Enhancing Your Perception Via Lucid Dreaming

Conscious dreaming — sometimes called lucid dreaming — simply means being consciously aware that you are dreaming, while the dream itself is taking place. For some this skill comes naturally, but for most of us it takes practice. There are dozens of valid reasons to master the art of conscious dreaming, some of which I’ll describe in detail in future articles, but for today I’m going to discuss how the practice alters your perception of reality.

Conscious dreaming, in the most fundamental sense, is about perception and awareness. It is about training yourself to remain acutely aware at all times. If you lose that constant awareness while dreaming, you quickly lose lucidity and slip back into an unconscious dream state. Dreams are slippery things, and often it is difficult to maintain a firm hold on the lucidity you worked so hard to achieve. Sustaining your awareness is paramount.

The beautiful thing about working to develop your awareness for lucid dreaming is that the practice carries over to waking life. In order to recognize when you are dreaming, you must first train yourself to become aware at all times, waking or dreaming. The more you practice, the more aware you become. The more aware you become, the more keenly you sense things physically, mentally, emotionally, and psychically.

We navigate the waking world through the use of our senses, which frequently deceive us. We navigate our lucid dreams accepting that we can’t trust our senses at all. We know we instead must rely on instinct, intuition, and something more — a more attuned sense of the mind and an expanded awareness. As you learn to master conscious dreaming, you also learn to translate those expanded senses into waking life. You come to acknowledge that your five physical senses are not enough for waking life, any more than they are for dreaming.

As you explore varying levels of awareness in this fashion, you begin to recognize that dreaming and waking are simply two aspects of one reality, two levels or states of existence. You learn how each aspect flows naturally into the other, and that each may be manipulated according to its own rules. You eventually learn how easily those so-called rules may be bent or broken. Conscious dreaming is about studying your surroundings with the unique perspective of one who has learned to recognize the shifting nature of what we call reality.

In forthcoming articles, I’ll offer some tips and techniques for developing a constant state of expanded awareness, as well as some lessons for mastering the art of conscious dreaming. For now, I’ll leave you with a little thought experiment…

Imagine, for a moment, how your life would change if you never knew for certain if what you were experiencing was real or instead the product of your dreaming mind. Explore not only what that uncertainty would feel like but how it would affect you.