Reality Testing with Lucid Dreaming

Reality testing (or reality checking) is a common method used by people to determine whether or not they are dreaming. It involves performing an action with results that will be different if the tester is dreaming. By practising these tests during waking life, one may eventually decide to perform such a test while dreaming, which may fail and let the dreamer realize that they are dreaming.

Common reality tests include:

• Looking at one's hands one or more times. Hands generally look distorted, or grow additional fingers in a dream.
  
• Reading some text, looking away from the text, and reading it again - in a dream, the text will probably have changed.
  
• Looking at one's digital watch (remembering the time), looking away, and looking back. As with the text, the time will probably have changed randomly and radically at the second glance or contain strange letters and characters. (Analog watches do not usually change in dreams, while digital watches have great tendency to do so.)
  
• Flipping a light switch. Light levels rarely change in dreams.
  
• Looking into a mirror; in dreams, reflections from a mirror often appear to be blurred, distorted or incorrect.
  
• Plugging one's nose shut, and attempting to breathe through it, or attempting to breathe underwater. It is usually possible to breathe while doing this because the tester is not actually plugging their nose in real life.
  
• Gripping and stretching a finger. In a dream, body image can become distorted, and pulling a finger can elongate it. Also, the number of fingers can shift when stared at.
  
• Jumping into the air. Gravity is often distorted in a dream state and floating or flying may occur.
  
• Looking around and seeing everything blurred, as if underwater.
  
• Imagining being sealed inside an invisible force field. Most of the time, the dream will radically change to a state in which one is sealed inside something (commonly a glass orb) and/or lost in sound, vision or mind.
  
• Being able to move through solid objects like walls.
  
• Putting one's finger through the palm of the other hand.
  
• Closing one eye and looking at one's nose. The dreamer may not see their nose as everyday details that usually go unnoticed in waking life are often absent during a dream.
  
• Acting as if one has "super powers". In a dream the "super power" attempted will occur and help the dreamer realize that they are dreaming.
  
• Pinching one's self, or having someone else pinch you. "Pinch me, I think I'm dreaming". Perception of a pinch may be altered in a dream state.

Importance of Meditation

Meditation is a mental discipline by which one attempts to get beyond the conditioned, "thinking" mind into a deeper state of relaxation or awareness. It often involves turning attention to a single point of reference. It is a state of experiencing a state of consciousness that has the qualities of enlightenment. By meditating you are learning how to be free of thought, feeling, emotion, and time.

Meditation originated from Vedic Hinduism which is the oldest religion that professes meditation as a spiritual and religious practice. Evidence of the origins of meditation extends back to a time before recorded history. Archaeologists tell us the practice may have existed among the first Indian civilizations. Indian scriptures dating back 5000 years describe meditation techniques. From its ancient beginnings and over thousands of years, meditation has developed into a structured practice used today by millions of people worldwide of differing nationalities and religious beliefs.

Meditation is also practiced outside religious traditions. Different meditative disciplines encompass a wide range of spiritual and/or psychophysical practices which may emphasize different goals -- from achievement of a higher state of consciousness, to greater focus, creativity or self-awareness, or simply a more relaxed and peaceful frame of mind.

Yoga is one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy, focusing on meditation. In India, Yoga is seen as a means to both physiological and spiritual mastery.

The Bhagavad Gita stresses the importance of meditation as follows "Make a habit of practising meditation and do not let your mind be distracted. In this way you will come finally to the Lord who is the light-giver, the highest of the high.

Meditation has always been central to Buddhism and considered a key tool in spiritual development. The historical Buddha himself, Buddha Shakyamuni, was said to have achieved enlightenment while meditating under the Bodhi tree.

What is REM Sleep all about?

This is a normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid movements of the eyes. REM sleep can be further classified into two main categories; tonic and phasic, which was first identified and defined by Kleitman and Aserinsky in the early 1950s.

REM sleep in a normal healthy young adult takes up about 20-25% of total sleep, which translates to about 90 to 120 minutes of a night’s sleep. During the course of a normal night of sleep, humans usually experience about 4 to 5 periods of REM sleep; they are relatively short at the beginning of the night and longer towards the end. Most people tend to wake, or experience a period of very light sleep, for a short time immediately after a bout of REM. The relative amount of REM sleep varies considerably with age. A newborn baby spends more than 80% of total sleep time in REM.

During REM, the activity of the brain’s neurons is similar to that during waking hours, for this particular reason, the phenomenon is called paradoxical sleep, which means that there are no dominating brain waves during REM sleep.

