Editor’s Note: Interested in learning about lucid dreaming with likeminded souls? Check out the Lucid University Courseweek Spiritworks offering: Dream Council with the legendary dream guide Emakhet Uru.

What is this Lucid Dreaming Stuff?

Lucid dreaming is greater than controlling our dreams to make us fly or skip the scary scenes. It is about becoming conscious within the subconscious and understanding that all realities connect. The Physical World and The Dream World are but a reflection of our own self, our fears, our desires, skills, and finally our lessons.

Lucidity is about inventing a life of your own creation. It’s not about controlling your world. You become lucid by embodying love, and by practicing awareness within your mind.

Using techniques in order to enhance the lucid experience

1. Communication within dreams

“Dream characters” are common symbols of people in our lives or versions of ourselves. Some examples of dream characters include guides, adversaries, helpers, healers, disembodies, energies, shades, dream, and rangers. These are all embodiments of certain essences that only you can understand.

You’ll want to ask questions to ask these dream characters that are simple yet necessary. Be open ended and broad. Think about how this character can move your dream story forward.

You can be a little bit more direct if you know you’re speaking to a Familiar, or an aspect of yourself. These characters tend to embody an extreme emotion. You can address this character directly if you know it’s name. For example, you might ask, “Fear, why are you with me here?”

2. Interrogating Your Dream Characters

Jonah Haas, Marketing Director of Lucidity Festival, and a Dream Coach, recommends that you should tweak your questions based on the character you’re with. It’s just like real life. Knowing your audience is key.

Use conversational skills from your waking world. This will aid you in learning to communicate with dream characters. If you can understand their presence, you can understand a symbiotic relationship between their role in your psyche.

You’ll be training your subconscious to communicate on a level well-beyond our general programming. The answers you’re receiving are archetypal, and often metaphoric. Best of all, they’re pre-filtered, raw, and devoid of many of the muck and murkiness of the waking world.

3. Walking Through Walls

In the dream world, you can walk through walls. It’s like in Peter Pan, you have to believe you can fly in order to fly. It’s that simple.

Everything is a metaphor in dream world, and walls are a pretty tangible symbol for obstacles. You can look at walls in your dreamworld as a lesson in working through your issues by changing your perspective, walking away, or completely reinterpreting their existence. Maybe those obstacles don’t even exist.

4. Engage Utility Fingers

“Engage” is a direct command for your dream body. Our dream bodies react strongly to direct language and instruction like this. Speak to your body and tell it what you need to do using direct words and descriptions of what you need as simply as possible.

When you take control of yourself and have confidence in what you are wanting to do, any “obstacle within a dream can be solved with a snap of your fingers, literally.”

5. Engage Oracle

Jonah continues to recommend the phrase “Engage” as a powerful verb in the dream world. Engage is an activation of the conscious awareness. It is an action word, but it also involves turning a system on, connecting neurons to new potential.

In this case, use Engage to give the gift of vision. Activate your Oracle, or guide, to expand your vision into a place or another perspective. Jonah mentions using Locator Goggles, that sounds like a handy tool to carry in your Dream Backpack!

6. Spider Man Web

So, training a skill in your dream world is a powerful way to become more and more “in control” of your lucid dreams. Practice, embody, and live that gift!

One example Jonah shows is his spider man technique. This is a skill that he’s practiced to either travel from place to place quickly, or to bring an object closer to him. It’s a physical skill that allows him to fly!

This technique is not necessarily about having a cool power of spider webs coming out of your wrists, though. It’s about belief coming to fruition. This is the most important concept in lucid dreaming: If you believe you can be in control, your imagination will get you the rest of the way there. That’s how you’ll reach the next level, overcoming your limitations, and grow into deeper states of consciousness.

Results?

What your mind can see in states of sleep can be wildly different from reality. Yet, there are always strands of truth, no matter how your dreams play out. The physical world is portrayed indirectly as a perception of life.

Dreaming awake is our interpretation of our reality, to be lucid is to be awake and aware. So express your dreamself and grow with us!