Why do some dreamers immediately adopt lucid dreaming, while others struggle to achieve lucidity even once? I recently thought about this question when I interviewed a young Norwegian woman, L. Salvesen, for The Lucid Dream Exchange. He claims to have about 1,500 lucid dreams a year. For most of us who average three or four lucid dreams a month, fifteen hundred per year sounds incredible!
However, she is not the only person. Over the years, I have met several very frequent lucid dreamers, online and in person. Curious about its ability, I started looking for some common characteristics, something to explain this high frequency. I realized that they often assumed that everyone was dreaming lucidly and I was surprised to learn that this was not the case. In some cases, their frequent lucid dreams can be traced back to nagging childhood nightmares in which they learned how to achieve lucidity to deal with nightmare scenarios. In other cases, his frequent lucid dreams seemed related to certain waking habits of mind.
Looking back on my carefree college days studying behavioral psychology and reading Carlos Castaneda, I went from 3 to 8 lucid dreams a month to a maximum of 30 lucid dreams a month at my peak, all of which I described very well as a budding behaviorist. Part of this increase could be attributed to the use of the MILD technique. But decades later, when I started encountering ultra-frequent lucid dreamers, I started to feel a bit deflated, quantitatively speaking. How did they achieve lucidity so often?
Then a mini-epiphany occurred to me.
One day, reading an email from an ultra-frequent lucid dreamer and feeling a tinge of envy mixed with curiosity, I replied, “How? How do you become lucidly aware in almost all dreams?” The lucid dreamer wrote that she had a constant habit of repeatedly asking herself, “What was she doing?” This mental habit carried over into her dream consciousness, so that in the dream she would ask herself exactly this question: “What was she doing?” Searching his mind, he realized that he had been preparing to sleep, therefore, he must be dreaming!
At that moment, a small light went on in my brain. Ultra frequent lucid dreamers develop a lucid mindset.
A lucid mindset means a persistent mental habit of re-examining one’s perceived environment or state of consciousness. Whether it involves memory or vigilance (for example, Am I safe here from nightmares?), These ultra frequent lucid dreamers repeatedly checked or analyzed their current situation.
For some, numerous nightmares apparently reinforced the need to differentiate awakening from dreams and allowed them to be very attuned to signals from the dream state that would elicit lucid awareness. This habitual need to examine their state (waking or dreaming) naturally led them to lucid dreaming, as a positive way to deal with nightmares. Done with consistency over time, a lucid mindset developed, which became an unconscious and routine part of her dream life.
As for the lucid dreamer who constantly questioned herself to recall her last action, we found another kind of lucid mindset. Here, she performs not so much a ‘reality check’ as a memory check that leads to a reality check. Her questioning leads her to further reexamine her current environment or state, and she becomes lucid. Whatever the underlying motivation, certain habitual mental patterns lead these ultra-frequent lucid dreamers to take a closer look at their perceived environment or current state.
So how can you use this knowledge to become a more frequent lucid dreamer? How can you work to develop a clear mindset? Or do you already have a hint of a lucid mindset, which you just haven’t noticed?
The secret is simply this: establish a persistent mental habit that makes you reexamine your surroundings.
For some people, it can be as easy as deciding that every time you walk through a door, you automatically think, “What place is this? Where am I?”
Once you establish this persistent mental habit, it will naturally carry over into your dreams. Suddenly, in your dreams, you will think: “What place is this? Where am I?” – and your conscious examination will ask you to realize: “Hey, this is a dream!”
Then you’ll be on your way to becoming an ultra-frequent lucid dreamer …
