Tuesday, September 22, 2009

New 30 Day Experiment: Lucid Dreaming



I haven’t done a 30 day experiment in awhile because I haven’t found anything that is both enticing and requires a daily action. I’ve started doing salsa lessons once a week (let me know if you want to go), I still rock climb when I can, teach Sunday school, Toastmasters etc. So I’ve been implementing new activities, but starting tonight I have now found my next 30 day experiment.

I first read about lucid dreaming from Steve Pavlina a guru on self development. He is one of the more eccentric individuals that I currently read and explores a lot of extremes. He documents his results and rates them based on feeling and experience from the activity. Tim Ferriss writes primarily about life hacking, and uses a scientific method approach in discovering what works best. I am most attracted to Ferriss’s approach and tend to pay attention to his results. I didn’t realize that he studied at Stanford primarily to learn more on lucid dreaming by one of the top experts on the subject. His blog today documents his experiences with lucid dreaming.

So What is Lucid Dreaming
Lucid dreaming is the ability of having active consciousness during dreaming. Essentially you are in complete control of your dreaming state. Think the matrix. You can fly, hang out with famous people, create entire worlds, review study material; whatever you can imagine is possible. The benefits that have been noted are reductions in stress, fun, review of material for tests the next day, training with your favorite athlete, creating athletic performance success to develop confidence and recall; essentially you get your mind back for an additional 8 hours a day.

I’m curious to try out lucid dreaming and document my results. The first step is to immediately record my dreams upon waking up. This process can take one week or more to achieve the desired level of recall. I’ll post on this topic when I feel that I have significantly made progress in this area and document results as well as step 2.

If you decide to try it as well let me know so we can discuss our results together. See the links throughout the article for more information.

2 comments:

  1. I've actually been wanting to try lucid dreaming as well. Did you ever get anywhere with it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Steven, I'm still in the process. I'm writing down dreams when they are vivid enough to remember. Which I say occurs about three times a week now. On nights that I drink I rarely have any dream recall. When I sleep in I have more so because I wake up and fall back asleep.

    My dreams have become very vivid; I believe I have become lucid twice but upon the realization I have woken up almost immediately. I haven't done in the of the inducing techniques recommended in Tim's article. It's something I should do during this off week coming up.

    I dream alot more about things I would want to dream about I would say, but I often find the outcome will be the way I logically think it will go rather then the ideal way I wish it would. If that makes sense. Therefore I still can't control my dreams but I feel that I'm making progress.

    ReplyDelete