I think this topic deserves its own sticky. Let me explain.
I have been reading LD4all since I was 15. Back then, the internet was just starting to boom (the year 2000) and I was absorbing everything I could about everything. I’d never heard of an LD until I randomly had one. When I searched the subject (this was back before the days of one-million hits for each random search) I found Pasquale’s humble page. Thanks Pasquale! I owe a lot of my early experience with LD’s and spirituality to the information I found on your pages and especially, in this forum.
For many years, I dedicated a portion of my waking time to practicing habits that would induce LDs. Reality checks, dream journals, MILDs, WILDs and all the other currently talked about techniques. Eventually, I stumbled on to one of my favorite books on the topic and one of my favorite spiritual guides, Tenzin Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. I think I found the recommendation on this forum and, likewise, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Buddhism and LDs.
Anyway, I stumbled variously in and out of LDs, never achieving any regularity. By the time I got to college, I let my practice slip and when I graduated, I experienced the longest time since having my first LD, of not having any real clarity in dreams and I definitely did not have an LD for about three years.
I graduated in 2008 and the last three years have been tough on me (I swear this is pertinent and comes full circle.) I traveled until I was broke, moved back in with my parents and struggled like hell to get a job. My ideas about the world were not positive and I was not happy. Of course, happiness is subjective and while my environment was generally positive, I lacked the clarity needed to see where I wanted to go and how I wanted to get there. So I started back with my Buddhist practices, many of them learned from Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Eventually, my daily practice brought the clarity I sought. I regained direction in my life, recovered my ability to provide for a situation that made me happy and presto-wammo! I LDed again (recently) for the first time in years (I posted my experience in the Flying guide thread under the LD adventures forum.)
Meditation brings clarity to those who practice it. To those who practice it regularly, it brings a feeling of confidence in decision-making and a closer connection to the elusive present that all the guru’s tell us we need to be in. I find that my dreams are clearer as a direct result of this practice. They are more vivid, I inhabit a stronger sense of self in the dreamworld and when I awake, the dreams stay fresher in my mind - I can remember without having written them down 5 dreams in the last 2 days.
Without meaning to, I removed my desire to become Lucid (in clarity and in control of my dream) and I became lucid rather by my desire to see the highest well-being for myself. Don’t get me wrong: meditation is a discipline just as the techniques required to attain lucidity discussed on this website. But because the goal of mediation is not dream lucidity so much as lucidity of the present moment, I have managed to overcome that particularly prickly paradox of doing lucidity practice without consciously wanting it so much.
For the record, I have no intention of ever going back to the practice of dream lucidity. There’s just not enough time in the day. Rather, what I’m suggesting is that through a more general use of meditative discipline, one can achieve a similarly parallel practice to lucidity in dreams. I also mention this because in my travels I met one of those rare, gifted people who LD almost every single night, sometimes multiple times in a night. We talked a long time (we met randomly right before sharing a 10-hour bus ride from southern Chile to the northern Patagonia region in Argentina.) Anyway, this guy was a fervent meditator, practicing consistently everyday. From our discussion, I got the sense that he did not directly practice dream lucidity and yet still managed to attain it every single night.
I feel like meditation is not often discussed enough when talking about dream lucidity, and since this website helped guide me, I now offer my guidance to those who seek guidance. Meditation is an incredible discipline that positively benefits the waking reality but now as I’m discovering, has incredible benefits for the dream world as well.
I open up the discussion to those of you who experience LDs almost effortlessly; or for those of you who are practitioners of meditation to discuss your practice and how it effects your perception of the dream reality.