We often hear the expression “there are only so many hours in the day”, but what about the hours during night? I’m not saying you should work through the night, I’m actually saying the exact opposite. I’m saying you should take advantage of your sleep, by lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming, is taking control of your dreams, it can be highly beneficial. Dreams are meticulously crafted by your brain, cable of producing hyper realistic scenarios. Taking advantage of this, you can create scenarios to improve learning, solve problems, and prepare yourself for difficult situations. With lucid dreaming you can practice, boxing with Mike Tyson or a speech you have to make in front of some investors.

Al Hirschfeld, a famous illustrator in his time would often work on his designs in his sleep. After waking he would rush to his table and jot down his nocturnal illustrations.

Learning to lucid dreaming takes a concerted effort. Its a lot like learning to whistle, when you first start your pretty much just spitting in the wind. When starting anything my recommendation is learn to do the minimum really well. In this case the minimum would be writing a dream journal. Journaling your dreams in this weird way strengthens your dreaming muscles. Remember that dream you had yesterday? No, well thats because dreams have a tendency to disappear rapidly after you wake up. Dream recall is important to develop because it allows you to take advantage of the database of information your dreams provide.

From noting down your dreams you’ll be able to see reoccurring patterns, which are called dreams signs. These won’t take shape as your magical animal spirit, Abu the flying otter, but rather as out of place oddities. These dream signs can be places, people, actions. I would recommend building up your dream journal for several month before moving on to trying to achieve lucidity.
To actually achieve lucidity you need to become self aware during your dreams. Reality checks are way to do so.  A popular check is to look at your hands. A reality check is a simple action that you make into a habit. You would do this action at least 20 times a day. During the action you would take note of your environment, the smell, the feeling of the air on your skin, details of the palm of your hand. Once it becomes an established habit there will be higher a likeliness of doing your reality check while dreaming. This time when you do it in your dream you’ll realize, its a dream.

So now that your aware in your dream you can start changing your dream around. But one thing to note is that often becoming aware can result in you waking up. Stay calm and try not to get too excited and don’t forget to have fun, fly a little bit.