Chasing Lucidity: Two-Year Quest to Control My Dreams

If lucid dreaming can give you a new opportunity or save some time, would you be willing to try it?

Summary:

1. Journey into Lucid Dreaming. Embarked on a 21-day lucid dreaming class with hopes of consciously navigating and controlling dreams, aiming to rehearse real-life situations, confront fears, and experience fantastical abilities.
2. Challenges and Techniques. Despite various techniques like dream journaling, reality checks, and visualization, achieving lucidity remained elusive. Some methods, like waking up in the middle of the night, were dismissed to maintain natural sleep.
3. Finding Value Beyond Lucidity. Derived insights from dream analysis, often with the help of AI chatbots. Acting on dream symbols led to real-life opportunities, emphasizing the wisdom our subconscious offers during sleep.

Have you tried lucid dreaming? I wanted to learn a new personal growth activity, so I picked lucid dreaming from my long list of habits to try. I took a 21-day lucid dream class two years ago, and I was hopeful that I could start lucid dreaming by the end of the class. Two years later, I still have not had a proper lucid dream, but it has opened me to the world of interpreting my dream and figuring out what is unfolding in my subconscious.

Lucid dreaming is realizing you are dreaming while still in the dream. Many people use lucid dreaming to solve math problems, face their emotions, or heal their trauma. I planned to use it to try things I couldn’t do in real life. First, I wanted to rehearse situations I haven’t tried yet, like becoming a mom or living in a different country. Then, I wanted to explore fears like bungee jumping or parachuting, which I’m too afraid to do when awake. And, if possible, I would love to experience abilities like flying, teleportation, or time travel that are impossible in the physical world. I was hoping that lucid dreaming could help me explore my parallel lives.

When I first started learning about lucid dreaming, I kept a dream journal to record any dreams I remembered. At first, my memory was quite fragmented — I could only remember pieces of people or places. Sometimes, I would fail and…