Lucid Dreaming

I must have mentioned to my friend that lately I'm remembering a lot more of my dreams, because she recently gave me a copy of Charlie Morley's Lucid Dreaming: A Beginner's Guide to Becoming Conscious in Your Dreams.  Appropriately enough (since I think this increase in dream frequency or intensity or maybe just recall is related to my meditation practice) Morley turns out to be a practitioner of  Tibetan dream yoga.  The whole subtext of this pop introduction to lucid dreaming is his buddhist commitment to awakening, and the book often reads like a trailer for his, I guess less popular, Dreams of Awakening, where he apparently goes more deeply into lucid dreaming as a spiritual practice.  The current book is more non-denominational generalized new age spirituality type of stuff.  It's also written in the blandly approachable, appeal-to-the-least-common denominator, style of that genre.  So it assumes any discussion must begin and end with a pithy and inspiring first person anecdote, that your attention wilts after exposure to anything more than a three sentence paragraph, and that you will retain nothing that is not encapsulated in bullet-pointed-checklist-numbered-inset-box form.  

Which is to say that it's more or less a piece of junk as a book.  Or more generously, that it is an appetite whetter for his first book or his classes on the topic.

However, I did get something useful out of it.  First, there's information about how to try to become lucid in your dreams.  It's a bit vague and general, but it's a starting point.  I can summarize it fairly quickly in the aforementioned style:

1. Start by just trying to remember your dreams.  Write them down. This is especially easy with the ones that happen just before you wake up because, well, you're waking up for the day, but also because the last sleep cycle of the night is apparently dominated by the REM sleep that produces our dreams.
2. Try to naturally become lucid in your dreams by getting in the habit of asking "Am I dreaming?" anytime something weird happens in life.  Hopefully, one of those times you really will be dreaming!  You'll know it because stuff will be weird!  Like you're hand won't look the same on one side versus the other, or when you look carefully at some object for a while it will start to morph.   
3. Try to naturally become lucid in your dreams by just really really wanting to have a lucid dream.  Remind yourself that this is what you really really want before bed and when you wake up in the middle of the night.  In fact, set an alarm for when you'll probably already be dreaming and wake yourself up to remind yourself this.  
4. When none of that shit works, follow the time tested techniques of the various mystical traditions around the world that have been perfecting this for centuries. Try to actually stay conscious as you fall asleep.  Morley offers three versions of this technique.  You can meditate your way to sleep, surfing the edge of fading mindfulness.  You can feel your way to sleep as you continuously scan the sensations of your body (I was not clear how this is different than the first one).  Or you can think your way to sleep by counting the number of times you ask, "Am I dreaming?" as you drift off.

So, there you go.  If you're curious and you just want to try out whether you can induce a lucid dream, you no longer need to read the book; try those steps.  Of course, your mileage may vary.  I was already remembering my dreams more, considered steps 2 and 3 to be too vague to be useful, and skipped to the meditation version of step 4.  I'm sorry to report that I have yet to experience a lucid dream.  I did, however, ruin a perfectly good night's sleep by repeatedly waking myself up as I felt my mindfulness slip away.  It was actually an interesting, though tiring, experience.  I'd liken it to leaning back on two legs of your chair at the dinner table.  There's a wonderfully cool sense of balance just before you panic.