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title article : how to practice lucid dream
how to practice lucid dream
Article knowledge, Article lucid dream,Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (2. Preparation for Learning Lucid Dreaming, Eps 1)
Learning How to Learn
Many people experience lucid dreams after
reading or hearing about lucid dreaming for the first time. This may be akin to
beginner’s luck: they heard it could be done, and so they did it. As a result
of indulging your curiosity about lucid dreaming by buying this book, you may
already have had a lucid dream or two, but you probably have not learned how to
have lucid dreams whenever you want. This chapter will provide you with
background knowledge and skills that you will need for practicing the lucid
dreaming techniques in the following chapters.
Before you set out to explore the world of lucid dreaming, you
need to know some basic facts about your brain and body in sleep. Then, it may
help you to know about the origins of common “mental blocks” that prevent
people from committing themselves to the task of becoming aware in their
dreams.
Your lucid dream training will start with
keeping a dream journal and improving your dream recall. Your preparation for
Learning Lucid Dreaming journal will help you discover what your dreams are
like. The next step will be to use your collection of dreams to find
peculiarities (dreamsigns) that appear often enough in your dreams to be
reliable signposts of the dream state. Your list of dreamsigns will help you
succeed with the lucid dream induction techniques presented in Chapters 3 and
4.
When you are familiar with your ordinary dreams,
and have learned how to become more or less lucid at will, you will be ready to
try out some of the applications described in the later chapters of this book.
But first, it is important that you focus your mind on learning the preliminary
skills and background information required for becoming a lucid dreamer. You
cannot write poetry until you learn the alphabet.
Sleeping Brain, Dreaming
Mind
People are mystified by the need for sleep.
Why do we turn ourselves off for eight hours out of twenty-four? Some likely
answers are to restore the body and mind, and to keep us out of trouble during
the dark hours. But to call sleep a mystery begs an even larger question:
What does it mean to be awake? A basic definition of being awake is to be
aware. Aware of what? When we speak of sleep and wakefulness, we are referring
to awareness the outside world. Yet, while asleep and unaware for the most part
of the outside world, one can still be aware (and thus “awake”) in a world
within the mind. There are degrees of wakefulness. Lucid dreamers are more
aware of their real situation – they know they are dreaming thus we can say
they are “awake in their dreams.” Exponents of traditional methods for
achieving higher consciousness speak of “awakening,” meaning increasing one’s
awareness of one’s place in the cosmos.
But how does anyone or anything come to be
“aware”?
Awareness in biological organisms is a function of the brain. The
sensory organs detect information (light, sound, heat, texture, odor) in the
world and transmit it to the brain. The brain interprets the information and
synthesizes it into a conception of what is happening in the outside world.
The brains with which we experience our
worlds, whether dreaming or awake, are the product of biological evolution.
During the past thousands of millions of years, living organisms have competed
in Mother Nature’s life-and-death game of “Eat or Be Eaten: Survival of the
Fittest.” The simplest one-celled organisms don’t know until they bump into
something whether it is predator or prey. If it is food, they engulf it. If it
is a predator, they are eaten. This is obviously a dangerously ignorant way to
try to stay alive.
Since knowing what is going on around you obviously has enormous
survival value, creatures gradually evolved sense organs that allowed them to
predict whether they should approach or avoid something in their environment
without having to bump into it. Over billions of generations, organisms
developed increasingly sophisticated nervous systems and correspondingly
reliable and precise capacities for perceiving the environment and controlling
their actions.
