I have been reading about how to become conscious during waking life to be able to become conscious (lucid) during dreams.
One of the things I read was written by Oliver Clerc in an issue of the Lucidity Letter:
[color=brown]"I came to think that to be conscious during a dream, I first had to be conscious during the day. Now, that sounds silly! We’re all conscious during the day, aren’t we? No! Most of us are not. Most of the day, we’re always involved in something, doing this or that, then still something else; we’re just as busy as in our dreams. Never do we stop to think:
‘I am here, now. I’m perfectly conscious that I exist. I hear this noise (whatever it is) now. I see this thing, or these things now. I smell whatever now. I know who I am, where I am, what I’m doing and why, where I live, and all my memory is available to me now.’
We tend to live a great deal in the future and/or in the past. We use our actual perceptions to remind us of what we’ve done, of what we intend to do. Either we do things without being really conscious of doing them, either we’re so focused on our own thoughts that we are no more aware of most of what is around us. I’m afraid this is not very clear but the whole idea came intuitively and synthetically to me, and I find it very hard to put into words. (Still more in English words…)
Anyway, what I did then was to write a big ‘C’ (for conscious) on my left hand to remind me as many times as possible to be conscious during the day. I’d see it every time I’d look at my watch, and many other times too, After one week of this training, I had my first lucid dream, and ever since I never went under an average of one lucid dream per week! After three weeks, I didn’t need the ‘C’ on my hand anymore, I was spontaneously conscious during most of the day.
Then I added some refinements to the technique: I’d consider the whole world as my own creation, and to help this, I used George Leonard’s idea of using one’s senses, not as a means to establish the limit between you and the outside world, but as means to be in constant contact with this world. I tried (and managed to) to feel the outside world inside me. Still another addition was to remind myself of being conscious every time any emotions, good or bad would manifest itself. In case of bad ones, it had the advantage of making them disappear. This particular addition is especially good for beginners. It raised my number of lucid dreams to three per two weeks."[/color]
(If you want to read the entire article, you can find it here:
spiritwatch.ca/Past%20issues … Dreams.htm)
My question to the forum is, can someone please explain to me a bit better how to become conscious during waking hours? I have tried stopping and thinking that I exist and everything Oliver Clerc wrote but I didn’t feel any different. Am I supposed to? Does reminding yourself to be conscious mean to stop thinking other thoughts, slow down, and pay attention to the “now”? When I try that, why doesn’t it feel any different? If someone has a technique that really works for finding consciousness while awake, please share and tell me if it helped with LD’s. Thanks.
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