REM sleep is physiologically different from the other phases of sleep, which are collectively called non-REM sleep. Vividly recalled dreams mostly occur during REM sleep. These dreams are also those dreams that most likely to be remembered upon waking up. It is felt that that the length of the REM sleep cycle might be correlated to the brain size.

Hobson’s reciprocal-interaction model gives a biological explanation to the chemical transaction that take place during REM. REM is generated in the pontine reticular formation and REM is turned on by cholinergic neurotransmitters. Serotonergic and noradrenergic neurotransmitters inhibit the cholinergic neurotransmitters turning REM off. The function of REM has not been definitely determined. One theory is an evolutionary, adaptive function. Another function may be a restorative process for some types of memory during REM sleep, but it has been firmly established that REM is when dreaming occurs in the sleep cycle.

Once it was established that dreams are generated during REM, it became very important to find out the reasons for dreaming and to get into the details of the functions of dreaming. There are two fundamental theories that describe the function of dreaming. One is an adaptive evolutionary function and another is restorative memory function.

While psychoanalysts argued that we dream to forget and not include certain traumatic memories into our dreams, neurobiologists insisted that dreaming is a phenomenon during which suppressed and repressed memories are brought to the surface. Neurobiologists concluded that disturbances in REM sleep end up in nightmares and horrifying dreams; which could also result in narcolepsy because of an increase in REM latency and a decrease in REM time. Hence they felt that people who have gone through violent experiences try not to allow these experiences to be part of their long term memory and that the entire function of dreaming was a step towards memory consolidation.

Current research suggests a more involved chemical exchange in the reciprocal-interaction model than was once thought. Though dreams may not have meaning as Freud suggested, dreams still seem to reflect an individual’s stored memory and emotion brought about by chemical exchanges in the brain and brainstem.

Luciddreaming.com Submits Idea for Google Project 10100

Project 10¹⁰⁰ is a call for ideas sponsored by Google to help change the world by helping as many people as possible. They're also committing $10 million to implement the best picked projects. Luciddreaming.com submitted a Google questionnaire and is anxiously awaiting the results on January 27, 2009. We won't give out the exact details concerning the Lucid Dreaming Project but we will say that it combines our community-centric website along with aspirations of a research center.

Lucid Dreaming Community Videos

As you can see in the embedded video, people around the world are attempting to lucid dream and become educated. Allison discusses induction methods and dream signs in her Youtube video.



http://www.luciddreaming.com/usr/member.php?id=2&t=videos&play=true&playno=106

Lucid Dreaming - Induction Methods

Mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD)
The MILD technique is a common technique developed by Dr. Stephen LaBerge, used to induce a lucid dream at will by setting an intention, while falling asleep, to remember to recognize that one is dreaming, or to remember to look for dream signs when one is in a dream.

Wake-back-to-bed (WBTB)
The wake-back-to-bed technique is often the easiest way to encourage a lucid dream. The method involves going to sleep tired and waking up five hours later. Then, focusing all thoughts on lucid dreaming, staying awake for an hour and going back to sleep while practicing the MILD method. A 60% success rate has been shown in research using this technique. This is because the REM cycles get longer as the night goes on, and this technique takes advantage of the best REM cycle of the night. Because this REM cycle is longer and deeper, gaining lucidity during this time may result in a lengthier lucid dream.

Cycle adjustment technique (CAT)
The cycle adjustment technique, developed by Daniel Love, is an effective way to induce lucid dreaming. It involves adjusting one's sleep cycle to encourage awareness during the latter part of the sleep. First, the person wakes up 90 minutes before normal wake time until their sleep cycle begins to adjust. After this, the normal wake times and early wake times alternate. On the days with the normal wake times, the body is ready to wake up, and this increases alertness, making lucidity more likely.

Wake-initiation of lucid dreams (WILD)
The wake-initiated lucid dream "occurs when the sleeper enters REM sleep with unbroken self-awareness directly from the waking state". There are many techniques aimed at entering a WILD. The key to these techniques is recognizing the hypnagogic stage, which is within the border of being awake and being asleep. If a person is successful in staying aware while this stage occurs, he or she will eventually enter the dream state while being fully aware that it is a dream.

