This is awesome. I haven't read your blog for a few years because I pretty much stopped using LJ. But I decided to take a look at it today out of the blue, and I had a lucid dream a few months ago. If I walked by this thing every day, it would make it a lot easier to invoke a lucid dream. Check out this RadioLab podcast about this subject, if you haven't already.
Asking the internet how to have lucid dreams produces too much woo. Why do you think this would help? I'm inclined to agree that it might, but I think the lists of things which do and do not help cause lucid dreaming needs some kind of a blinded test.
I think it works because I actually tried it. What I did was just simply look down at my hand about once an hour for a few days, just looked at it an examined that everything was normal. After a couple days of this, I carried this behavior into my dreams. So in my dream I looked down at my hand and it looked misshappen, as if it was underwater. At that point I realized I was dreaming, and that I could start to control my dream. I agree that it does sound very woo-ish. But of course, there is nothing supernatural about it. It's really just a method to trick your brain into becoming aware that you're dreaming. Check out that podcast that I linked. They go into a few methods for doing this.
Agreed that there is too much woo on this, but the 'look at your hands' routine seems to be the most cited technique, even in non-internet resources, so presumably it has some amount more at least potential validity. I remember reading about it in a thing called a book, back in the dark ages before the googles.
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This is awesome. I haven't read your blog for a few years because I pretty much stopped using LJ. But I decided to take a look at it today out of the blue, and I had a lucid dream a few months ago. If I walked by this thing every day, it would make it a lot easier to invoke a lucid dream. Check out this RadioLab podcast about this subject, if you haven't already.
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jan/23/wake-up-dream/
Asking the internet how to have lucid dreams produces too much woo. Why do you think this would help? I'm inclined to agree that it might, but I think the lists of things which do and do not help cause lucid dreaming needs some kind of a blinded test.
I think it works because I actually tried it. What I did was just simply look down at my hand about once an hour for a few days, just looked at it an examined that everything was normal. After a couple days of this, I carried this behavior into my dreams. So in my dream I looked down at my hand and it looked misshappen, as if it was underwater. At that point I realized I was dreaming, and that I could start to control my dream. I agree that it does sound very woo-ish. But of course, there is nothing supernatural about it. It's really just a method to trick your brain into becoming aware that you're dreaming. Check out that podcast that I linked. They go into a few methods for doing this.
Agreed that there is too much woo on this, but the 'look at your hands' routine seems to be the most cited technique, even in non-internet resources, so presumably it has some amount more at least potential validity. I remember reading about it in a thing called a book, back in the dark ages before the googles.