Daniel Erlacher

I’m sorry, but I’m back in lab and this means another part of night-report. Basically, there will be only one night-report per week, Just because I don’t want to bother you too much. Anyway, there is always the “delete-button”… First I want to tell you about the problems we had the last week. The computer program crashed about 5-6 times in one night and to restart the SynAmp (amplifier) takes several minutes, which would be dumb when the dreamer just signal a lucid dream and we would miss this data. Well, today we received an update from the driver for the SynAmp and everything looks fine. I used the time to organize and clean up the lab, what else would you do with your spare-time? And now the big time can start. 4-5 recordings per week with several people for application and different dream subjects and everything under mine control…. almost everything. Meanwhile, I try really hard to understand more about the EEG-signals, but hey, this stuff looks still strange to me.
Okay, okay, okay…Tonights topic is “how do I become lucid?”. That is a good question and a lot of you guys want to know the answer. Well, there are several techniques out there and some of them work and other don’t. I will explain two of them. Basically what we want is that we recognize in our dreams that we dream. The first approach is the ‘Reflection Technique’ (Paul Tholey, one of the pioneers in the studies of lucid dreams. I met him personally at a symposium in Vienna and I could feel his spirit. Unfortunately, he died in the beginning of this year.) what Paul Tholey recommends to do is to ask yourself several times a day if your a dreaming and than you check the world very carefully for abnormalities, e.g. flying cats, talking plants… there is no doubt that you are awake but you have to ask yourself very serious. After a time you will start to ask yourself the same question in your dreams. But in your dreams you will find maybe a flying cat, which is not unusual for a usual dream, but in this moment you know hey there is a flying cat, flying cats are pretty unusual in the waking life. Thus, when I ask myself if I’m dreaming, than I have to answer this question with “yes, I’m dreaming”. After this conclusion your in… or better spoken your awareness is back and you have a lucid dream with every constraints you can imagine or not. It is your world and you are god #1. Paul Tholey recommends to do these reality checks in situation, which are relatively dream like, e.g. you meet somebody who you just thought about. Also you should do this reality checks a couple of times during the day. Actually there is a device to buy at the Lucidity Institut, some advertising ;-). It looks like a little beeper, which starts to vibrate randomly during the day. These vibrations reminds you to make a reality check!
Let’s talk about the MILD-technique from Stephen LaBerge. The abbreviation MILD stands for ‘Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams’. This is one of the most powerful techniques right now (w/o any help-devices). Set your alarm clock two hours earlier than usual instead of 8:00am to 6:00am. Oh wait, better instead of no alarm clock and 12:00am to alarm clock at 8:00am. Hopefully the alarm wakes you from a dream (if not, try again a half an hour later). Keep this dream as vivid as possible in your mind. Remember the dream and go through the whole dream again. Stay awake for at least half an hour (that’s the hard part) and think the whole time about this dream, as vivid as possible. After half an hour go back to sleep and now start to put yourself back in this dream scenario. See yourself in this dream and keep this image as vivid as possible in your mind during the time you fall a sleep. Try to imagine how you would fly through this dreamland. See yourself walk in this dream and fall asleep in the real world. In the next REM stage you will find yourself in a dream, lucid, totally aware of where you are and what you are.
So, that’s it. Another possibility is to buy a NovaDreamer or the DreamLight. Both are a kind of goggle, which you wear during the night. This goggle recognize eye movement and send light signals back in your dreamland. As soon as you see these lights you know, “hey, this is a dream”. 30 days money back guarantee. You find this and much more on the Lucidity Homepage. Believe it or not it’s 2:18am and I take a nap….