Lucid Dreaming
Lucid dreaming is a concept that not everyone is familiar with. In any given conversation I have throughout the day, someone might ask me what’s new, and I might reply, “I had a great time lucid dreaming last night.” They most likely will have no idea what I’m talking about or, worse, they will jump to the wrong conclusion.
In brief, lucid dreaming means being aware that you are dreaming. A part of your consciousness remains active and is able to observe the dream you are having. Once you can observe your dreams as they are occurring, the next step is to take action in the dreams and alter them at will.
When I teach this technique to my students, I describe this as the tip of the iceberg in beginning to understand self-observation, self-awareness, and introspection. Others might describe it as slipping down the rabbit hole. Questions begin to arise: Who am I? Which conscious or unconscious part of me is actually running this show, both in my dreams and in my daily life?
What Happens in a Lucid Dream?
When you lucid dream, you can change the dream, stop the dream, and make yourself wake up from the dream. You can add people or animals and change the scene of the dream. In this dream state, if you don’t like where the dream is going or how people are acting in it, you can change this too. It’s like being the ultimate director and producer of your own personal movie. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
Monks, yogis, shamans, and almost all types of spiritual wisdom teachers have taught how to lucid dream for as far back as we can trace in these ancient forms. They have used different terminology to describe these dreams, but the results were the same. I’m surprised this technique isn’t taught more by psychologists, as it provides a way to work out one’s problems by trying out multiple scenarios in the dream sequence. It provides the opportunity to see how things play out and how you feel in each different scenario. After all, it’s like daydreaming in your sleep.
Some people experience their first lucid dream accidentally, and it’s a shock to them. They may have a dream in which they are experiencing a stressful situation, such as falling off a tall building or feeling out of control in a scary situation, and in their panic, they scream “Stop!” and put their hands out. To their great surprise, the dream freezes to a halt, as if the dreamer had a remote control in their hands and paused the television from playing. If they are aware that this is a lucid-dream moment, they may then play around, lowering their body safely to the ground, removing an object they don’t like from the dream, or removing a person from the dream sequence.
As I’m describing what this looks and feels like, I realize that for many people, playing video games can be similar to this experience, as the player chooses their character, runs through different scenarios, and removes other players and objects from the game at times.
In the early days of lucid dreaming, most people enjoyed flying, feeling invincible, or being able to control their environment. These things are great fun, but the greater purpose of lucid dreaming is to help you get in touch with what’s going on in your life on a deeper conscious and subconscious level in order to explore new directions that you can take in your life.
The Point of Lucid Dreaming
Lucid dreaming can help you face your fears and can also be a great stress reliever, even helping to soothe hurt feelings from the past. For example, let’s say that yesterday you had a stressful encounter with another person and you didn’t handle it as well as you could have. Perhaps you acted bluntly and rudely and said things that you shouldn’t have said. In your lucid dream, you can recreate this encounter and run through the scenario, practicing how you would handle this type of situation should it happen again in the future. This can help you work through the emotional process and feel more confident about your ability to not fly off the handle the next time you interact with this person or situation.
As you continue to practice lucid dreaming, you can incorporate it with your spiritual connection. For example, let’s say there’s a person to whom you wish you could say things, and for whatever reason you can’t currently say this to them. Maybe this person has passed on to the other side, you have no idea where to find them now, you are estranged from them, or it would not be a good thing to interact with them in person. In your lucid dream, you can create a scenario in which you can speak with this person’s soul/higher self.
You design a location where the two of you meet higher self to higher self, and you say what you have always wanted to say to this person. Then with the intentions of greatest good, you send this message to this person’s higher self, imagining them receiving this information.
Depending on how intuitive this other person is, they may receive the message in a dream. Whether they are aware of the energy sent to them or not, on some energetic level it is received. Like for all practices of this kind, only send out the highest and best good energy, thoughts, and intentions, because what you send out comes back to you in energetic waves three times stronger. This is a more advanced practice in lucid dreaming that will take some time to build up to.
Frequency of Lucid Dreaming
It’s not good to lucid dream too often or to recreate the same dream over and over. There are advanced esoteric wisdom teachings that explain “thought forms”: if we focus on one thing for too long, we can create this image into being in the astral planes, and over time it can manifest onto the earth plane.
In the New Age community, people are taught how to do this by focusing on a wish that they desire to manifest, for example. In lucid dreams, some people get caught up in a fantasy world of their making and create a character that is their “dream person.” Should they continue to focus their energy too often on this character, it can begin to manifest in the astral realm. The astral realm is a specific spiritual plane where thoughts that are given enough energy can become things. Over time and given enough energy, this character can take form, grow, and manifest into something that will not be like what is created in the dream. This is a rare occurrence, but, nonetheless, one should know all the side effects of lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreaming at the very advanced levels is still taught by some practitioners. Dream yoga, for example, is one form of advanced lucid dreaming, taught by some Tibetan Buddhist monks. One chapter cannot begin to cover the extent of lucid dreaming. If it’s something that appeals to you, I recommend seeking a teacher who can explain how this process works in great detail. Most people find the biggest advantage of lucid dreaming to be the ability to wake themselves up from a bad dream and stop the dream from returning so that they can enjoy a restful night’s sleep.
