Obvious Illusions

Lucid Dreams. A strange concept, but a familiar one. Familiar in that most of us have day dreamed about being some place or doing something that in reality we could not accomplish. I think that is a universal truth among humankind. Lucid dreams however are not about day dreams or fantasies. They are not about dreams that felt real either. Lucid dreams are those rare dreams when you know you are dreaming and when realized you understand that you have control.

I myself have never had a lucid dream or at least none that I can remember. Most of the dreams I have are chaotic and twisted. Events and places I have never known mesh with concepts and people I do know. (Often they are intense and border on scary without actually being scary. However they play out they are almost never calm or peacefull and I never realize that the craziness is breaking the boundaries of reality until I wake up.) I have had friends though that claim to be able to do this and what I have read makes me very interested in it. OVerall it sounds like a lot of work and it sounds potentialy dangerous in a few ways, but think of the possibilities. For someone like me it is akin to winning the lottery.

Anyhow, from what I understand, their are a bunch of techniques to get a person familiar with and access this strange conciousness. I have read that a lot of people try to use drugs to do it and I think that seems counter productive to get doped up first. Most people just seem to arrange specific sleep schedules, keep dream journals, and use habits formed in their real lives to identify the dream situations from reality. So far, again from what I have read, this has not been a bad or harmfull thing to do and infact is being practiced on a scientific level to gain understanding of such things.

Now, how far does this rabbit hole go? Well, I have no idea actually. Most of what I read has to do with lucid dreaming and dream exploring, but I have read accounts of shared dreams, prophecy dreams, astral projection, and other such things. None of these ideas are foreign to me, but a few of them I had believed to be out of the realm of mans ability. Who knows just how honest and accurate these accounts are. Maybe very, maybe not at all. I'll keep reading for a while to find out more, but who knows, I may actually give this a shot.