Introduction
Hey! As usual I write a post primarily for myself, because I want to sort out my own thoughts and ideas. But I hope that you'll find it useful too. Be warned it will probably be very long, but also be curious and give the wall of text a chance, because I will attempt to make it valuable. Enjoy!
Why should you listen to my words?
Let's begin by saying that I am not a master of lucid dreaming, far from it.. However, I have been practising for a couple of years now and I have always been very driven by learning about lucid dreaming and what it means to master lucid dreaming. And I have read about the majority of theories and tried the majority of the techniques and my goal has not only been to learn how to induce a lucid dream, but also how to do it consistently.
And I have never felt that I have reached a satisfying conclusion, and if I did found a method that induced lucid dreams regularaly it had alot of side effects. For example I used a method before where I had set multiple alarms to wake me up which would produce lucid dreams close to at will, however it shocked the brain and body to the degree that I was left tired the rest of the day. You can read my old threads and posts if you want more details.
Other problems I bumped into was the fact that the lucid dreams I got where very unstable. Another thing that bothered me was the fact that I did not wanted to be reliant on anything else but myself, so all methods that was based external factors such as using alarm clocks, lucid aids, wake up timing or time of practise and so on did not speak to me. Because when we are reliant on a specific method, the method is using us, we are not using the method. But to answer the question "Why should you listen to my words?" - I have finally found a lucid dreaming approach that is consistent and what allows me to be reliant on just myself.
What is awareness?
This is the first question that we need to have an answer to. Because if we want to attain awareness of our dreams, we actually have to have a definition of what it means to be aware. The general definition of becoming lucid is to "become aware of dreaming while dreaming". And the approach that we use to accomplish that is to practise being aware during the day. But then again we have to ask ourselves "What is awareness?". To make the discussion short I will just tell you my experience of awareness. My view is that most of us intellectually know what awareness and lucidity means but we have actually forgotten what it is like... Let me test you on something that might sound weird at first, but this is a crucial reality check of your own mind and life that is a truth you need to become aware of if you want to understand what it means to be AWARE. Close your eyes right now and focus on your breath for 10 seconds and then come back to this post...
First ask yourself: How did you feel? And then ask yourself: Did you smile?
The reason to why these are relevant questions is because they show your degree of awareness. To be in a state of awareness of what you are experiencing at this moment is to be aware of the NOW.
Most of us are not in the present moment, we are either in the past: which usually means that we focus on something that cause us to feel anxiety or the future: which usually means that we focus on something stressful. Or we are simply having lots of different thoughts that distracts us from seeing reality as it is.
But focusing on the present moment (when we truly are just in the NOW) oddly enough has the effect of generating joy and cause us to not being able to stop smiling like a laughing buddha or a playful kid.
And our mind is focused and instead being distracted in a state of congitive dissonance, our mind is clear and in a state of flow.
So let's re-define awareness to:
The degree of focus you give to the present moment.
This idea can easily be tested by just feeling and observing your state of mind while experiencing reality. Test it while drunk, test it after a stressful day of work, test it after you have been sitting in front of your computer or when you have read a book to see which kind of activities that promotes consciousness/focus/awareness Vs. unconsciousness/unfocus/unawareness. That's how you truly learn to FEEL what awareness is and what awareness is not. And as a little side note, also note how your level of awareness affects your behaviour and feelings towards others.
Awareness Promoting Activities
In my search for awareness promoting activities I have encountered many ways of generating that state of mind. One is diet, what you eat has a huge impact on your awareness, try to live a day without sugar and you'll see. Although what you'll quickly realize is that it's almost impossible to not eat sugar in modern society because we have society that promotes the general population to become unconscious (Sugar, TV, excess of technology, social media and stimulation). Another is something as weird as sexual energy, which basically means abstain from .. computer stimulation and masturbation. Let's just say that when you learn to convert sexual energy into life energy interesting things happen, it's energy that is capable of creating life after all. I can't speak on how this is done for women, simply because I do not have experience of that, but if you are a woman reading this search the wide web and there are probably someone who describes it. For me as a man though I feel an increase in desire for real life women, interacting with people in general and to express myself and fully give myself to the world, but these are just bonuses apart from the increase of awareness and energy.
