No Expectations
It seems like lucid dreams come in cycles for me. Some months it’s every time and on demand, while other months it’s slippery at best and essentially closed for business. I took a nap after an hour-long meditation and decided to induce a lucid dream, but I was still pretty tired from this morning’s long-distance run, so I didn’t fully put all my effort into the intention. I took my headphones off and simply rolled over. I fell asleep almost instantly.
At the tail end of the nap, I became aware in my dream. Or rather, a dream ended and another was starting. In that moment, I felt the familiar sensation of a lucid dream “spinning up.”
An aside: I checked my activity tracker to see when and how long I was asleep. Usually, I can spot changes in dream sequences by looking at restless and awake states breaking up otherwise continuous sleep patterns. I expected to see such a break in this afternoon’s chart, but all I saw was the moment I ended my meditation, put my headphones away, and rolled over. According to the tracker, this episode was just one continuous lucid dream.
Lucid Dream
The brief and impossibly black void dissipated into a first-person view of myself sitting in a simple wooden chair, in my office, in front of a medium-sized mirror on the wall. I don’t have a mirror in my office.
In the reflection was a chubbier version of me, with long, light-brown hair styled into giant bangs in the front and pigtails in the back. In waking life, I walk around at about 12% body fat and am very bald, occasionally sporting a mustache during colder months.
I became aware of all of this right away in the lucid dream. It was hilarious.
Next to me, in an identical wooden chair, sat a woman. I couldn’t quite tell who she was, but I knew her. That’s always such a strange and confusing feeling. She had long, wavy dark hair that gently rested on her shoulders, pale skin, and a face that was kind but solemn. Or maybe more melancholy. She felt safe and in control. She appeared to be waiting for something. It was the kind of patience a parent develops after years of battling toddlerhood, finally realizing they’ve been losing that battle all along and accepting that time heals most things.
I started making silly faces in the mirror with my new feminine look, mostly to try and make her laugh. After a while of getting little to no reaction, it became clear she was pretty ambivalent about what I was doing. Then she humored me by suggesting I pose like a ballerina. I did 🙆🏻.
That wasn’t enough, apparently, because right away I told her, “Look, I’m exploding!”
I proceeded to make myself explode. Obviously, this was a dream and I knew I had that kind of control in it. In the mirror, you could see me go from a dancer’s pose 🙆🏻 to wildly flinging my arms around as my head and upper body exploded in a bloody mess 💥.
I did this court jester routine a few times. She chuckled, but I could tell it didn’t truly amuse her. She was just humoring me.
I ended the shenanigans and sat quietly. She reached behind my head and pulled something out. She extended her hand to show it to me and motioned for me to examine it.
It was a small piece of something that looked fleshy and dark, but it was hard to distinguish exactly what it was. I furrowed my lady-eyebrows and tried to discern its shape.
The lucid dream’s ending sequence began. I spun through the chair I was sitting in and down into the ground. I awoke with many questions.
Parting Thoughts
While pondering the “inconsistency” of inducing lucid dreams and my continual quest for conscious OBEs, I came across a book titled The Illusion of Method by Mark Gurriaran. The gist of the message is simple: you don’t induce anything.
The heart of this idea is that we all have spontaneous lucid dreams, OBEs, NDEs, and similar experiences. If these states are spontaneous, then you’re not truly the one causing them.
You can initiate them, but the rest is up to your subconscious.
The real key is this: trust. Trust your subconscious. Trust yourself. Let it take you where you want to go. To initiate that, you concentrate on the intent and then, as I’ve written about before, forget about it.
Why forget it? Because you must set the intent but have no expectations.
To sum it up in near-impossible simplicity: intent, trust, no expectations.
