About 3 years ago I taught myself how to lucid dream. This was after keeping a dream journal for many years and never having a single lucid dream. It was a subject I was very interested in, but I was never able to succeed.
There are some very awesome insights I have learned about perception and awareness which came directly from lucid dreaming. It is a genuine frontier of exploration that most people take for granted. After these things happened for me, I felt a desire for everyone else to know how to lucid dream as well.
So, the technique. Essentially, I followed the Carlos Castaneda method. I initially associated that book with hippies and so the first time I read it I didn't bother finishing it, but after coming back from Peru I re-read it and the book had a new meaning for me.
Part 1 of this technique is to continuously bring a question into your everyday thinking. This question is: Am I dreaming right now? One element of dreaming is that if you want to bring something from the waking into the dream state, the best method to achieve this is *repetition*.
In the past I had actually succeeded in this first part of the technique. But I was unable to verify that I was dreaming so I never became fully lucid. For example, once I dreamed that a huge ship was floating over a big downtown city, doing dips and tricks and stuff. Out over the water I saw red baron-style biplanes with nazi swastikas on their sides, flying towards the ship. It was all so bizarre that I asked myself, am I dreaming? I looked around at my friends, at the horizon, I touched the grass. It all seemed perfectly real and so I could not "break through".
This is where part 2 comes in, which is the hand technique.
After putting the question into your ordinary sequence of thoughts, inevitably at some point you will have the suspicion that you may be dreaming, and it is at that point that you must look at your hand. You must look directly at it for at least 5 seconds or so. Sustained attention is the key. If you sustain your attention for a few moments, then your hand will change in some bizarre unexpected way, it will not remain stable like your ordinary physical hand. When this occurs, you will have a total realization that you are in fact dreaming. If you can manage to remain in the dream and not immediately wake up, then you are in for something very incredible.
I've used this technique over and over since that first success, it is a solid technique that works. It took me an entire year of efforts to finally have my first lucid dream though. Since then I have done a lot of experiments in the lucid dream state and they have shown me a lot of interesting things about how our consciousness and perception operates.
So I wanted to share this technique with you guys, in case anyone is interested in lucid dreaming but doesn't know if one or another technique is worth trying.