Dreaming the Dream of Hands

Posted on November 17, 2007
Filed Under Awareness, Dreaming |

I used to be a pretty prolific lucid dreamer, but over the years I have let the habit slip, until it has become a fairly rare thing. For me, the reason is due to getting increasingly caught up in the physical world and paying less attention to the dream world. But whenever I begin to pay attention towards my dreaming again - my dream recollection increases within just a few days. And this is great, because dreaming is a very important aspect of our life.

To try and regain my ability of lucid dreaming, I needed to become aware inside of my dreams - to consciously dream. Being aware during dreaming can be a bit tricky, but there are a few techniques which can help. The first is to increase your dream recollection so that your mind gets a good grasp of how it feels to dream.

Anyway that done - I followed a practice I have used quite a few times, which is looking for an object within my dreams. In this case it was my hands. Once you realize you are dreaming, looking for something within your dreams helps bring about a degree of lucidity. The surprising thing for me, was that I became lucid on the first night I had started thinking about it. In the blackness of my sleep I became aware that I was sleeping, and thought; “Hey, ok - so I am asleep, let’s look for my hands!”

The odd thing was that a dream didn’t form around me. Instead my hands appeared in the blackness of my sleep-space. Now when first starting out to lucid dream it isn’t a good idea to focus on one thing for too long as the attention begins to fade and you can loose lucidity. So I started to look around for something else to look at, but as it was all blackness there wasn’t really anything much to see. As I looked up from my hands I noticed many twin dull green orbs, all of which appeared to be looking directly at me. I took them to be eyes, there wasn’t anything particularly pleasant about them either. So pretty quickly I decided to look back at my hands again. I didn’t get a whole lot further than that.

In the end there were two things of note about that experience. One; I gained lucidity on the first night of thinking about doing it. Two; the very odd, and somewhat unpleasant eyes that were watching me.

The dream-world certainly offers up some oddities.