The Deep Mind, Meditation, Self-Awareness, & Reality Checks

Eyes Wide Shut

At the beginning of the "The Matrix" Morpheus presents Neo with a choice.

The first option is to take the blue pill, allowing everything that Neo has built his life upon, his friends, his career, and his interests to all stay in tact — carrying on as before.

The second option is to take the red pill, which awakens Neo to the "truth," that reality is a construct of the mind, with his thoughts and beliefs the only building blocks.

What's the link? Taking the red pill is essential for successful lucid dreaming.

Why? We go about or daily lives paying no attention to what's going on around us, mindlessly accepting whatever reality presents to us "as is."

We "know" that we will not float off into space because of gravity, we "know" that the sky is blue, we "know" that we can't walk through walls, and we "know" that we can't move objects with our mind.

Swallowing the blue pill is so easy, especially when it's expected and everyone else is doing the same. And we carry this lack of awareness over into the dream state, which explains why lucid dreamers are so rare. So, what's the solution?

Question Everything

To lucid dream successfully, you need to question the "truthfulness" of your surroundings, especially during your waking hours.

The most popular method among LD experts is to do what's called a "reality check" — that is, sincerely asking yourself: "Am I dreaming?" and "Is this real?"

A successful dreamtime reality check will effectively "inject" your conscious mind's heightened attention directly into your dream, triggering immediate lucidity.

The difficulty with this technique is in the "genuine" and "truthful" questioning of your real-life experiences.

Can you really retread a lifetime's worth of well-worn neural pathways? Can you unlearn your most entrenched belief systems?

Only a master can truthfully and honestly question whether the table sitting in front of him is real, or whether the ground under his feet is merely a construct of his mind.

Bridging The Waking & Sleeping Mind

What if there was a better way to enter the lucid dream alternate reality, where there are no restrictions, no rules, no fears, no inhibitions, and no doubt? Where you play on the universe's coolest playground, doing literally whatever your mind can think?

There is, it's called meditation! But how and why?

Simply put, a reality check is merely injecting the heightened awareness of the conscious mind into what is normally a purely subconscious and unconscious mind activity (sleep).

From shallow to deep, meditation does the same by forging a precisely engineered bridge between all layers of your mind, effectively bypassing the need for a reality check.

The mindfulness learned through meditation automatically helps your conscious mind realize: "Cool, I'm dreaming right now. Let's have some fun!" Meditation instills heightened mental awareness by day, when then penetrates your dreams by night.

If you wish to still implement the practice, then we have good news. By hitting the reset button on a lifetime of unquestioned data, meditation effectively de-programs the lucid dream blockages from your mind. What's the result? A far more potent and effective reality check.

TIP: Practicing meditation immediately before you go to sleep multiplies your chances of LD success. We recommend a powerful brainwave focused program like EquiSync® to dramatically shorten the meditative learning curve.

How To Achieve Lucid Dream Control

Taming The "Monkey" Mind

The array of ultra bizarre scenes that you see, feel, and experience in the lucid dream state is like watching "The Matrix" on hallucinogens, with fresh landscapes and vivid imagery unfolding with each new thought.

Very cool, right? Here's the catch. When lucid dreaming introduces the so called "monkey" conscious mind to the "fear-free" deep dreaming mind, this unnatural meeting creates a clash.

So, what's the problem? As the prime generator of stray thoughts, the quickly excitable, often anxious conscious mind is the main lucid dreaming saboteur — not only blocking LD induction but also cutting the cord once you are successfully "in."

Then, how do we make the conscious mind behave?

Meditation. As your dream events spin around in total chaos, meditation's higher perspective is the best way to unemotionally witness and neutrally observe the unfolding extravaganza.

The super-focused "mind awake, body asleep" state achieved through meditation ensures that you stay cool and calm before, during, and after a lucid dream.

The In-Control, Highly Disciplined Meditative Mind

By corralling the wandering mind and reducing the frequency of stray thoughts, meditation enables the prerequisite strict mental discipline for successful LD induction. Every time. No problem.

All of meditation's extra horsepower puts you firmly in the driver seat of your mind, giving you total control over your dream experience, allowing you to turn the knobs like a DJ working his turntable.

Like one of those addictive Sim video games, meditation's advanced mind control allows you to specify all dream variables: the who, the what, the when, the where, and the how long.

If your dream experience goes off course, the power of meditation allows you to set a new heading faster than you can press the "Select" button on your childhood Nintendo controller.