Dream Dictionary - http://www.luciddreaming.com/dreamdictionary/index.php
Lucid Dream Information - http://www.luciddreaming.com/information/introduction.php

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Integrate Your Own Feed at Luciddreaming.com

Show off your latest RSS/XML feed on your profile by logging into your account and following our 3 - Step Dream Feed process. Allow luciddreaming.com to be your center stage for dream journal creation by either posting an external dream journal feed or by simply creating your own. Gain more organic traffic and exposure by completing a full profile at luciddreaming.com

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Luciddreaming.com becomes more Ajaxian

Luciddreaming.com becomes a little more Ajaxian and also integrates a new layout to its profile page. Our new and improved layout should help users navigate more easily throughout their pages. With the addition of Prototype technologies we're on a fast track to utilizing its latest features and improving your user experience. Stay tuned for more updates and interesting news.

For more information visit http://www.luciddreaming.com

Sleep Tips

There are several tips that one can use in improving the quality of sleep which is as important as getting the right amount of sleep. While sleep cycles and patterns are bodily functions that are established and taken care of by our body, applying free will and the willingness to readily surrender to our physical body and admit that it knows what is best for us doesn't come naturally to most people. During childhood and most adulthood good health and sleep are taken for granted and the system is abused indefinitely till it starts falling apart.

Instead of waiting for the system to push back and say enough, it is in our interest to go with the flow of nature and follow certain basic principals in resting the body and mind in an attempt to contribute to a healthy body and health mind.

To begin with it is important to cultivate some basic habits that will set a routine and once the routine is set, one just needs to stick to it and not allow it to lapse. Some tips that might help establish this routine are as described below:

Diet and Exercise: In a 24-hour day it isn't much to set aside 30 minutes for exercising. Initially one can start with a brisk walk and it needn't necessarily be at one stretch. Two sessions of 15 minutes each or three sessions of 10 minute each is a good start. A week or two later there can be a 10-or-15-minute increase to the total time devoted to exercise. Introducing mild stretching exercises and yoga for 5 to 10 minutes everyday can follow this. Exercising late in the evening might not be a good idea since exercise stimulates the body and increases the temperature, which is a direct contradiction to sleep, which requires a relaxed body with decreasing temperature.

It is advisable to eat at least two hours before bedtime since a heavy meal followed by immediate resting doesn't do much to relax the system in its entirety. A cup of hot milk before bedtime is good idea since milk contains tryptophan, which induces sleep. Caffeine should be avoided or the quantity of caffeine should be reduced towards late evening and night. This is primarily because caffeine binds to and blocks the same cell receptors that recognize adenosine, which is the chemical that triggers of the fatigue signal after which sleep occurs.

Smoking causes sleep troubles in numerous ways. Nicotine is a stimulant, which disrupts sleep. Additionally, smokers actually experience nicotine withdrawal as the night progresses, making it hard to sleep.

Many people think that a nightcap before bed will help them sleep. While it may make you fall asleep faster, alcohol reduces your sleep quality, waking you up later in the night. To avoid this effect, stay away from alcohol in the last few hours before bed.

For more information visit http://www.luciddreaming.com

Sleep Facts and Statistics

Facts and Statistics

• In dolphins, only one-half of the brain sleeps at a time, with the other half staying awake. This is essential in order to reach the water surface to breathe.
• Up to 15% of people “sleep walk.” Sleepwalking is called somnambulism.
• Approximately 15% of people have restless leg syndrome.
• Vehicular crashes are the third leading cause of death and injury in the United States, and up to 20% of them are sleep related.
• Untreated sleep apnea causes 500,000 motor vehicle crashes annually.
• One in 20 men have sleep apnea.
• Seizures occur more commonly during sleep than during waking hours.
• Many tranquilizers actually decrease deeper stages of sleep that are required for the restoration and fresh feeling in the morning.
• Jet Lag is worse when traveling toward the East.
• Sleep loss of four hours is equivalent to being drunk with a blood alcohol level of 0.1%.
• One-third of young adults are pathologically sleepy during the day.

Importance of Sleep

Sleep is important for our overall well being and sleep helps us feel healthier, think sharper & enjoy life more fully. Many people underestimate the value of sleep. Like proper nutrition & exercise, sleep is vital to your health. Lots of disease conditions and emotional problems stem from lack of sleep and not from external factors, as we would like to believe.

The mind and body do not shut down during sleep. Sleep allows the brain to consolidate the day’s learning into memory and improves the ability to learn repetitive skills, such as riding a bike or working on a computer. During sleep, the body does maintenance work like replacing old cells with new ones and reenergizing organs and muscles.

The "work" that sleep does during the night is vital for you to function optimally during the day. Getting the amount of sleep you need and getting a combination of light and deep sleep allow the most restorative benefit.

