Can you really transform your life while you sleep?
Yes, says CLARE JOHNSON, who believes that lucid dreaming can help to reduce anxiety levels and even boost creativity
and sketches. Keep your journal by your bed and write down your dreams before you get up.
Even if you haven’t remembered any dreams, open your journal and start writing. It’s astonishing how dreams can flood back into the mind when you put pen to paper.
MEDITATE
Meditation is a great mindfulness technique and can help encourage lucid dreaming. Just 10 minutes of meditation before sleep can work wonders.
Meditation strengthens the connection with the unconscious, boosts mental clarity and teaches us to focus on the present moment. We need all these skills to stay lucid in our dreams.
TAKE A NAP
If you don’t have enough sleep at night, the body needs to catch up on dreaming sleep so when you nap you tend to have a light sleep filled with bizarre, vivid dreams. This is a magical state of consciousness for all would-be lucid dreamers.
As the sleep is light, you can become lucid more easily and as the dreams are often strange, you’re more likely to notice you’re dreaming. If an afternoon nap is impossible, wake up early in the morning, meditate, then return to bed determined to be lucid in your dreams.
GO BACK TO BED
This technique has a high success rate for lucid dreaming – a recent study in a sleep lab found that 50 per cent of people manage to become lucid when using it. Set your alarm for five hours into your night’s sleep. This means you will have your deepest sleep behind you and will be ready to enter dreaming sleep or REM. When the alarm goes off, get up for 15-30 minutes, write down your dreams and go back to bed. Visualise yourself becoming lucid in one of the dreams you just had.
DAYDREAM
Find a quiet space where you can relax and close your eyes. Bring the memory of a dream into your mind.
Take a moment to conjure up the dream and relive it. Identify the strongest emotion in your dream. Is it determination, joy, panic, sorrow, disgust? If the dream takes place in the past it may point out that you still have strong feelings about that situation. If the dream is connected to a current situation, move through any negative emotions and try to imagine possible solutions you can apply to your waking life.
CHANGE YOUR DREAMS
Every day when you have a spare minute, pick one of your own dreams, close your eyes and re-enter it. Now imagine how you could change it or what you would do differently. Re-entering your dreams in this way throughout the day is a wonderful way of reconnecting with your dreaming mind.
It will send a message to your unconscious that you want to become lucid in your dreams. Do the visualisation again last thing at night, with your eyes closed. Repeat to yourself as you fall asleep: “Tonight I am lucid in my dream.”