As with all things, balance is the key. It’s not good to lucid dream too often, as the subconscious mind also needs the opportunities to have regular dreams in order to sort out situations that occur on a daily basis.
Benefits of Lucid Dreaming
I’ve often been asked if lucid dreaming wears me out and if I’m exhausted when I awake, as I’ve been busy in my dreams doing all kinds of things.
The answer, in my experience anyway, is that it appears to have no physical effect. I feel the same as I do any other night when I sleep and don’t lucid dream. Sometimes when I awake from lucid dreaming, I actually feel better because I’ve overcome an emotional or mental stumbling block in my dream state and feel excited and positive about what I will be doing that day.
One of the greatest benefits of lucid dreaming is that it helps you understand and work out why a dream is recurring. Have you ever had a recurring dream like the types I described in chapter Three? For many people, these typically aren’t pleasant dreams. They usually focus on something disturbing: a common example is feeling scared in the dream and running away from something or someone. Sometimes you can see or hear the person chasing you; other times, you never see what is chasing you and just feel the fear and the urge to run away. In this type of dream, once you become lucid and realize that it’s just a dream, you can change what’s happening. Facing your fear, you can stop running and turn around and demand that the person or thing chasing you show itself and explain why it is chasing you.
How to Use Lucid Dreams to
Help with Recurring Dreams
I’ve spoken with many people over the years who have used lucid dreaming in their recurring dreams to wonderful results. Here are some examples of their recurring dreams and what changed for them when they could lucid dream and face their fear:
Dream 1: Chased by a Wolf
In my dream, I was running from the awful sounds of a snarling animal who was huge and sounded like a wolf. When I was able to lucid dream, I stopped running, turned around, and demanded that the wolf stop and then tell me what it wanted. At this point, the wolf was stunned into submission. He whimpered and lowered himself to the ground and shrunk into the size of an adorable puppy. I picked up the puppy and cuddled it, and it licked my face.
When I woke up, I looked up the shamanic meaning of a wolf in a dream and found out what the wolf was representing for me in this experience. Now that I understand what the wolf was trying to tell me and why I was feeling threatened, I’ve never had this dream again.
Kala’s Note
In this case, the person owed money to a friend and was worried about not being able to pay the person back in time according to the agreement they had made. In their dream, they faced a wolf, and it changed to a loving puppy. When they researched the meaning of the dream, they realized that the wolf represented their fear of having to tell their friend that they couldn’t pay back the money they owed. This gave the person the courage to call their friend and explain the situation, rather than avoid them like they had been doing.
They had been imagining in their head that their friend would be extremely upset by this news (responding like the wolf), but to their surprise, their friend was instead very warm and supportive (like the puppy) and had no problem extending the deadline and the payment schedule in a manner that the person could easily handle.
Dream 2: Hiding in the Basement
I kept having this recurring dream in which I was in this broken-down old house that was dark and scary. Something was chasing me, and I would run and hide in the basement every time while it searched for me. The next time I had this dream, instead of running to the basement, I asked for the person or thing to show itself to me. Rather than appearing to me, it just dissipated into nothingness, and the house was quiet and still. I then calmly walked to the front door and stepped out of the house. I’ve never had this dream again.
Kala’s Note
This person consulted with me and for further understanding also researched the meaning of dreaming about an old scary house and going into the basement. Dreams about houses give many clues about what the person is feeling about their status and the status of others. The different levels of the house can indicate the progress that the person is making. In this case, the person was suffering from very low self-esteem, and every time a situation would get tense for them, they would have a fight-or-flight reaction, which is what we do at the root chakra level. When this dreamer felt stressed, they ran away and hid from the situation.
Once they understood that there wasn’t a big bad thing coming for them—that instead it was their fear of not being able to handle things that caused this instant retreat—they were able to work on adopting new coping skills to handle conflict and stress. As they worked on gaining self-confidence, they were able to lucid dream and ask the person or thing in the dream to show itself. It dissipated into nothing, showing the person that, indeed, it was just their fear that they were running from. At this point in the lucid dream, they were able to rise from the fight-or-flight root-chakra level and leave the lowest level of the home, the basement. They “rose” to the main floor and were able to calmly and confidently walk out the front door.
Dreams in which you see yourself on a different level of a building are very important to pay attention to. You may dream about your career and see yourself on the fifth floor, when you previously worked on the third floor of the building. In the dream, you may see your coworkers on the third floor but find yourself taking the elevator and getting off on the fifth floor to go to work. This can indicate that a raise or promotion is coming your way soon. If you want to work on manifesting this promotion, you can lucid dream and see yourself getting on the elevator, which opens on the highest floor, and meeting the president or CEO of the company, who is welcoming you to your new position.
