Lucid dreaming
I’ve always had a vivid imagination, when I was a kid, I used to start daydreaming and make up scenarios and stories and experiment with how I would handle different situations. I love putting myself in chaos. Train crashes, robberies, riots, kidnappings.. being in the middle of horror and asking myself how I would handle it. After creating scenarios and working with my fantasy for some years I learnt how to distinguish imagination from reality. At one point I found myself in the middle of a really bad dream, realized it, and started enjoying. I could control what was happening and use the dream as a playground for my fantasies with unlimited time and possibilities. Kind of like playing a videogame, but so much better, more real and more fun.
Lucid dreaming provides you with a possibility to explore and live and try the things you always wanted to try. The only limit there is is your own imagination and it’s capacity of creating an artificial sensation of something that you have never felt, kind of resulting in the sensation that you think you should expect. My favourite thing to do is stretching my capacities and doing things that I know my brain can’t handle, there is no pain in lucid dreaming, but there is still fear, knowledge of physical laws and natural instinct that holds you back from doing things. The fun thing is to try to work against it. Jump off that cliff, go touch that puma, try climbing that wall. Once I tried to break a glass inside my hand, what happened was that it broke into small glittering particles and kind of dissolved into the air. No pain, no glass, no blood. I didn’t know what it was supposed to look like or feel like, and my brain clearly couldn’t handle it. haha
Another thing that’s great is going to places you have enjoyed and try to recreate the feeling you had when visiting them. After travelling for a while I have collected a few gems that I love visiting when I feel that I need to, what’s really funny is that though I visited the places for long periods of time and spent my days wandering around the streets, it’s often night and the streets are empty when I get there in my dreams to have a look around. Kind of like in the picture above from when we walked around La Paz in Bolivia in 2008.
Lucid dreaming is fun and I recommend it to any bored kid out there with a connection to their inner self. I usually enter by going “nah, this can’t be.. it’s a dream.” What also works is trying to read, looking at numbers or looking at your hands.. look around a lot and look for details in your dreams, they’re usually not all perfect, your brain isn’t good enough to recreate everything in a setting, and when you realise that things are strange, you’re in.
Now, don’t wake up and don’t be afraid, go flying instead – it’s a lot of fun.
