Every person has his or her own personal dream symbols -- objects, situations, or places that appear frequently within dreams. One person may dream often of a specific animal, while another may find himself or herself frequently visiting the same location in dreams. These commonly appearing phenomena vary from person to person and are known as personal dream symbols.
Discovering your own personal dream symbols can be of great help in achieving lucid dreaming. Once you have discovered your personal dream symbols, you'll be able to use those symbols as cues for a reality check to trigger a lucid dream.
In order to discover your personal dream symbols, it's necessary to keep a dream journal. (Refer to the previous article to learn the best methods for recording your dreams to encourage lucid dreaming.)
Over time, you'll begin to notice patterns emerging in your journal. Certain things will appear more often than others. These are your personal dream symbols.
Keep in mind, dream symbols don't always represent details that stood out or were prominently featured in the dream. You may find a specific dream symbol appears frequently as a background detail -- something you notice but don't necessarily focus on during your dreams.
For example, my dreams nearly always feature water in some form, but water is not usually the focal point of the dreams. Instead, water often appears in the background as part of the scenery, even when my dreams take place indoors. By tracking my dreams with a journal, I discovered this pattern. Now every time I see water in any form, even just the faucet in my kitchen or a puddle on the street, I perform a reality check. After I began using water as my trigger for a reality check, the frequency of my lucid dreams quadrupled.
By working with what my mind was already doing, I greatly increased my odds of having lucid dreams. If you explore your dreams and take note of the things you already dream about on a regular basis, you can use that information to your advantage and boost your chance for lucidity.
Stay tuned for the next article in this series, which will describe several techniques for performing Reality Checks to help you realize when you're dreaming.
This post is Part 7 in the series Mastering the Art of Lucid Dreaming.
