Don’t tell me you didn’t feel it.

After the movie, Inception, you may have experienced the most fantastic element of the movie, a real life experience of inception.

As you watch the top spinning, wondering if it’s about to fall, the screen goes blank and you see the word, “inception.”

After your mind followed the movie characters through that mental labyrinth, you may have experienced a split second question in your own mind, “Am I really awake?”

If you didn’t feel that, you may be a person who has never actually experienced lucid dreaming.

I could list all my credentials, such as my doctoral degree in clinical psychology, my personal research on sleep, or my work with expert hypnotists on the cutting edge of research, but my most convincing argument comes simply from personal experience.

Sixteen years ago, I met someone that planted the idea in my mind.  I had to try it.

Can you develop the ability for lucid dreaming even if you have never experienced it?

You can, so long as you are able to use autosuggestion (a technique developed for influencing your own mind).

Of the two topics of this article, lucid dreaming and autosuggestion, the one that will have the most profound impact on your life is autosuggestion.

Everyone engages in autosuggestion, it’s just that few people engage in it on purpose and with conscious control (just as everyone dreams, but rarely with conscious control).  I’ll get back to that in a moment.

“In a dream we create and perceive simultaneously.” ~ Cobb in Inception

If you only knew how true that statement is for your conscious, waking state, you would probably take a week off work to fine tune your own (currently) automatic creation of the (experience of) reality you live in.

But since I don’t have time to go into that now, let’s talk about how to learn lucid dreaming.

There are very few elements involved, but each element can be fairly complex depending on where you are starting in your ability for autosuggestion.

The elements you need are a brain state that allows dreaming paired with an ability to wake up your conscious, self-observing state of mind during your dreams.

The first element is easy to conjure.

You just go to bed at night or take a nap.  But to make it easier, I have found that the shorter the time period between wakefulness and sleep, the easier it is to enter into a state of lucid dreaming.

You can take advantage of sleep-inertia to accomplish this.

Sleep inertia refers to the tendency of your brain to want to stay asleep or drift back into sleep when it has been sleeping.

If I wake from REM sleep in the middle of the night, I almost always return to the same dream in a lucid state without even meaning to now that I’ve practiced it.

I simply “intend” to be self-aware as I drift back asleep.

Intention is a shortcut that you can develop for autosuggestion once you practice it a lot.

You can also use sleep inertia by setting an alarm that goes off intermittently during the night (not great for your work performance the next day).

The least disruptive way to take advantage of sleep inertia is to take a nap when you are a little sleep deprived, because the brain tends to jump straight to stage 4 sleep and/or REM sleep when you are sleep deprived (plus you can catch up on your sleep- which is healthy for your mind and body).

You just set a revolving alarm for about every 10 minutes during your nap.  A wrist watch alarm is best because it requires minimal movement to turn it off.

Staying in the same physical state helps with what psychologists call “state-dependent memory,” which is the tendency to remember something better when you are in the same mental or physical state you were in when the memory was formed.

Another method you could use is to buy a ZEO personal sleep coach system, that reads your brain waves to tell which stage of sleep you are in.  You could have a buddy watch for REM sleep on the ZEO.  When they see you are in REM sleep, they could wake you up.

What you do is (1) stay still (2) try to remember the dream you were just having (we dream the story-like dreams in REM stage) and (3) try to enter a state of observing your own thoughts and experience as you wait for sleep inertia to drift you back into REM.

So how do you do this self-aware stuff?

The trick is practice while you are awake.  Learn to sit quietly with your eyes closed and simply “observe” your own thoughts as they pass through your consciousness.

Contrary to how most people believe, most of your thoughts are not words.

Most of your thoughts will come in the form of split-second pictures or holographic experiences or symbols representing a very rapid flow of concepts through your mind.

For example, you may notice yourself noticing the sound of a motorcycle driving by on the road nearby your location.  You don’t see it with your eyes, but your mind may automatically create a mental image of your best guess regarding what that motorcycle looks like as it drives by.

This is an automatic thought.

Get used to watching your thoughts instead of controlling them and you will be developing a skill that makes lucid dreaming much easier.

Spend about 10 minutes a day practicing this.  You’ll find your mind wanders “into” your thoughts instead of “observing” your thoughts.

This will happen over and over at first (sometimes within 15 seconds).  Each time you realize you are “in” your thoughts instead of observing them, just come back to the observer mode, as if you were watching your thoughts go by like the leaves floating down a stream.

The other thing you’ll want to practice to make the jump to lucid dreaming is dream recall.  By trying to remember your dreams right after waking up (they fade quickly from memory) you will begin to meld the conscious state with the unconscious dreaming state.

You are “getting used to it” so to speak, meaning you get used to reflecting on the dream state and being aware of it with all of its inconsistencies, paradoxes, and other oddities that can only occur in a dream.

What about autosuggestion?

It’s the ability to directly influence certain elements of our conscious or unconscious experience.

The ability can be gradually developed using methods I describe in the Life Modification introductory course, but let me tell you this: the key is manipulating your belief in your ability to alter your experience.

It’s the same key that unlocks lucid dreaming.

You start with simple things, like trying to get your mouth to salivate simply by vividly imagining yourself biting into a lemon.

You go back and forth between actually biting a lemon and then simply imagining that you are.  The point of going back and forth is that you draw on your memory of the real event to create an increasingly crisp imagination of the event.

Eventually you get so “clear” in your ability to imagine the juice running over your gums and teeth that your body responds to the imagined event by salivating (as if there really is citric acid in your mouth that needs saliva in order to be digested).

When you grow this trust in your ability to influence you body with your imagination, the next step is to begin to influence your mind and emotions.

The most practical and useful application of these techniques for me has been the ability to create mental states that are positive and productive.

At the most powerful form, these methods have been used help drug addicts feel like they are getting a high, without touching a drug (the point is to keep them from going back to the drug when they get a craving).

I wish I had more space to go into the applications of autosuggestion a little more in this article, but if you want to learn more, look into membership at LifeModification.com

-Dr. Todd Snyder