A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming by Dylan Tuccillo, Jared Zeizel, Thomas Peisel Read Free Book Online

dreaming.
    So What Is an Intention?
    An intention is a purpose, a goal. A directed thought toward a
    specific action. We set intentions all the time in waking life:
    to eat healthier, become physically fit, work less, play more, learn
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    a new language. When we lack intentions in life (or in dreams),
    we sometimes wander meaninglessly and without direction. We
    become vague and unspecific about what we want. How many of
    us struggle with this problem when it comes to our careers or our
    personal lives? When we’re clear about what it is we want, it’s a
    whole lot easier to go out and get it.
    Don’t worry, we won’t ask you to jot down all your life goals.
    Fortunately, you already know what you want: to become lucid in
    a dream. With this clear desire in mind, let’s look at the most effec-
    tive ways to set an intention.
    The Power of Thought
    Have you ever heard of athletes mentally rehearsing as an
    important part of their practice? Well, it’s possible that this
    isn’t just superstition; science is finding out some pretty interest-
    ing stuff, proving just how influential the mind can be over its
    surroundings.
    A study was done in which skiers were hooked up to an elec-
    tromyograph (EMG), an instrument that measures the activity of
    electrical waves associated with the skeletal muscles. The skiers
    were asked to carry out mental rehearsals of themselves skiing. The
    skiers were then told to visualize themselves performing their runs
    on the slopes in their mind’s eye. What the researchers found was
    that the electrical impulses of the athlete’s muscles were the same
    as the ones they used when they were actually skiing.
    “The brain sent the same instructions to the body whether
    the skiers were simply thinking of a particular movement or
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    actually carrying it out,” writes Lynn McTaggart, in The Intention
    Experiment. “Thought produced the same mental instructions as
    action.” In other words, their brain did not differentiate between a
    thought and a real-life event.
    Guang Yue, an exercise psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic
    Foundation, was also interested in the power of thought. All you
    couch potatoes out there, listen up: He found that simply imagin-
    ing exercise can significantly increase muscle strength. You read
    right! He had a control group go to the gym and work their biceps
    while another group simply imagined doing so. By just think-
    ing about it, the average subject who imagined the workout had
    increased muscle strength by 13.5 percent while the subjects who
    went to the gym increased muscle strength by 30 percent. Throw
    away that gym membership that you never use anyway and stick
    with some focused thought.
    We don’t need scientific experiments to tell us how powerful
    thoughts are. Our lives are run by the intentions swirling around
    in our heads. Even a small goal, such as baking a cake, begins with
    a specific intention in mind. You first imagine what ingredients
    you’ll use, the different steps along the way, and how delicious the
    cake will be when it’s done.
    Larger goals, such as starting a business, need more passion
    and specificity, but the process still begins with an intention, a
    burning desire to get what you want.
    For us lucid dreamers, not only do clear, passionate, and spe-
    cific thoughts prove essential as we explore our dreams, but they
    are often necessary to becoming lucid in the first place.
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    A YOUNG MIND
    We’ve  gotten  to  know  a  lot  of  lucid  dreamers,  and  many  seem  to  share  a similar quality: they are confident and often playful. Many young kids and teenagers are talented dreamers because at their age they don’t recognize their own  limits.  They  haven’t  let  reality  harden  into  its  “concrete”  mold.  We  can learn something from these youngsters: we can focus on creating and imagining instead of doubting our abilities. If we