Regarding lucid dreaming. I had a sociology professor in college that had us do a number of very cool things; one of those things was a technique to achieve lucid dreaming, which I did.
I'll explain how it was done here. I've told other people how to do this, and it's worked for them. The average time seems pretty short...though it took me a few weeks. (Many people have done this in days, so perhaps I was just 'slow'
) Though some others in the class never managed to do it, most were quicker than I.
This is just from memory, I'm sure he explained it much better, but I've told other people this, and it's seemed to work for them, so it's a good enough explaination I guess.
Look at your hand, the back of your hand as it faces you. Study it. Don't concentrate really hard or anything, just stay focused that when you're dreaming you want to try to look at your hand. Say in your mind as you do this something like "Okay this is what I want to do in my dream, I want to see my hand".
Do this randomly throughout the day as you remember to do it, or when you think of it. Spend a couple minutes doing it. Then spend several minutes doing it each night before you go to sleep.
Now you can read on for what will happen, or you can be surprised. (The professor let us be surprised, and didn't tell us what would happen. Which was kinda cool.)
SPOILER AHOY!
What ends up happening is in your dream at some point in time after doing this (took me a couple weeks) you'll see your hand, and
remember "OH! I'm supposed to look at my hand!" At that moment you will become lucid in the dream. In other words you're conscious, but still dreaming.
I still can remember vividly what happened for me when this occurred. I was walking up a staircase in a courthouse. I looked and saw my hand on the railing and thought "YES! I did it!!! I'm supposed to see my hand" and then realized that I was dreaming, yet completely aware. I touched the stone wall, which was cool and hard...just like stone. I was amazed that it was so real. I touched the wood of the railing, and it too felt very real. I looked around at the other people, and again, it was all very real, yet I knew it was a dream. The awareness seemed to last subjectively only a few minutes, then I fell back into the dream, and was no longer consciously aware, but merely dreaming as normal.
When I woke up, I recalled it, and also falling back into the dream. It was pretty neat.
I was told that basically continuing to do that, and by staying focused you could achieve long periods of lucidity and even dream control (where you could control the enviroment, or themes, basically be a god of the dreamworld or whatever lol). I know people who have said that they do so. However at the time (I was young), I was concerned about some things, and had no answers (actually still don't have any). I think that in dreaming our subconscious works out a lot of kinks. I've gotten good insight from my dreams...not in a woo-woo way, but in a 'hmm that's a different way of looking at that issue' sort of way. Obviously not ALL the time or anything either. Anyway, I wondered if someone was able to achieve a constant lucid state, would that somehow effect that process? I don't know. Perhaps people still have dreams in which they have no control, and only remember those in which they do. So that was one concern.
Another is it's an awful lot of work, and I enjoy the random patterns of dreams, the surprise, and the interesting things that my subconscious comes up with that I don't think my conscious mind could.
As I've gotten older, I also notice that I remember fewer dreams. Unless I wake up in the middle of one, or it's especially vivid in some fashion, I don't usually remember it. Even then, I often forget it shortly after waking anyway, unless it really stands out.
It was an interesting experience though, and I thought it was pretty cool to touch objects and was amazed at the realism. (I guess somehow I expected it to be different hehe). And perhaps it's something that other people would be interested in trying. It can also be effective in breaking chronic nightmares, in that if someone can alter the events of the chronic nightmare and change it, it often no longer bothers them.
A friend of mine is working on that right now actually. She's pregnant and is having a chronic nightmare in which she drives away abandoning her son. She believes that the dream is (in essense) about her concern that her son will feel left out with the new baby. But even after addressing those concerns, the nightmare was happening every night, disprupting her sleep and severely upsetting her. I told her about lucid dreaming and what I had learned about it, and she was able to do it in 3 nights. (Told you I was slow heh) and though she too was only briefly lucid, it gave her a sense of control. She feels if she can alter the pattern (such as going back to her son) it will resolve the nightmares completely. I haven't talked with her in a couple weeks about it, so I'm not sure where she's at with it, or if she's accomplished that or not. However even just gaining that consciousness helped tremendously, because it gave her a sense of control.
Because it is, after all, just a dream.
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