Sleep Debt

Sleep loss that accumulates night after night is called sleep debt or sleep deprivation. Slight loss of sleep also could cause sleep debt if continued on a regular basis. It is therefore important for the body to get the stipulated amount of sleep.

Impact of sleep debt or sleep deprivation

• Sleep debt has a deep and lasting impact on daytime life. Accidents that occur while driving or decreased levels of concentration at work etc., are all a result of sleep deprivation, cataclysmic accidents, such as the Exxon Valdez or Chernobyl nuclear disasters, can be traced in some part to lack of sleep.
• Fragmented sleep can be as devastating as no sleep. -- Dr. William C. Dement, Stanford University, Sleep Research Center.
• Two-thirds of American adults report a sleep-related problem.--National Sleep Foundation
• Some people show great bravado about getting a job done on little sleep or brag having trouble sleeping, claiming their work proves they didn’t need the rest anyway. Yet the truth is that fatigue is dangerous. America’s sleep problems have reached epidemic proportions, and may be the country’s number one health problem.--CNN Health Story Page.
• By the year 2010, nearly 40 million Americans will experience debilitating excessive daytime sleepiness, and an estimated 79 million Americans will have difficulty falling asleep.--Census Bureau Statistics
• On any given day a substantial number of Americans, perhaps the majority, are functionally handicapped by sleep deprivation.-- National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research
• Researchers suspect one reason heart attacks occur more frequently in the morning is that a night of tossing and turning can lead to a significant surge of blood pressure the next morning.-- Time Magazine
• In today’s fast-paced world we are sleep deprived. We’ve cut back on the hours we sleep to provide more time for work, family and leisure.
  

Future trends of Lucid Dreaming

The future of Lucid Dreaming is extremely bright and promising. To be actually aware of your dream as you are dreaming and the ability to control your dream is almost like gaining the power to create a parallel world. Lucid dreaming is an awesome skill that can be studied and cultivated and prove to be extremely beneficial to human kind.

Once developed, lucid dreaming techniques can be used to wake up and utilize all the creative centers that are lying dormant within one self. It can empower people by enhancing their energy levels and contribute significantly to understanding ones’ fears, problems, or weakness. Lucid dreaming can help evolve and develop a person by removing all mental and emotional blocks.

By employing Lucid Dreaming, our civilization should be able to overcome certain fears and experience more rationale. Lucid dreaming techniques can contribute significantly towards de-stressing people who prescribe to lucid dreaming thereby directly reducing diseases and illnesses. With stress being the main contributor for most physical and mental ailments, lucid dreaming may help people overcome it in the most natural and relaxed form. Lucid dreaming is a bridge that connects the conscious and unconscious minds. While on this bridge you are free to experience the unconscious by being fully aware of what is happening. If a person suffering from recurring nightmares develops the skill of Lucid Dreaming he or she will be fully aware of what is transpiring and has the power to face the challenge and overcome the terrifying experience at the unconscious level. The fear will no longer appear larger than life and the ability to face the fear will convert all the blocked negative energy into free positive energy.

Lucid Dreaming is rapidly gaining popularity all over the world simply because it is one of the oldest and most popular forms of dream phenomena. From ancient Indian scriptures like the Upanishads to Tibetan Bardo or Ancient Greek and Egyptians everyone understood and practiced Lucid Dreaming technique hence Lucid Dreaming is mostly a rediscovery.

Lucid Dreaming is one of the most effective and natural forms of healing. Lucid dreaming helps people overcome their fears and acts an outlet or platform for releasing or expressing suppressed and unexpressed emotions. Problems and baggage that people have been carrying since childhood can be cured once a person masters the skill of lucid dreaming.

Other benefits that can be accrued from Lucid Dreaming include the ability to draw out a persons’ true creative potential as well as problem solving skills and all this is possible because the dreamer is no longer a silent spectator in the dream but an active participant who can control and change the course of the dream. The dreamer is also going to experience some adventurous and unnatural feats like flying, passing through solid objects, levitating etc., which are impossible to experience during a conscious state.

Once initiated into the prarctice of Lucid Dreaming, you can start exploring the advanced forms of Lucid Dreaming like Clairvoyant Dreams, Precognitive Dreams, and Telepathic Dreams. These types of Lucid Dreams are extemely informative and helpful because through these dreams, one can see what could be is in store for the future and act cautiously as forewarned is always forearmed.

