Have you ever been dreaming and then suddenly become conscious that you were actually dreaming?

Well, this is lucid dreaming, where the dreamer is aware that he or she is in the middle of a dream. You must know that lucid dreams have been scientifically proven to exist.If an average person spends 7 hours a day sleeping and lives an average life of about 75 years, then he or she has slept almost 1/3 – that’s 22 years! - of his or her life away. The great thing is that you can get more life out of those years wasted on sleeping, by learning to control your subconscious with lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreaming, also called conscious dreaming, refers to dreaming while actually being aware that you are dreaming. Once you become aware you are dreaming you can influence your dreams and control what happens. You can do anything you’ve ever wanted and go anywhere you’ve ever dreamed.

What is the point of lucid dreaming?

• Experience adventures of a lifetime
  To experience lucid dreaming to the fullest, you must remember that you are not restricted by any laws in your dreams – you have complete freedom.
  Instead of walking to school or work, you can fly. While at half-road you may spontaneously decide you’d rather explore the mysterious depths of the ocean without a breathing device. Or you may want to travel at the speed of light and explore the endless heavens around us without a ship.
  Or perhaps you’ll remember a book or a movie that captured your heart and you’ll want to play the main character of that book or movie and live for a short while in that story.
• Exploring creative inspiration
  You cannot go back in time and change something, but instead, you can try out new behaviors and test yourself under different situations and scenarios, and learn from the results. You can prepare yourself for events that have not yet occurred and perhaps prevent yourself from making otherwise inevitable mistakes.
  If you’re writing a novel or even creating a computer game, lucid dreaming can help you visualize it. You could even ask your characters about how they feel about something or what they think will happen.
• Enhance your abilities
  Lucid dreams can be realistic enough to rehearse a speech or musical performance. Of course, everything is controlled by your own mind, so in whatever situations you find yourself dreaming about you’re basically assuming how others will react. You have the power to create similar situations endlessly, which allows you to better prepare yourself for a wide range of outcomes.
• Stopping nightmares
  Most of us look can’t wait to sleep because it is a very peaceful and quiet time allowing us to slow down and put aside, for a while, the endless unrest of our waking lives. However, some people are afraid of falling asleep because the ceaseless nightmares they’re having.
  Lucid dreaming can play a major role in curing the fear of nightmares. With dream control you can completely change the setting and context of your dream, successfully eliminating your nightmares.
• Problem solving
  One possible explanation to the boosted brain abilities during sleep is the lack of sensory input, because the mind is no longer focused on our senses, such as sight, hearing, and so on. Therefore, the brain can concentrate more promptly on creative problem solving. Lucid dreaming can help in dream interpretation and communicating with your subconscious.
• Research
  If you are largely interested in dreams, either in spirituality or in psychology, experiencing lucid dreaming could help you in your research.
• Transcendence
  Lucid dreaming demonstrates the amazing fact that the world we see – subjective reality – is the product of our minds. It makes us look beyond everyday experiences and ask ourselves, “If this is not real, then what is it?”

Learning Lucid Dreaming Techniques

Lucid dreaming is just like any other skill. Some are born with the ability, while most have to practice and improve it. The main condition for experiencing lucid dreams is to develop higher dream recall.

Although it may at first not seem like it, training dream recall is quite easy. It mostly takes only practice and motivation. Once you’ve improved your dream recall to a couple dreams per night, you can then trying to induce lucid dreaming.

Dream Journal
A great method of recording your dreams is to focus your intent on remembering them before falling asleep. A dream journal is the most common way of recording your dreams, but you can use something else, like a recorder, for instance.

A dream journal is simply a writing notebook that you should keep close to your bed. Upon waking, don’t let your mind drift off, but immediately try to focus on what you had just been dreaming, and write it down in your dream journal.

Dream Signs
Dream signs are quite simply cues that you are dreaming and are a standard means of inducing lucid dreams. In most cases, dream signs appear in the form of things or situations that would be impossible or less likely to happen in the waking world.

Some examples of common dream signs are:

• breathing under water
• flying or taking “Superman” long jumps
• oversized or undersized objects or people
• purple skies
• green cats

Dream signs are also sometimes more subtle:

• light switches that don’t work
• suddenly returning to work at an old job, being late
• not being able to scream
• the speech patterns of friends being unusual
• arriving somewhere naked
• having your teeth fall out - this is often a result of excessive worrying.

A personal dream sign that I have is the inability to run. I feel as if my feet are stuck to the ground or wading through waist deep water.

CONCLUSION
The benefits and healing potential through lucid dream imagery are unlimited in alleviating pain and fears, fast recovery from injuries, working through grief, gaining greater self-confidence.
Developing lucid dreaming skills is an exciting attempt to picture your life the way you want it to be. A genuine attempt to change your life is recognizing that your own mind is a reflection of your true spirit, and will prove to you that the best there is in life, is yours, to create.