Lucid dreaming is the experience of becoming aware that you are dreaming, while you are still having the dream.

How I Discovered Lucid Dreaming

I’ve been fascinated by my dreams for as long as I can remember. As a child I would wake up in the middle of the night and wonder “what was that dream all about?”. I loved my dreams from the get go.

My Love Of Dreaming.

I was an introverted kid growing up in a loving Greek migrant family in a tight and connected community. I hadn’t experienced any significant trauma or negativity in my childhood so I had every reason to feel happy, safe and secure. It was the 70’s in Australia and life was pretty good.

I didn’t have a lot of negative things influencing my dreams and didn’t suffer from nightmares or anything that might put me off my slumber. My night time dreams were generally uplifting and positive experiences and my dream recall was pretty good.

I would often wake up thrilled by the adventure that I was having in my dream and disappointed that I had woken up. It was this disappointment that stimulated my desire to return back to the dream that had just been interrupted.

How can I get back into the dream that I was just having?

My good dream recall and positive outlook meant that my dreaming adventures were pretty regular. My night time dream adventures might be occasionally interrupted by day time events that provided distraction and exhaustion for a young boy, but I would have some sort of dream action and recollection most weeks. This regularity provided a solid classroom for me. My only problem was waking up when I was in the middle of a great dream.

This dream interruption proved to be a real challenge. I only had one solution and it was very simple.

Getting Back To My Dream

I knew that once I woke up, the dream world would retreat very quickly. Dreams that were very realistic and completely immersive, would evaporate right before my open eyes as they looked out over a boring bedroom. So I figured I better stay as close to the sleepy dream as possible. That was my plan.

When I woke up from a good dream I would simply stay as still as possible and keep thinking of the dream I had just left. I would just stay there for as long as possible and hope that I would fall asleep again and be back in the dream. Yep, that was my scientific method. Not bad for a teenager.

It took months of this practice before I finally had some success. I probably would have given up if I could have come up with another plan, but I couldn’t think of any other options. Looking back now I realize it was actually a pretty good plan.

Once I started to have some success getting back into my dreams, I got very excited. My focus on my dreaming world was increasing, along with my dream frequency and recall. My “stay still and hope for the best” method was working. It was definitely a bit of a hit and miss approach, but I was starting to get some results. Sometimes I would find myself back in the dream that I had just left and other times I would find myself in a completely different dream, but it was working and it was a lot of fun.

Fearless Flying In A Lucid Dream.

It was while using this dream re-entry approach that I experienced something strange. As I was attempting to re-enter a dream, I realized that I had succeeded. “I’m back,” I shouted. I was so happy that I started to jump up and down and found myself floating off the ground.

This was my first lucid dream and it was life changing. I knew I was dreaming while I was having the dream and (if that wasn’t enough) I was floating in the air.

The first thing that struck me was a complete lack of fear. This was a dream. It was my dream and nothing could hurt me here.

Along with this fearless confidence came the idea of flying. I was already floating off the ground so why could’t I fly around? I stuck out my arm, Superman style, and tried to move forward. I hit the ground painlessly and bounced back up. I started jumping up intentionally trying to get some flying action happening and found myself getting a bit of altitude.

Look, it wasn’t a great flying lesson, but it was a life changing event. This was the most fun I had ever had. The excitement of the dream-flying bumped me out of my dream. I found myself back in my bed, awake and excited.

My room was dark and quiet and such a contrast from the vivid flying world that I had just experienced. I thought about trying to get back to the dream, but I knew I was just too excited.

I lay there in the silent darkness and tried to understand what I had just experienced. My mother had sometimes talked about her dreams over breakfast, but not very often and definitely nothing like this. This experience was like nothing I had ever heard of before. At some point I fell into a dreamless sleep, probably with a huge smile on my face.

My first thought that morning was about the dream and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The memory of the event was clear, detailed and very sticky. I couldn’t stop thinking about it during the day and my sleep went dark for the following couple of weeks with no dream recall at all.

It was a sensational experience that took weeks to digest.

My Lucid Dreaming Addiction

As the days past, the unreal nature of my lucid dreaming experience began to settle. I didn’t talk to anybody about it because it seemed too weird. Nowhere in my environment was there a person that seemed likely to understand what I was experiencing, so I just kept quiet about it.

What did happen was practice. Nightly practice.

One of the things that I love about dreaming work is that mother nature has given us both the tools and the time we need to practice every night as we lay down to sleep.

There is definitely something addictive about dream work and in my experience lucid dreaming is the most blissful of dream addictions. Over the years I played around with many different dreaming techniques, but lucid dreaming was by far the most engaging.

After my first lucid dreaming experience I began to explore the possibilities of my dream world.

By far the most fun for me in the early days was flying. My ability to take off and fly was a high priority for my lucid dreaming adventures and in fact, it became one of my most trusted reality checks. If I thought I might be dreaming, what better way to make sure than to take off into the air? If I left the ground, then “bingo”, I had confirmation that was dreaming. Game on!

What I Discovered About Lucid Dreaming

It’s been over four decades since my first lucid dreaming experience and in that time my interest and practice has remained keen. I will write a lot more about the nature and practice of dream work and lucid dreaming, but here I would like to clarify exactly what it is.

The general definition of lucid dreaming is simple enough. It’s becoming awake and aware within your dream. Those dreams where you know you are dreaming, while you are having the dream.

But if you were to ask me what lucid dreaming is, I would also add, that it is a tool. A tool that allows you to get natural access to parts of yourself that you are normally unaware of. The normal boundaries and limits that you enforce on yourself during your waking life are not there in your dreams. Even the laws of physics are not there, unless you take them with you.

Bringing awareness into your dreams opens up a world of possibilities. In my experience, it allows you to explore the limits of your imagination and creativity, but it also presents an opportunity to reveal and face elements of yourself that you might be ignoring or avoiding. Our innermost stories, relationships and emotions can be exposed.

In Joseph Campbells famous exploration of mythic structure The Hero’s Journey, the hero must enter the Innermost Cave and face himself in order to grow and move forward. If your dreams have been lost in the dark cave of your skull, perhaps you need to enter and shine the light of your lucidity.