Resources
Two foundational researchers in lucid dreaming are Keith Hearne and Stephen LaBerge. The practitioners who influenced me the most are Michael Raduga and Charlie Morley.
There is a vast amount of information about lucid dreaming techniques online, so I do not share much of that content here. Still, I’d like to share one technique that I have developed myself. It is not exactly a lucid dreaming technique, but a dreaming practice, which I call: dream navigation.
Dream navigation
I’ve been doing this for many years, since before I knew what lucid dreaming was. I’ve always been fascinated by my dream world and felt like half of my life was somewhere else, in an inaccessible place that I nostalgically missed. I thought I could never get back there. So I used to navigate my dream memories as a way of returning, until I found out it was actually possible to intentionally go back!
This practice is about activating dream memories and, in this way, being in closer contact with your dreams. I feel it has a very positive effect on my dream recall, which indirectly supports my lucid dreaming practice: if you know your dreams, you might be able to cognize them. Moreover, I do it as a form of targeted concentration exercise that helps me enter dreams consciously.
This is how the practice goes. Follow these steps for a few minutes. For example, 1 to 15 minutes.
- Close your eyes.
- Think of the earliest or most meaningful dream you ever had (reference dream).
- Explore those memories as thoroughly as you can. Look around each part of the environment and feel everything that there is to feel about it.
- As soon as a new dream memory associated with the reference dream pops up in your mind, switch to this other dream.
- One dream will lead to another, and then another. You might start remembering dreams you hadn’t thought about in a while, which happened many years ago. It is a wonderful feeling.
- If nothing comes to mind after a few minutes exploring the reference dream, rest your mind and try again some other time.
