The best way to get yourself to lucid dream is to send yourself a signal while you're in a deep sleep, generally via a flashing light of some sort. A dude who goes by "natetrue" went and built himself a mask that does just that, flashing you about 5 hours into your sleep cycle. The best part? He's now selling kits so you can make your own for $30.
(Via Reality Carnival.)
I have spontaneous lucid dreams; I haven't yet learned how to induce them. Lately I've become acutely aware that my dreams seem to take place in a variety of interconnected locations. I'd like to explore this half-glimpsed world more deeply, test its barriers, mingle with its inhabitants, memorize its geology, and ally myself with its inherent strangeness.
3 comments:
Mac -- Based on the comments following the description of the LD device, it does not sound to me like many people really know what lucid dreaming actually entails. Lucid dreaning is not simply VIVID dreaming. It entails REALIZING that you ARE dreaming while still in the midst of the dream, and then continuing to dream although now with some degree of conscious control over the dream imagery.
I am not sure a light strapped to one's forehead to produce a signal would do the trick. (It would probably just wake me up.) I also have occasional lucid dreams but find it extremely hard to induce them on purpose. I've take to giving myself a lucid dreaming autosuggestion as I am going to sleep, which seems to work occasionally (although not often enough to suit me). Like you, I certainly have VIVID dreams much of the time (usually in the morning) which I have no trouble remembering, since they seemed real at the time. In fact, one problem that seems to make true lucid dreaming difficult is just that many of my dreams seem so real, it is hard for me to believe that I AM dreaming. In fact, just the other morning, it happened that my lucid dreaming autosuggestion worked, and I told myself in the dream that I was dreaming, but then, because it seemed so real that I actually couldn't believe that I WAS dreaming! Occasionally, spontaneuously, I do realize this though, and then things get really interesting.
Carlos Castaneda has a book on lucid dreaming called, appropriately, Dreaming that I recommend (if you're into Caros, anyway).
Is this an electronic version of Brion Gyson's DreamMachine?
Pisces--
It's close, but in this case the flashes are meant to remind the dreamer that s/he's dreaming, not exactly to induce a visionary state.