dream. Thats not true. YOU HAVE BEEN CONDITIONED. You're brain is choosing to not remember, because it has been taught that Dreams don't matter. Follow me for Un-conditioning Camp. You can fly, blast monsters with telekinetic powers, travel the universe searching for the meaning of life, and expand the boundaries of consciousness.
Thank you for reading, huge shoutout to @penny-rose and her awesome short story about lucid dreaming that inspired me to write this post...