Our brain maintains an up-to- date model of what’s going on in the
world and predicts what may happen in the future. Prediction requires using
previously acquired information to go beyond the information currently
available. If you are a frog and a small dark object flies by, information
built into your frog brain through evolution allows it to predict that the object
is edible and – zip! you have eaten a fly. Or if a large shadow suddenly falls
on your lily pad, information (also acquired through evolution) allows your
frog brain to predict danger, and – plop. Frogs do not see the same world we do
– the complex patterns of color, light, shade, and movement that we can
identify as trees, flowers, birds, or ripples in water. The frog’s world is
probably composed of simple elements like “small flying object” (food), “large
approaching object” (danger), “pleasant warmth” (sunlight), or “attractive
sound” (frog of the other sex). Although the human brain is far more complex
than that of the frog, it works on the same basic principles. Your brain
accomplishes its world-modeling task so well that you ordinarily aren’t aware
that it is modeling anything. You look with your eyes, and you see. The
experience of visual perception seems as straightforward as looking out a
window and simply seeing what is there. Nonetheless, seeing, hearing, feeling,
or perceiving through any other sense is a process of mental modeling, a
simulation of reality. The contents of your consciousness, that is, your
current experiences, are constructed and depend on your present
purposes, what you are doing and what relevant information is currently
available.
The mind in sleep
If you are awake and engaged in some kind of
activity (walking, reading, etc. ), your brain is actively processing external
sensory input from the environment, which, together with your memory, provides
the raw material from which you construct a model of the world. While awake and
active, the model accurately reflects your relationship to the external world.
If you are awake but physically inactive, the
balance of input moves from the external to the internal. To a certain extent
your thinking becomes independent of external stimuli, your mind wanders, you
daydream. With part of your mind you are modeling worlds that might be rather
than the current actual environment. Still, you tend to maintain a reduced
model of the external world and your attention can easily be drawn back to it,
if, for some sign of danger appears.
In the case of sleep, so little sensory input is available from
the outside world that you stop maintaining a conscious model of it. When your
sleeping brain is activated enough to construct a world model in your
consciousness, the model is mostly independent from what is happening in your
environment – in other words, a dream. The sleeping brain isn’t always creating
a multidimensional world model. Sometimes it seems to be merely thinking, or
doing very little. The differences in mental activity during sleep depend
largely upon differences in the state of the sleeper’s brain.
Sleep is not a uniform state of passive withdrawal from the world,
as scientists thought until the twentieth century. There are two distinct kinds
of sleep: a quiet phase and an active phase, which are distinguished by many
differences in biochemistry, physiology, psychology, and behavior. Changes in
brain waves (electrical activity measured at the scalp), eye movements, and
muscle tone are used to define the two states. The quiet phase fits fairly well
with the commonsense view of sleep as a state of restful inactivity – your mind
does little while you breathe slowly and deeply; your metabolic rate is at a
minimum, and growth hormones are released facilitating restorative processes.
When awakened from this state, people feel disoriented and rarely remember
dreaming. You can observe this state in your cat or dog, when it is quietly
sleeping in a moderately relaxed posture (in the case of cats, the “sphinx”
posture) and breathing slowly and regularly. Incidentally, this is the phase of
sleep in which sleeptalking and sleepwalking occur.
The transition from quiet to active sleep is
quite dramatic. During the active sleep phase, commonly called rapid eye
movement or REM sleep, your eyes move rapidly about (under closed lids, of
course), much as they would if you were awake. Your breathing becomes quick and
irregular, your brain burns as much fuel as it does when you’re awake, and you
dream vividly. If you’re male, you probably will have an erection; if you’re
female, increased vaginal blood flow. While all this activity is happening in
your brain, your body remains almost completely still (except for small
twitches), because it is temporarily paralyzed during REM sleep to prevent you
from acting out your dreams.
The “sleep paralysis” of REM sleep doesn’t
always turn off immediately upon awakening; this is why you may have
experienced waking up and not being able to move for a minute. Sleep paralysis
can seem a terrifying experience, but actually it is quite harmless, and
indeed, can even be useful for inducing lucid dreams (see Chapter 4). You can
get a good view of “paradoxical sleep, “ as REM sleep is called in Europe, when
you see your cat or dog sleeping totally collapsed, breathing irregularly,
twitching, showing eye movements, and in the case of dogs, tail wagging,
whimpering, growling, and barking. This is when people justifiably say, “Look,
Spotto is dreaming!”
Source by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D.
& Howard Rheingold
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