Have you ever been dreaming and then realized you were in a dream? This psychological phenomenon is known as conscious dreaming or lucid dreaming—a sudden awareness while you’re dreaming that you are dreaming. 
And, according to lucid dream teachers, researchers and therapists, it can lead to limitless possibilities. People all over the world have developed a love affair with this magical world, believing it to be a key to happiness, mindfulness, awareness, kindness, love, inner peace, and spiritual enlightenment.
For over a thousand years, Tibetan Buddhists have practiced lucid dreaming as a means to promote spiritual enlightenment. They’ve developed elaborate techniques to master this richly detailed, moving, exhilarating and inspiring world.
Tapping into lucid dreams, while facilitating a better understanding of consciousness, can also be riotously entertaining.
If you’re aware that you’re dreaming, it follows that you can control your dreamscape. Philosopher and physician Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, writes: “… yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof.” If you can control this mysterious world, then the possibilities become endless. You are only limited by your imagination. My dream world is extremely complex and vivid and, even before I realized lucid dreaming had been scientifically proven, I experienced many lucid dreams.
And I had a riot.
During one such dream, I was walking down the street in a surreal landscape straight out of an old spaghetti western movie set. The sun was just setting on a desert-like crimson horizon. At first I wasn’t aware that I was dreaming, even though everything looked incongruous. Suddenly a fang-toothed monster stepped out in front of an old saloon, growled menacingly, and charged me. 
With an adrenaline-fueled injection, I dashed behind an old building. I heard the beast coming closer and began to panic. I started looking around for a weapon to defend myself and magically an AK-47 appeared on the ground in front of me. As soon as I picked it up, the monster approached and I fired a staccato-burst of bullets. Riddled with blood-soaked holes, he dropped to the ground like a sack of hammers. Then it occurred to me. Wait a minute. Machine guns don’t magically appear just when you need one. I must be dreaming.
With that new awareness, I continued down the street, believing I had been thrust into a larger-than-life video game in which the object was kill or be killed. Sure enough, monsters of all shapes and sizes began attacking me and I cut them all down effortlessly with my machine gun. Soon all the monsters were dead and I was alone on the street, smoking gun in hand. Satisfied with my efforts, I began to think of other possibilities. Maybe I should spread my wings and fly. But before I could focus to try and achieve this, one of the dead monsters began to stir. It was as if the camera had been reversed. His spilled blood began to flow from the street and back into his veins. His bullet-ridden body magically healed itself. He rose stronger and more determined than ever. So did the others. They regrouped and attacked en masse.
I cut them down as they approached, but there were too many. Soon they were on me, biting, ripping and tearing me to shreds. With raw fear creeping into my veins, I tried to keep my composure, telling myself over and over that I was dreaming. Like the monsters, I would magically heal and launch a counter-offensive, deadlier than before. But the uncertainty was probably too much and I woke up, albeit with vivid memories of the dream and a not-unpleasant feeling of having escaped into another wild, wonderful and powerful world. I quickly documented the dream and it became the inspiration for Resurrection Point, a dark tale exploring the horrifying consequences of experimenting with death and resurrection.
But, many of my lucid dreams have been far less uncertain and overwhelmingly positive. As with many other lucid dream lovers, my favorite thing to do while lucid dreaming is to fly. I’ve accomplished this many times, soaring high in the sky over beautiful land and seascapes, mesmerized by the beauty and spellbound by the incredibly amazing experience.
Experts say if you want to explore this mysterious world often, you have to train your mind. The most important thing to do is keep a dream journal, document your dreams as soon as you wake up. Become familiar with your dream landscape and its recurrent themes, so you might reliably identify them and thereby put yourself into a life-changing lucid dream. They also say look for incongruous dream signs that will alert you that you’re dreaming. One technique to recognize a dream sign is the reality check. 
During your conscious world, look at your hand and look away. Then look back at your hand. It should look the same. During a dream, look at your hand and then look away. When you look back at it, if you’re dreaming, ninety-five per cent of the time it won’t look the same. It might be elongated; you might be able to stretch your finger to ten times its normal size. Your hand may resemble a five-fingered water balloon. That’s because the file for pattern recognition of your hand is stored in the left hemisphere of the brain and dreaming is a right-brain phenomenon. Providing you’re dreaming, the hand-examining reality check will serve as a dream sign, alerting you and helping you become lucid.
Of course there are many other dream signs; flying pigs; talking to your dead father; being in your childhood home, and being nude in public. It’s just a question of training your mind to recognize them.
Many people claim they don’t dream at all. Their sleeping world is black nothingness, an unaware state. According to the experts, this just isn’t true. Experts claim that every human being has between three to seven dreams per night. Most people just don’t remember them. So, it’s not a question of not dreaming, it’s a question of recall. If you want to experience the transformative world of lucid dreaming, you have to train your mind. Start a dream journal, learn how to identify and use dream signs, and do reality checks.
You might be saying, Why bother?
But think about it. In an average life span, we spend a third of our lives sleeping. That’s about thirty years. Why, if you could develop a richer awareness and understanding of yourself and the world around you, would you choose to spend it in total blackness? It’s almost akin to being in solitary confinement for thirty years.
Experts say it’s possible for anyone to learn to dream consciously. Don’t knock on that door to higher consciousness. Leap right through it. Discover a colorful, crisply detailed and beautiful landscape with limitless possibilities—where you can control the characters, narrative and environment. 
Based on my own richly rewarding experiences, I’m quite sure you won’t be disappointed. So sleep, dream, create, escape, enjoy and understand more fully what it is to be human in this complicated and stressful world we live in.
Watch for next week’s blog post on lucid dreaming in the context of nightmares. I’ll discuss the notion that nightmares, far from being a destructive force in our lives, actually represent hugely valuable opportunities to come to grips with our phobias and fears.