Perfecting Dream Recall With Meditation

Hazy Dream Memory

Can you recall the vivid details of last night's dream? No? Can you remember anything at all? Again, no? Well, you are not alone.

Whether a beautiful extra-dimensional adventure or a horrible nightmare, last night's dream memories often vanish from our conscious mind the minute we roll out of bed in the morning.

To combat this common phenomenon, many experts recommend keeping a dream journal, logging your lucid and non-lucid dream details immediately upon waking.

For the aspiring lucid dreamer, studying your journal for trends and recurring patterns very often pays huge dividends.

The Importance Of A Dream Journal

While dream journals are a "must have" for high level LD, the problem is how much strict discipline is required to maximize your results.

Many LD experts advocate setting multiple alarm clocks throughout the night, waking up every 90 minutes or so, recording each dream's details before drifting off to sleep again.

Sound fun? While this method certainly works, most of us do not want to face our nerve-fraying alarm clocks any more than necessary.

What if there was a better way? What if it was possible to maintain conscious awareness of last night's dream, remembering the details with crystal clarity? You can!

Meditation Unlocks The Dream Memory Vault

Serving as a kind of colossal underground mental library, your subconscious / unconscious mind permanently store everything that you have ever seen, felt, and experienced up until this point in your life.

This infinite time capsule also contains the memory of each and every dream detail, both boring and bizarre. From your whole life. (Like the cosmos, the human mind is so vast that we can't begin to comprehend the scale. See: Akashic records.)

Then, what is the best way to access this infinite mental library?

Meditation. By dropping a hi-res 360 degree camera into the deepest trenches of your mind, meditation brings your submerged dream data into the primetime spotlight of your conscious mind.

After all, isn't it pointless to invest so much time and effort into lucid dreaming, only to forget about your experience the minute you roll out of bed in the morning?

With clear, conscious access to your once hazy dream backlog, you become familiar with the ins and outs of your dreaming mind, eventually knowing it like the back of your hand.

After meditation gives you a certain level of subconscious and unconscious mind mastery, your likelihood of becoming lucid with each subsequent nightly REM sleep cycle improves dramatically.

Deciphering Dream Symbolism

Best known as dream symbolism, your reappearing dreamtime places, characters, emotions, and even colors are incredibly valuable and deeply meaningful for all human beings.

Would you like to awaken your powerful yet dormant intuition? How about manifesting abundance in all areas of your life, or aligning with your higher self? Indeed, successfully code-breaking your dream's cryptic symbolism sets in motion many amazing benefits.

When your first cup of coffee no longer blank slates last night's REM shuteye adventure — then tuning into, analyzing, decoding, and interpreting your dream symbolism becomes second nature. All thanks to meditation.

Immerse Yourself In Hypnagogic Imagery

The Border Holds The Key

Just before your nightly 8-hour slumber, in that precious half-awake, half-asleep state, do you ever try to focus your conscious mind on the dreamlike sights, sounds, and sensations?

The truth is, we experience a variety of consciousness levels throughout our 24-hour cycle — with the hypnagogic wakefulness / sleep border perhaps the most critical for the aspiring lucid dreamer.

Beginning with your closed eyelids and finishing deep within your mind's eye, the sometimes scary yet always fascinating hypnagogic state is thought to appear in stages: 1. Blurry purple & green blobs → 2. Ambiguous shapes → 3. Basic geometric patterns → 4. Complex dream-like imagery.

Here, people often report their body size / shape "morphing," seeing weird-colors, visiting "extra-dimensional" landscapes, or hearing ethereal music, odd buzzing noises, and phantom voices.

While most people drift off to dreamland without paying much attention to hypnagogia, becoming familiar and comfortable with this sleep-threshold state can portal you directly into a lucid dream.

Then, what's the secret to mastering this state? Meditation, and the reasoning is simple.

On Demand Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming

Successful meditators see hypnagogic imagery during each and every session — in effect, visualizing full-on dream scenes from a waking state. Sound familiar? Yeah, kind of like a lucid dream.

If you want to become a better swimmer, you go to your local YMCA and swim lap after lap. If you want to become a better lucid dreamer, you go into a state of meditation and practice hypnagogia, session after session.

By becoming 100% comfortable with this natural state of consciousness, meditation bridges the gap between mere hypnagogia observation to full-on wake-induced-lucid-dreaming (WILD).

In this way, the ancient mind-practice is your ticket to on-demand LD.