Dreaming has long been considered a gateway to the infinite. The ancient Greeks believed dreams predicted the future. Famous Chinese Sages believed the soul traveled to other dimensions during dreams, bringing back messages from beyond. Druids, Native American Indians and Tibetan monks all practiced the ancient art of lucid dreaming.
Over the years I have come to believe that when we are born, we are complete. And that our physical, mental and emotional body form one part of ourselves and our dreaming body another. My term for this is our inner and outer selves. During this stage of our totality of being, we are connected to a force called intent. As we get older the physical body and dreaming body become disjointed and we lose connection with our intent and with our inner self. With the passing years our physical, mental and emotional body begin to stock pile and retain our life experiences while our inner self becomes the gatekeeper of our dreams.
What does it mean to be conscious and experience active living while dreaming? For me lucid dreaming is a fine honed art form of displacing one's perception in order to enhance and enlarge the scope of what we are able to perceive. The tools needed for lucid dreaming, awake and in sleep, lie in our very hands, in normal awareness. From my experience all it takes is for you to believe.
I started practicing lucid dreaming exercises when I was a teen living in Honduras. I was determined to master this elusive craft so I practiced mnemonic induction exercises every night. Right before I went to bed I would remind myself to look for my hands in my dreams, to no avail. In the 1970s we did not have the props and dreaming resources that we have today. Now we have a device that fits on your finger called the Dream Genie. The Remee Sleep Mask helps enhance rapid eye movement. Some lucid dreamers take pills like melatonin and galantamine to fine tune their dreaming abilities.
Over the years my dreaming awake activities fared better than my sleep induced dreaming attempts. My tipping point did not come until a chance meeting with a Shaman. I told him about my lucid dreaming struggles and asked him how long it took him. He smiled and said he did it on the first try. In that moment it was as if a switch had been flipped and all it took was hearing someone else say lucid dreaming was effortless.
Words can be powerful allies. But they can also hold us back.
According to psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge experimenting with lucid dreaming can help cultivate heightened awareness and a general sense of well being. In fact, he considers sleep to be the best form of meditation.
For me it served as a spring board to reconnect my higher self to my long lost dreams and has given me a feeling of balance and completeness.
Dreams are important. Without them we are like a compass without a needle. Explorers in field of lucid dreaming are growing and gaining momentum with their dreaming abilities as they continue mining their reveries for clues, tips and creative insight.
Today technology, self help sites and social media are making it easier for dreamers to enter the dream world I like to call the Gateway to Infinity.