If you search `Lucid Dreaming` on Google, within fifteen seconds Stephen`s name will undoubtedly come up. He’s a major player in the lucid dreaming world, not only as an author but as a scientist and researcher. Because of the work he (and a few others) performed, lucid dreaming was proven real, and not just a trick of the mind. It was a cool experiment – someone would go into REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, get lucid in the dream, and send a signal to their physical body. The signal was a distinct back-and-forth movement of the eyes, so the observer would know the dreamer was lucid. It worked, and the rest is history.
This book is solid. It contains a wealth of information for anyone who wants to learn how to lucid dream, from the basics (writing down your dreams), to the practical, to recognizing dreamsigns (incongruities within the dream that cue you in to the fact that you’re dreaming), as well as some ideas for what to do when you have a lucid dream, and how to maintain it.
The technique offered in this book is called MILD (mnemonic induced lucid dream), which is where you wake up in the night, toward morning, and as you fall back asleep, tell yourself that you will become lucid, envision yourself becoming lucid, and have it be the last thing on your mind before you drift into dreamland. He also talks about inducing a WILD (waking induced lucid dream), where you go straight from waking into dreaming by choosing something to focus your attention on, something that will keep your mind awake while you fall asleep. During this process it`s helpful to frequently ask yourself, “am I dreaming?”.
Like many other lucid dream experts, Stephen suggests using lucid dreaming as a tool for personal growth by confronting fearful and negative dreams – he talks about his experiences with anxiety in dreams, and how the frequency in which he experienced nightmares decreased dramatically once he started working with them. For anyone who often has bad dreams, this is essential information.
But perhaps my favorite part of the book is the last chapter, where he contemplates the philosophical idea of life as a dream. It really gave me some food for thought, and I love this quote, “Solve for X: as ordinary dreaming is to lucid dreaming, so is the ordinary waking state to X”.
Pros:
-The technique in this book really does work
-Accessible to most people – there’s a distinct lack of woo-woo here (it helps that he has a PhD from Stanford)
-Written by a guy who has done a lot to advance our understanding and knowledge of lucid dreaming, and continues to do so
Cons:
-It only focuses on one technique (with variations), which might be problematic if someone has issues with it and wants to try something else.
I experienced my very first (very short) deliberate lucid dream because of this book and the WILD technique mentioned above, so I consider it to be very useful, and essential to anyone wanting to foray into the world of lucid dreaming.