Lucid Dream Techniques: Anchors in the Dream Reality

In my late teens and early twenties, I studied lucid dreaming heavily. It seemed like the one vaguely paranormal-seeming experience I could hope to have. There's nothing paranormal about it, of course. It's a natural state of consciousness that many people have had at least once, extensively researched in the 1970s by Stanford's Dr. Stephen Laberge. Lucid dreaming is when you realize that the reason zombies are descending on your high school--where you are apparently still taking classes at age 34--and eating the mean cheerleaders is because you're dreaming. Zombies. What else are they good for, except cues that you're dreaming?

Lucid dreaming happens naturally to me now, and I think that if I intetionally practiced the way I used to, I could go from "happening naturally every few weeks" to lucid dreaming at will. I'm considering this. The joys of lucid dreaming are many, from adolescent pursuits like flying and wild sex, to more evolved aspects like healing meditations (an incredibly intense experience) and direct, responsive communication with your own subconscious.

A common problem is maintaining lucidity. Realizing that you're dreaming and that everything around you feels just as real as the waking world is a tremendously exciting feeling. It's like God swooped down and said, "Here's 100 billion dollars, complete invulnerability, and the ability to bend the laws of nature to your liking." That excitement is physically and energetically stimulating, kicking you around on the edge of dreaming and awakening.

One way to avoid this is to anchor yourself in your new dream reality the instant you realize you're asleep and dreaming. A classic technique is to look at your hands, though strangely, dream hands often take on weird shapes or consistencies. I get "ghoul hands" a lot, blue-tinged, claw-like, and in bad need of a manicure. It's stopped startling me, and now amuses me.

For people like me who are tactile-oriented (you know who you are--you have to touch the leaves of trees as you walk past because they look like they'll "feel interesting"), these techniques have helped:

--Focusing on the sensation of my feet on the ground. Stomping them is even better as the real-seeming physical impact drives home the new reality. *STOMP* "This is a dream!" *STOMP* "Stomping on this hard floor feels totally real!" *STOMP* "But I'm dreaming!"

--Touching the walls, the floors, anything that is around me. Feels totally real. Get close enough and you can see the scratches and dirt on the desks.
Touching my face and hair, recognizing the feel of my own countenance in this new world. Yep, that's me. I feel that. I recognize that. I'm here, wherever that is.

--Once I'm established in the new reality, I also find it useful to say my name, recite my address and phone number, the names of my family members, etc. I'll also do a few multiplication tables. This not only stimulates the analytical mind--bringing in waking consciousness--but it momentarily deadens emotional excitement that might wake me up. It's hard to get excited about 9x3, and it's a bit of a challenge to remember the answer in a dream state.

The techniques work fabulously, but the difficult part is remembering not to jump right into cool stuff like flying, but to first take a moment to anchor.