Breasts, And How To Squeeze Lucid Dreams Out Of Them...Or Was It The Other Way Around?

Morning meditation:

I have the attention span of the Memento guy.

OK, it's time to start more 30-day trials. I came up with two in the 3.7-nanosecond-long conscious section of my meditation.

1. 30 mins or more of studying Chinese per day.

I'm planning on going to China sometime in this or my next life, so it's about time to put some discipline into my studying. Lately I've paid more attention to my love handles than to my Chinese skills (and I pay less attention to my love handles than to my fictional great aunt Propecia. Hmm...I should call her).

2. Start trying to lucid dream again.

Lucid dreaming is a synonym for "stop wasting a third of your life on nonsense, just so you can write it down in the morning for a 30-day writing-down-dreams-in-the-morning trial." It was adopted at the Belgium-based Winslow-Gordon Convention in 1865, when people realized that they have had it up to here(Northern New Jersey, upwards of my head) with saying that long quote twenty times a day.

Normally, you have no control over your dreams. You can lie there right before falling asleep and chant the latest Miss World's name till you're blue in the face, but will she grace your dream with her scantily clad presence? Very doubtful, because she's too busy serving (servicing?) lucid dreamers. Instead, you get assigned the dream where you're filling out your taxes, you're late, all you have left to do is sign, but your pen's stuck up in some tree for some reason and a village of armadillo gophers is willing to lay down their lives making sure you don't get it in time.

Dreaming for the average man (women don't have dreams, it's something to do with their breasts) is like watching an in-flight movie. You have no choice in the content, and chances are the pilot likes The Lizzie McGuire Movie. Or sometimes you don't even get one you haven't seen yet, you get a "recurring" one. What movie did you watch ten times already? Beethoven's 4th? What a coincidence! That's what we're playing today!

Lucid dreamers don't put up with this. They're elite, they're first class passengers, they're "the foot" as the French would say. They take out a couple minutes every day to ensure they don't get trapped in squirrel paradise like the average dreamer. What they do is they do "reality checks." Every ten or fifteen minutes, an aspiring lucid dreamer will examine the world for a second to make sure he's truly awake. For example, look at your hands right now. ...Uhh, I meant look at your hands after the next sentence. If they start swimming in your field of vision/changing shape size or color/vary in their finger content/(insert whatever your particular set doesn't normally do), then you know you're dreaming. In that case, you snap into the reality of the dream, which is much more vivid that ordinary dream-watching, and find yourself in a world where you have almost limitless control over the content. This is what a lucid dream is. You own the dream, you're the master. You can do whatever you want. You can fly around circles, fly around in squares, fly around in triangles...yea, my imagination ends here, but fortunately you're only limited by yours.

Of course, there's a price. In exchange for additional hours of consciousness, during the day you look like an idiot - whipping out your hands every ten minutes, then explaining to the police why you suddenly punched that pregnant woman with both fists. My advice is to take it slowly. Don't rip your pockets off, just calmly withdraw your hands: "calm calm calm...OK, let's see what we have here. Hmm, only one hand, I'm dreaming!...oh, never mind, I lost that one in Nam, nope...not dreaming, OK, see you in ten minutes, hand, done." Do that as often as you can, and you're on your way to lucid dreaming.

In case you're tempted to try it, there are other techniques that can help you achieve a lucid dream, preferably done in combination with "reality checks:"

1. Surpreme confidence - you know you're going to have a lucid dream. "If that idiot blogger can do it, I can do it."
2. Affirmations - unlike Miss World, lucid dreams will materialize if you think about them constantly. Before you go to sleep, turn on a mental mantra - "I will lucid dream tonight, I will lucid dream tonight, I will lucid dream tonight, I will lucid dream tonight," etc.
3. Attach reality checks to everyday things - every time you feel you need to pee, do a reality check. Every time you flip a light switch, do a reality check. Every time you think about breasts, do a reality check. Especially if you do this last one, you're set. Unfortunately, breasts have very little to do with most people's reality.
4. Reading this blog. Twenty to thirty times a day should be enough.

Lastly, performing a "reality check" inside a dream is not the only way to obtain a lucid dream. You can go straight into a lucid dream when you're falling asleep. For that, you need to be a bit of a sniper. You have to lie on your back and wait patiently for that moment when you slip away into dream land. And in that moment, you have a chance to get into the dream, but not lose consciousness. Often, the falling asleep moment will be accompanied by strange bodily sensations, such as heat and full body vibration. These are signs that you're close, but don't get too excited, you'll spook the lucid dream away.

Alright, ready, set, reality checks start...three paragraphs ago! Happy hunting!