Lucid Dreaming in Real Life

“The more real you get the more unreal the world gets.” — John Lennon.

We’ve often heard people say that this world is just an illusion, a dream of sorts that we are all dreaming up together. John Lennon said it best when he said, “A dream you dream alone is only a dream, a dream you dream together is reality”.

So if this is true, if our life on earth is just a dream of sorts that we are all dreaming up together until we die and travel to the afterlife or to a higher dimension or whatever it is you believe happens after this physical body dies, is it possible to use the concepts of lucid dreaming in our waking life?

Wikipedia defines lucid dreaming as, “any dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming.” It goes on to say, “In a lucid dream the dreamer has greater chances to exert some degree of control over their participation within the dream or be able to manipulate their imaginary experiences in the dream environment.” Just like the events in the dream depend on the dreamer’s awareness of them in order to exist, the entire world depends on our perception of it for its survival.

For example, if you are sitting in a forest looking at the trees you must realize that without you sitting there perceiving the trees, they really don’t exist. Yes they can exist as an idea in your head, for instance if you were home later and thinking back on them, you would be able to recall them in thought, but without your conscious perception of it in the present moment, the tree technically does not tangibly exist.

Quite literally, the world we perceive is completely dependent upon us to exist. Not only that, but for anyone who has been able to lucid dream in their sleep, they can tell you the most wonderful thing about realizing you are only dreaming inside the dream is that you lose all fear. You can actually behave in ways you wouldn’t normally behave in when you believe the dream was real.

As we all know, fear is a huge reason we hold ourselves back from following the life we truly want to live in our waking existence. However, if we start to see that fear is a part of the dream, we are able to take our fears a little less seriously.

There are many ways that seeing ourselves from the perspective that we are a dreamer who has become conscious within our own dream can not only help us to live our life more uninhibited and free, but also help us relinquish the stress and worry that comes from taking our lives too seriously. Here are a few tips to think about to help yourself start to exert more power and control of your personal “dream”:

1) It only has power over you if you believe it has power over you

Since we are creating our dream, who or what will be able to have power over us is completely dependent upon our belief in it in order to play a part in our dream. This is great news because, if everything that scares us or angers us or makes us stressed is depending on our own belief in it to even exist in our lives, all we have to do in order to take back our own control is stop believing in it!

For instance, most people have assigned power to things like the society, money, relationships, etc. These are the things that are able to get people angered, stressed or worried. All of these emotions stem from fear. When you are worried about money, it’s because there’s a part of you that fears that you will not be able to get it when you need it; when you are angry at another person, it stems from the fear that you are weak, that these things or people will be able to exert some sort of control over you and you fear losing control. But these things are in your dream! You can choose whether or not they have power over you in your present moment, and if you are still letting them get you angry they are still exerting control over you.

2) The person you are in your dream isn’t the real you

When we are lucid dreaming, we realize that we are our dream selves, not our real selves, so we take the dream and ourselves way less seriously. We can take this idea to our real life ‘dream’ by realizing that we are not our body. We are literally playing a part right now kind of like an actor in a movie, so have fun with it! Don’t cling so much to your labels, and realize that just like we are not the part we have chosen to play in this ‘movie’ of our lives, neither is anyone else. Which means we can start taking them less seriously too.

3) You can’t force yourself or anyone else to become ‘awake’ in the dream

For those who have experienced lucid dreaming in their sleep they will most likely say that when it first happened to them it happened completely by chance. It was just a gift that they were able to experience, but there was nothing they could do to force themselves ‘awake’ inside the dream.

In our waking life we often hear people saying they are ‘awake’, but I dare to say that it is a term that is used a little too loosely these days. To become awake is to literally raise to a higher state of consciousness or a raised vibration which we cannot force to happen, it happens as a result of a divine intervention of sorts.

With that being said, just like a person who was trying to experience a lucid dream in their sleep, there are things we can practice that will help the process along. Things like meditation, prayer, mindfulness, therapy, and energy work are all things that will help further along the awakening process.

The more we connect with our real selves (our awareness) the more our external reality looks and seems trivial and fake. We may start to hear people complaining about things that we no longer take so seriously, or we become conscious that there are so many people still completely caught up in the illusion of fear and we no longer resonate with them.

An important thing to remember is that all of these realizations happen automatically as our consciousness level rises, it is nothing that we can make happen. And just like we can’t force it upon ourselves we cannot force it upon others, we must trust that they will start to experience the world as an illusion as they get in touch with their real selves as well. Until then we can have fun creating our dream instead of living in another’s nightmare.