Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life

your state of consciousness by asking yourself whether or not you are dreaming while you are awake. Tholey stressed the importance of asking “the critical question”—“Am I dreaming or not?”—as frequently as possible (at least five to ten times a day) and in every situation that seems dreamlike. That is, at any appearance of a dreamsign, weak or stro

The late Paul Tholey, a German psychologist and world-class oneironaut, developed and tested a variety of techniques for inducing lucid dreams, derived from over a decade of research involving more than 200 subjects. According to Dr. Tholey, the most effective method of learning to achieve lucidity is to develop “a critical-reflective attitude” tow

Possibly, all you will need to do to increase your dream recall is to remind yourself as you are falling asleep that you wish to awaken fully from your dreams and remember them. This works in a similar manner to remembering to awaken at a certain time in the morning. While you are at it, why not tell yourself you will have

interesting, meaningful, and lucid dreams?

During lucid dreams, one can reason clearly, remember the conditions of waking life, and act voluntarily within the dream upon reflection or in accordance with plans decided upon before sleep—all while remaining soundly asleep, vividly experiencing a dream world that can appear astonishingly real.

There are two kinds of sleep. The first is an energy-conserving state known as Quiet Sleep (QS) associated with growth, repair, restoration, a relaxed body, and an idling brain. The second is a very different state known variously as Active Sleep,

When Idries Shah, the preeminent Sufi teacher, was asked to name “a fundamental mistake of man’s,” he replied, “to think that he is alive, when he has merely fallen asleep in life’s waiting room.”[4]