I wrote my thoughts down for a while when I first started practicing. I had the intention of posting a LL journal, but once you’re in your regular practice, there’s nothing much to tell because the process is going so slow.
Remember though… although the implications are far more deeper than LDing, it takes a lot more practice for a much longer time in order to change radically. So it’s extremely important to keep practicing, day by day, and to have a lot of patience!
In talking about LL there is usually a great deal of attention and explanation put on what it is not. This could be summed up nicely as swimming in the shallow turbulent waters of our personal “insanity”. Worries, fears, anger, going thru the motions without any awareness, etc. Most often the issue becomes: “How do I stop? What exercises can I do? etc”. There is definitely a need to find some way to bread the pattern, but don’t let the exercise become the focus of LL. If you engage in self-examination, looking to see if some thought is really you or not, don’t make a career out of it. If you are disappointed in the weather, don’t spin yourself into some great introspective conundrum. That’s still swimming in the shallow waters.
When I notice that I am not in the moment, I simply go “Woops” and return my attention to the here and now. I believe that the most benefit will be gained by staying in the moment. But this is personal opinion, and what’s most important is to find something you are comfortable with and keeping at it. LL is just one way of expressing the concept of being in the moment. Meditation, long walks in the woods, etc. are other means of arriving at the same thing. The difference I see with LL is the focus it places on what if feels like to be in a Lucid Dream, and trying to maintain that state of awareness in waking life.
I came up with LL because I was trying to explain what Lucid Dreaming was like, and I thought a lot about what the actual feelings/mechanisms were at play in my awareness in an LD. One key element that I always come back to is the sense of self in this type of awareness. Though I have 95% of my attention on my surroundings there is always this subtle awareness that it is ME that is doing the looking. It’s like Xetrov said: something that is always there in the back of your mind. This is simply an awareness of self. I’m not aware of being hungry, or tired, because the essential ME doesn’t feel these things, any more than the essential ME feels angry or afraid.
For me this sense of self is fundamental to this state of awareness. If I become too engrossed in what I am looking at I loose being in the here and now just the same as if I had become afraid. I’d say this was an element of self-control, a self-discipline that has to be maintained.
The practice of LL is something that can and should be done through out the day. I can loose the LL feeling in a second and have to bring myself back many many times. I’d say don’t look for a special time or place to practice this. After all it is Lucid Living, do it any time you are alive.
This is a really interesting topic. I’ve read the Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche book as well, and tried to practice his technique for certain periods of time. What I find difficult is that it’s easy to be reflective when I’m walking along or just relaxing, but when I’m in some kind of more intense situation like social interaction or a stressful activity, I forget all about reflecting on myself and I’m completely involved in the activity (or completely uninvolved, to look at it another way, since I am not really conscious at this time), exactly as I am completely involved in non-lucid dreams. My dreams almost always seem to involve some kind of emotionally intense scenario. Maybe these experiences are the ones that generate the strongest unconscious traces (karmic traces as Rinpoche calls it, or sangkaras in Vipassana meditation) and so these kinds of emotions are more likely to be relived in dreams. Maybe I am just a stressed-out person. I have been aiming to use stress as a trigger for reflection for a long time, but it is so difficult. I always get caught up in some pointless ego roleplay (“Yes, I know all about that reflection stuff, but THIS TIME it’s REALLY IMPORTANT!!! Oh, yeah, it’s all very well to be reflective when the washing-up water gets cold or something, but what about when your girlfriend chucks you out of the flat and then you forget to take your boots and then miss the bus and get stuck in London all day?!! Stuff the Lucidity, I’m sulking!!!”). If EVERYTHING is like a dream, that means EVERYTHING. This is a really fundamental change in our way of life, and according to the Tibetan Buddhist theory, this should be the aim, with lucid dreaming just as a useful technique to make the mind flexible.
By the way, I have been wanting to say how amazing this site is. What we are doing is practical research into the frontiers of human consciousness, in the middle of a repressive society that scorns most manifestations of serenity, through a non-hierarchical group without any dogma (religious or scientistic), money or power. This could be the turning point for the human species. I don’t know of any other group that is doing this in such a healthy way. Wonderful how the fundamental urge to transcendent experience re-emerges from the most debased culture.
I was just wondering that today…if instead of asking myself if I’m dreaming when I’m awake, would it be helpful to just tell myself that everything is a dream when I’m awake, thus helping me to realize it when I’m asleep? That’s what it sounds like you’re saying, but has anyone done this successfully?
This is an excellent post, and in my opinion, the essence of lucid dreaming. Lucid living has been my “method” (if I can express it in that way) for achieving lucidity in dreams during the last 6 months. Trust me, it is not a quickie, but the efforts are rewarded both in waking life and in dreams.
Thanks to LL my life seems more real, and to some extent, my bad feelings and reactions have dropped numericaly. For instance, bad behaviours of people as well as bursts of anger dont influence me at all. I live in peace constantly.
And whatever else remains, is being transformed to poetry.
Well I havnt been able to find a place which describes in detail how to “lucid live”. It’s summer and I am wanting to try it out because I think it would help. Could someone give me a link which explains the steps to take to lucid live?
I don’t think you need any steps or directions to follow. All I can say is, be aware of you surroundings. You don’t have to know what is going on everywhere all the time, but just be aware of your direct surroundings. Ex. If you are watching a hockey game, you don’t have to keep looking out of the window to be aware of what is going on outside, just take in everything that is goin on in the game. When the game is over, and you move somewhere else, take that consciousness and awareness that you had during the game with you to wherever you go. Like Xetrov said back in '05, it’s “a kind of awareness in the ‘back of your head.’”