Hopefully people will realize the importance of Lucid Dreaming mainly because it is a gentle and relaxing technique of calming, healing and generally connecting a person to his or her core inner self. It almost like being given the power to create a parallel world, inhabit it, experience all that you want to there knowing very well that you are in control of what transpires there. It gives people powerful insights about his or her true Self which is different from the persona or the face that he or she projects into the world.

Lucid Dreaming should act as a guide for people to accept who they are, learn to improve themselves by facing all the challenging situations one encounters in the course of living on this plane. People will learn to be genuine and not try and be something they are not which will help them learn to accept others as they are and there will be no drama or play acting to impress or please, everything will be accepted as it is and nothing will be supressed or repressed within. Lucid Dreaming will open a whole new world to people who are willing to explore the immense potential there is by being self aware during their journey on the physical plane.

Luciddreaming.com Creates Facebook App

Click here to visit and install the LD Facebook Blog Application

Discover What People are Thinking....

Discover what People are Thinking in Real Time
Thanks to our newly integrated status updates, users can find out what people are thinking about in real time. Just go to your profile page and start typing in your thoughts about your dreams or something completely random.

Get Sketchy with Dreams at luciddreaming.com

Manifest your dreams visually by drawing sketches with you dream blog entry. Allow other people in you network to see visual representations of what it is you dream about.

Peer Into the Dreams of Others

Mashable.com, November 8th, 2007 (http://mashable.com/2007/11/06/peer-into-the-dreams-of-others/)

Since the inception of lucid dreaming into the media by movies such as Vanilla Sky and Paprika, it has become a popular blogging genre, as has similar topics of out of body experiences (OBE) and astral projection. In case you’re not up on your West Coast spiritual terminology, a lucid dream is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. During lucid dreams, it is said that it is possible to exert conscious control over the course of the dream.

I have an IM buddy I met many years ago, back when I primarily engaged in web design and programming for my dollars, named Justin Crawford. He and I would chat about life in general and attempt to solve design issues together. He would from time to time bring up the topic of lucid dreaming; learning about it was always one of his hobbies, and it was his interest in it that induced him to purchase the domain “luciddreaming.com” several years ago.

He didn’t actually tell me till he accrued over 1000 active users, but he’s built a niche social network built around the exploration and documentation of lucid dreaming. He sent me an invite to the community earlier today. Having checked it out, I see that there’s quite a bit of interesting stuff going on there.

The most attractive feature about the social network, as with any niche social network, is the community there, and there seems to be a fairly active community growing. It also comes stock with most of the generally available social networking features you’d find elsewhere, like messaging, profile pages, and group forums.

The blogging feature is most interesting, though. Dream interpretation isn’t an exact science, but there are general themes in dreams that can be interpreted to mean certain things that are generally agreed upon by folks who do this sort of stuff. When a dream blog is posted, a general interpretation based on tags and keywords from the post is generated by the system and appended to the end of the post to provide a starting point for the community to discuss and help derive meaning from the dream.

Justin Crawford says of his site, “It’s exciting to finally see lucid dreaming getting recognized on the web and we hope our online community will bring forth a much larger awareness. My ultimate goal is to educate everyone so that they’re familiar with what lucid dreaming is. We want to give the dreaming community tools to help promote their ideas and thoughts to others.”
It is definitely worth checking out, either if you’re curious as to what that dream involving your mother and the navy submarine actually means, or if you’re just wanting to engage voyeuristically into other people’s minds.

Luciddreaming.com - Site takes aim towards Dream Blogging

The Associated Press, November 6th, 2007

Since the inception of lucid dreaming into the media by movies such as "Vanilla Sky" and "Paprika", it has become a popular blogging medium along with its associated topic counterparts, OBE (Out of Body Experiences) and Astral Projection.

A lucid dream is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. During lucid dreams, it is often possible to exert conscious control over the dream characters and environment, as well as to perform otherwise physically impossible feats.

Luciddreaming.com founder Justin Crawford mentions, "It's exciting to finally see lucid dreaming getting recognized on the web and we hope our online community will bring forth a much larger awareness. By utilizing target specified advertising campaigns and networking with other dreaming forums we're on a fast track to getting the world informed."

With over 2 million search results in Google, lucid dreaming has become a widespread topic that has increased in popularity substantially in the past few years. It's in the hopes of luciddreaming.com to establish one of the largest dreaming communities on the web to utilize its social networking capability and dream journal tools.

"Our ultimate goal is to educate everyone so that they're familiar with what lucid dreaming is. We want to give the dreaming community tools to help promote their ideas and thoughts to others.", says Justin.

For more information on lucid dreaming please visit http://www.luciddreaming.com/