Waking up inside a dream is like turning on a light in your mind. In a flash, you understand the nature of the reality you find yourself in. ‘Oh – I’m dreaming this! This is a dream!’ This realisation is usually followed by sharp mental clarity and a sense of heightened awareness and wonder.

The more we wake up in our dreams, the more we wake up in our lives.

So many people seem to sleepwalk through their lives, unconsciously going through the motions of going to work, driving the car, going food shopping. We’ve all done it: driven to the wrong place as we were on ‘automatic pilot’, or asked ourselves what we did last week as our days seem so similar that nothing sticks out for us.

When we live unconsciously, we miss out on the aliveness of the present moment,
so we become a little less alive ourselves.

Becoming lucid in a dream is a revelation; it wakes us up like a blast of fresh air to the face. We find ourselves energised, curious, enthusiastic! Imagine bringing this awareness into the waking state and transforming your moment, your hour… your life.

Dream lucidity greatly enhances waking lucidity, and vice versa. When we get used to questioning and identifying our state of consciousness through ‘reality checks’, we become more in tune with the present moment.

We’re also far more likely to have lucid dreams.

It’s a question of habit: the habit of awareness, the habit of noticing which state of consciousness we currently find ourselves in.

When we train this habit of awareness, we’ll soon find ourselves noticing while jogging along our usual route that our feet are not touching the ground; or at breakfast we’ll notice that the tangerine that just rolled off the kitchen table took a weirdly long time to fall. We’ll make the mental leap: ‘This must be a dream!’

I think of life as being like a ‘slow dream.’ Lucid dreaming shows us the instantaneous impact our thoughts, emotions and expectations can have on the dream environment. When we bring this knowledge into waking life, we can begin to shape and guide life events as in a lucid dream. OK, it may take a little longer for our desires to manifest in the waking world than in the dream world, but with the right intention, it will happen! Through spending time lucid in our dreams and having compassionate interactions with dream figures, we can grasp the combined power of kindness, expectation and visualisation.

Lucid dreaming teaches us to notice and appreciate the everyday beauty in our waking lives.
The more moments of beauty we notice, the more beautiful life gets, because life is made up of moments. The more deeply aware we are of the here-and-now, the richer our waking life becomes.

 

Why not wake up and live the dream of life joyfully and consciously? If we allow it to, lucid dreaming can help us to live a happier, more fulfilled life.