Here is a tip. From time to time, you question yourself: “What am I doing?” But don’t have indeed to answer mentally this question, it’s just in order to make you more aware of yourself and your environment and create this "kind of awareness in the ‘back of your head’ ", as if you were observing from behind yourself.
I always thought lucid living was spending as much of my awake time as possible thinking about the world around me and performing RC’s. I thought the aim was to live life while doubting the world around you so you will do it in your dreams. Just an obsessed reality checker really. After careful reading I see there is a lot more to it and that I had not really grasped the meaning of LL correctly (although there isn’t a true meaning yet I don’t think…)
Indeed. I think a lot of people just believe it is just a bunch of reality checks. Holding your nose and trying to breathe 10000 times a day is just physical reality checking. But I believe Lucid Living is in your head, not your nose
The dream yogis put it simply: “upon waking in the morning, think to yourself, ‘I am awake in a dream.’ When you enter the kitchen, recognize it as a dream kitchen. Pour dream milk into dream coffee. ‘It’s all a dream,’ you think to yourself, ‘this is a dream.’ Remind yourself of this constantly throughout the day.
The emphasis should actually be on you, the dreamer, more than the objects of your experience. Keep reminding yourself that you are dreaming up your experiences: The anger you feel, the happiness, the fatigue, the anxiety-it is al part of the dream. The oak tree you appreciate, the car you drive, the person to whom you are talking, are all part of the dream. In this way, a new tendency is created in the mind, that of looking at experience as insubstantial, transient, and intimately related to the mind’s projections. Every sensory encounter and mental event becomes a reminder of the dream like nature of experience. Eventually, this understanding will arise in dream and lead to the recognition of the dream state and the development of lucidity.”
-The Tibetan yogas of dream and sleep, p.90-1
A technique which has withstood the test of time. I think that it brilliantly describes the feeling and practice of lucid living. What do you think?
I think that’s a fitting definition, though I’ve found this a hard notion to bear in mind. Sometimes I feel that I really comprehend it, and I say, “Ah, I understand! Everything is created in my mind, so essentially it’s all a dream!” Most of the time, however, I feel that I don’t have a good sense of what that means.
Something that helps me regain a sense of the concept (and is amusing in addition) is to touch myself somewhere, such as my leg, and think about how even though I seem to feel that sensation of touch down on my leg, it’s actually processed in my brain. Without my brain, I wouldn’t perceive that touch. All these physical, visual, and audial sensations I’m experiencing that I regard as external are actually in my brain. That sensation of touch on my leg is in my brain, yet I feel it on my leg, a few feet down from my brain.
See, the problem with that kind of thinking is that it still grounds you to a reality, maybe one not as immediately percievable as the one in which you see this post on your monitor, but nevertheless one in which at least your brain is real and exists somewhat independently from yourself. What you have to ‘realize’ is even that brain with all its complexity is part of that same dream, and that nothing is real but consciousness and that physical reality is but a product of it, not the other way around. It helps to think of it this way because if the basis of your perceptions is physical in nature, it can’t really be a dream, can it?
I think Lucid Living is really not getting enough love here because for me, that is the main purpose of becoming lucid in my dreams: it is a step to becoming lucid in real life. Not to act in your life as you do in a dream, but to realize that life is a dream.
In my on again off again quest for lucid dreams, the switch is now flipped up. I’m back to practicing lucid living/dream yoga of sorts, and I can always do really well when I’m by myself. Then people enter the picture and everything goes to purgatory. I was wondering, for those of you who practice these techniques, how do you keep yourself aware of the dreamlike qualities of waking life when you’re trying to have a serious conversation? This is a key problem for me because my dreams consist of almost nothing but ordinary interactions with people and I feel that if I can overcome this IWL that it will help tremendously with lucidity. Thanks for reading
Try drawing something on your hand, like an open eye. Everytime you see it, even out of the corner of your eye, it will subconsciously remind you about dreaming, even if you don’t consciously think it.
Could you please explain your problem more concretely? Why does it become like purgatory when you meet DC’s? Why do you think that enhancing the awareness of dreamlike qualities of RL serious conversations could modify something? There is something in your post I don’t understand at all.
interacting with people in real life is pretty dreamlike to me.
realize that you are controlling their reactions to you based upon how you choose to communicate with them (which is hopefully completely and totally honest).
in this way, they cannot exist without you there to perceive them (although they will any way) and the conversation cannot take place without you bearing witness.
I believe she means “everything goes pear shaped” when she says purgatory, as in it all goes to hell, her concentration is broken.
The basis of Dream Yoga is to spend your entire waking life ‘realising’ that everything around you is a dream, or rather, you have to perceive it to be a dream 24/7. The goal being that you will be dreaming one day and just spontaneously become lucid because you know everything around you is a dream. Sort of like how we currently walk around thinking we’re awake all the time, so we do the same in dreams. She’s saying that since conversations occur frequently in her dreams, if she could make conversations become more dreamlike in her waking life, she could get lucid much more often in her dreams.
I see what you’'re saying! Of course it is natural to want to treat other people like they’re other people in real life. It would be rather self centered to be talking to people while thinking they’re not real. This habit would transfer to the dream world, so maybe you’ll just have to stop paying attention to your friends and responding to them as if they were real people =P