There are many ways to strenghten your awareness but when I saw that every book on self-development and growth recommends meditation, I realized that there was something of extra value with that activity even though it sounds weird and spiritual at first. You can find my meditation guide in my signature and you can try and observe how your own awareness transform over time. In my personal experience, nothing generates a higher degree of awareness than meditation. Then again I haven't tried drugs, but that would be an external solution based on reliance so it's something that I don't even look into.
Being & Doing - The Unconscious & Conscious Self
From my understanding of the brain that I have attained from books I have learned that the most beneficial way to view yourself is not as ONE, but as TWO. In a modern perspective we can say that the most effective way to travel from point A to point B would be to have a really fast and well functioning car and then be a very skilled driver and reach our destination in no time. However, as Plato and Freud and many other great men understood, our brain is not as rigid as a car, our brain constantly change and is neuro-plastic. So a better analogy would be that of a rider and a horse. Our unconscious mind is the horse and our conscious mind is the rider.
So what we should do is to take care of our horse by taming it, in our case that is by doing awareness promoting activities (especially meditation) and then also be a skilled rider. Although when the horse is tamed the rider barely have to do anything because the horse/ unconscious mind is already on our side. And we just sit back and observe and enjoy the ride and the journey.
Lucid dreaming & Meditation
Now you know how to prime your mind to BE awareness and that is in most cases all that is needed to start experiencing higher degrees of awareness in your dreams, because you don't attract what you want, you attract what you ARE. But to help the horse/mind and give it some directions doesn't hurt.
So let's look at how to do that now.
I have experimented with meditation as my new way of sleeping, because I try to decrease everything that has to do with unconsciousness, even sleep. And I have had a few loose ideas in my mind, but some days ago I decided to see if there were any books on meditation's relation to lucid dreaming. And I found one for 1 dollar, which contained ideas that I myself could verify and some fresh new ones that I could try out.
I will cite these here now. But show your support and buy the book from this incredibly helpful oneironaut. It is called "Meditation for Lucid Dreaming" by Jamie Alexander.
First of all recall your dreams, even if your memory will improve and your awareness does this automatically for you. To write it down is a good way of logging your progress. But remember that every experience you have is stored within your unconscious mind, so it will be accessable for you when you truly master unconscious exploration. But recall your dreams, it's fun!
Develop the habit of meditating as your new way of sleeping, what this does is that the last thing on your mind before falling asleep (if you fall asleep) is to be focused and aware. So a likely result of this is that you'll just wake up in a dream and you'll suddenly find your conscious mind switching on within a dream for no reason, there's not even the need to reality check. You are just aware from the get go!
Realize that the dream world and transition to the dream world has NOTHING to do with your physical body. From now just focus on one thing: What is going on inside your mind?
Be prepared that your increase of awareness will result in you becoming aware of both your dreams but also your micro-awakenings during the night. (Without an alarm clock) Which is a perfect time to do any of all the different dream chaining methods you've read about.
There are more specific details in the book about particular ways to focus before going to sleep to actually transition right from awakening to the dream, but that would be too much to add to this already very long post.
But to summarise how to both BE and DO Awareness:
Meditation
How to both DILD/MILD/WILD/WBTB/DEILD/ NATURALLY. - Be in the now, daily and nightly :meditate:
I hope you enjoyed this guide. And that it will help you in your journey towards more awareness in your life.
Feel free to discuss and ask questions.
Peace! ;)
The Cantenna (not the Pringle’s kind; see left) was a famous dummy load design when Heathkit was in business. It was a single carbon rod immersed in a paint can full transformer oil (which we now know was full of 
Building things in those days was a lot more artistic than most projects are today. Look at that crystal radio layout above, the picture of [SkyKing’s] radio above that, or you can see a few [Morgan] builds in [kc9kep’s] video, below. You constructed projects on wood or a steel chassis. You did wiring by hand. You could not get amplifiers, product detectors, and mixers as functional blocks in an IC containing 100s of transistors. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to romanticize the era. I like building complex things out of ICs on PCBs and making things that would have amazed [Morgan] and his contemporaries. Imagine meeting Morgan in 1950 and telling him that your latest project had thousands of transistors (most of them, of course, bundled in an Arduino; even an old RCA 1802 had 5,000 transistors inside).
