It’s a simple yet important question for you to ask yourself: Why do I want to have lucid dreams?

To begin, the average person spends about 5 years of their lives dreaming. Would you rather spend that time like a sheep, asleep? Or would you prefer to utilize that time with your conscious awareness in a number of powerful ways?

Lucid dreaming (when you are aware of the fact that you are dreaming while still in the dream) opens a number of exciting doors. I’ve broken these down into the top 5 reasons why we should pursue lucid dreaming: Fun, Creativity, Healing, Understanding of Self, Consciousness Exploration.

FUN-

The easiest way to explain why we should want to have lucid dreams, is simply because they are FUN! Being able to fly is fun. The sensation of walking through walls is amazing. Playing with the ability to shoot lasers and ice and sticky webs from your fingers doesn’t really get old. Telekinesis and teleportation are nifty tricks. Engaging in mind blowing sex and being mischievous without consequence can sometimes be a blast! Lucid dreamers are only confined by the boundaries of their own imaginations. As the Forge says in Inception, “Don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger!” There are always new fun things to do in dreams. Just be creative! Speaking of creativity…

CREATIVITY-

During lucid dreams, we can tap into our highest creative centers. For example, an artist who is looking for inspiration for a new painting, might walk through a door while holding the intention that on the other side of that door will be his next masterpiece work of art. I’ve experimented with this technique and have been successful on more than one occasion. Poets may find the words to their next poems hidden in the folds of the dreamtime. Actors might find the emotional inspiration they need for a character in dream. While all of these potentials exist with non-lucid dreaming, the power of lucid dreaming is that the dreamer can actively pursue these goals as opposed to waiting for them to arise spontaneously.

HEALING-

Lucid dreamers can consciously uncover the roots of their dis-ease. Whether the dreamer experiences physical, mental, or emotional pain, all can be cleared with some high-powered, focused dream work. Nightmares are usually messages from your higher self, or from your body, that there is something wrong… a blockage… something that needs attention. By becoming lucid in a nightmare, the dreamer can relinquish all feelings of fear, can turn and face the demons that are in chase, can ask the perpetrators of their nightmares poignant questions like “what are you trying to tell me?”. I’ve personally healed emotional issues that were embedded so deeply in my psyche that dreams may have been the only place where I could work on them. I have a friend who sendsReiki energy to clients while in her dreams, with quite a large and impressive number of success stories. The ability to heal physical ailments through the direction of intent and consciousness, while it hasn’t been widely accepted by scientific communities, has been well documented.

UNDERSTANDING OF SELF-

By conceptualizing dreams as an opportunity to learn more about who we are, how we think and feel, and what we truly want opens the door to an enormous amount of self-development and self-actualization work. When dreamers become lucid they are able to ask questions of dream characters and receive answers from their own subconscious. Skilled dreamers are also able to meditate on questions of their higher selves before going to sleep and receive the answers in their dreams, lucid or not. The answers and messages we receive in our dreams are often opportunities for us to delve deeper into our own understandings of how we work. However, these messages are often encoded in symbolism and metaphoric meaning. Dream interpretation becomes a vital skill to the dreamer interested in personal development work through dreaming. Luckily dream interpretation is fun… like solving a puzzle or a riddle. Lucid dreamers may even come to a point where they are able to interpret the dream while they are having it.

CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLORATION-

Most skilled lucid dreamers, and many dreamers who have never tasted lucidity, will tell you that they’ve experienced at least one inexplicable or supernatural phenomenon in their dreams. Dreamers frequently report experiences of speaking with spirits who have passed, or dreaming the future, or sharing dreams with other dreamers, or engaging in remote viewing. Regardless of whether or not science has “proved” these experiences as being valid or not, the dreamer who has had them will tell you they change our very understanding of consciousness and reality. I once held a very strict “science is truth” approach to the world, until in my dreams I began experiencing things that literally could NOT be explained by a classical scientific paradigm. My paradigm was forced to expand. That expansion has brought me to learn a variety of other perspectives on reality, many of which have been advanced by ancient Eastern thinkers, indigenous shamanistic traditions, modern neo-perennial philosophers, and the visionary creators at the heart of the new transformational festival culture. Through an exploration of, and experimentation with, the lucid dreamworld, individual dreamers can legitimately contribute to the accumulation of knowledge surrounding one of the more exciting frontiers laid before us as humans. We can contribute to in our own small ways to some big questions like, What is consciousness? AND What human potentials exist have we only begun to unravel?

Check out these resources for awesome lucid dreaming information and communities:

www.dreamcatcher.net

www.lucidipedia.com

www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com