Controlling Your Dreams
Let’s now continue the discussion of controlling your dreams.
As we’ve noted, dream recall is crucial, so please make sure you are keeping a dream journal, making a daily chronicle of what you dreamed the night before. If you do not easily remember dreams, make a goal of being able to soon remember one dream daily, in good detail.
Also, as we’ve discussed, guided audio meditations can really give you a leg up.
A prime tool for controlling your dreams is the ability to recognize your own personal triggers.
Do you dream often of a particular friend? A particular environment? Look for people, places and things that occur regularly in your dreams and cause a pointed emotional response. Whether that emotion is positive or negative, the fact that it elicits a strong response from you is the key. In either case, what you want to do is pay special attention when you encounter the trigger in your waking life.
Let’s look at some examples. Say there is someone who produces romantic feelings in you, and you dream often of this person. When you speak to and are around this person in your waking life, do some mental checks. In the back of your head, think to yourself, “am I awake?”
You need not do it incessantly. No need to become neurotic over this! Rather, gently use it as a meditation, something to focus your awareness.
Now, for a more emotionally challenging example, let’s say that you have to fly often for work, but flying gives you some anxiety. The next time you board the plane, again, do a mental check-in. In moments like these we may want to turn off, but try to practice presence. Breathing deeply and steadily helps in such a situation. In fact, you may find that as you explore the practices for controlling your dreams, your waking life receives benefits.
The calming breaths may help alleviate the anxiety of flying in the last example.
Furthermore (and here’s the real juice of what we’re discussing), you will be much more likely to realize you are dreaming the next time you have that anxiety dream about flying. In doing so, you will eventually find that you can control the dream, and lessen the anxiety.
Both the waking and dreaming experiences of this will play off of one another and form a positive loop.
If you truly cannot think of anything that currently gives you a high emotional state in your dreams, then manufacture some mundane waking-life triggers. As a matter of fact, this is a good practice to get into regardless of whether or not your can identify high emotion people, places, and things that frequently appear in your dreams.
In your dream journal, list five things you do in your daily routine (i.e. brushing your teeth). Resolve that every time you perform these actions, you will do your mental awareness check-in, asking if you are dreaming or awake. You can also vary it, setting different triggers depending on the day of the week. This is a foundational practice to controlling your dreams.
If you want to jump-start your dream awareness with subliminal recordings…
…The Unexplainable Store provides you with cutting edge audio meditation tools.
They carry specific Lucid Dreaming meditations.
Well, that’s it for this article on controlling your dreams.
If you still have questions about what’s really possible with dreams, you may want to check out the article Can You Control Your Dreams?
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