Dream 3: Embarrassed in front of Coworkers
Every time I would get to a certain point in my career where I was doing well, I would have a recurring dream that my boss brought me up to the stage during a big company meeting and gave me an award for my work. At first I was excited as I walked up to the stage, but as I got closer, I would see a disapproving look on my boss’s face. As I looked out at my coworkers sitting in the seats, they were shaking their heads, and some began to boo me. Each time I have this dream, I run from the stage feeling embarrassed and looking to hide in another room.
Kala’s Note
When this dream was shared with me, I was fascinated. I wish I had known the person when they were actively having this recurring dream, but when I met them, the dream had already taken place. This person was already a lucid dreamer, so when they would dream about the scenario, they would change the outcome in the dream. However, the dream continued to recur, and it would never be any better. In this case, it turned out to be a prophetic dream. This person’s boss had it out for them and was setting them up for failure. The boss did nominate them to receive an award while knowing ahead of time that a particular project was going to be investigated and found to have caused harm to their customers. The person who had the dream did not know what was going on behind the scenes on this project and was caught off guard when they were blamed and took the fall. Now wiser from this horrible experience, they left this company and moved on to a better situation.
Facing Fears in Lucid Dreams
As you review these dream examples, can you see that the dreams are creating a scenario that helps the person work out a fear or struggle that they are experiencing?
In the third dream, the person at work is struggling with the concern that their work is not good enough or that it won’t be respected by their coworkers or bosses, though they are not sure why they feel this way, since they are receiving an award for the work done. The dream is trying to help the person work through why they feel this way.
If the person could stop the dream when they get on stage, they could change the dream to get some answers. Standing on the stage, they could step up to the mic and ask their coworkers, “What do you think I could do better to help with this project?” They could also ask their boss, “What would you like me to do differently in my role at work?”
If they had asked these questions during a lucid dream, perhaps it would have been revealed to them that this was a prophetic dream. The boss might have said, “I’m going to give you all the credit on this project, no matter what happens.” Or one of the coworkers in the crowd who was booing might have yelled that the project was flawed or broken or might have given some hint to what was going on in this situation.
Lucid dreaming opens the mind to exploring and possibly getting new ideas regarding the perceived problem. I am not a psychologist, but I do assist my clients in dream interpretations and the meanings of certain symbols. At the end of the session, though, I remind them that the best dream interpretations come from the individual who had the dream, as they know all that is going on in their life and why certain people, places, and experiences are showing up in their dreams.
Lucid dreaming is extremely complicated, and it can be easy to go off on a tangent, get caught up in it, and become even more confused. It’s best to get some training if this is a path that you want to pursue.
Remember what I said in the beginning: it’s like falling down the rabbit hole, and you have no idea where you might end up if you open this door. In a dream book, lucid dreaming has to be discussed and defined in some part, but for most people, it’s something that is best done not too often.
It’s interesting and exhilarating to lucid dream, but like all things, moderation is key. It wouldn’t be a good to lucid dream too often, as it could throw off your regular dream cycles and scenarios, which are important to give your conscious, subconscious, and superconscious minds the opportunity to work out things in the manner needed to do so. There is some fascinating research on lucid dreams, but there is still a great deal more to understand.
Falling through the
Rabbit Hole of Lucid Dreaming:
My Eye Color Exploration
Okay, so that heading can sound a bit intimidating when we look at all the quirky places that lucid dreaming can take us. Really, though, for most intents and purposes, lucid dreaming can be a helpful tool when used wisely to overcome a problem that’s troubling you.
I remember many of my lucid dreams and how empowering they feel, especially in the knowledge that I am no longer at the whim of whatever bad dream I might experience. When I first began to understand that I was lucid dreaming, I decided in that state to program my mind and my higher self to remember how to lucid dream again, so that I could call upon this action anytime I felt uncomfortable in a dream. I also set the program so that any time I have an upsetting dream, I can call forth the action to either wake up or go into the lucid dream state so that I can continue to dream but be in better control of how the situation progresses.
Through lucid dreaming, I’ve had some very interesting adventures. Here’s one of the most fascinating lucid dreams that I’ve ever experienced:
In my early thirties when I was studying how to lucid dream, I began to practice with it to see what all was possible. The thing is, no one really knows the extent of what is possible and what the dreams can lead to. This is one of the unknown mysteries and adventures that we are still exploring.
I was trying all kinds of metaphysical adventures and explorations back then, wanting to grab it all like a kid in a candy store. It was a fun and wild time, and part of the fun was that my husband was also into all these teachings as well, so we could explore them together and compare notes after our return journeys from things like astral travel, astral projections, and lucid dreams.
As I grew more confident in my abilities with lucid dreaming, I began to wonder if I could do something in my dreams that would eventually manifest into the physical earth plane. As I mentioned earlier, when doing this type of work, there is some concern about turning thought forms into thought beings, so I decided to stay away from it.
Instead, I wondered if I could change something about myself personally through the power of lucid dreaming. I had been reading Autobiography of a Yogi around that time and was fascinated with what could be achieved through the practice of mindfulness.
I thought about what I could try to do in my dream, and I wanted it to be something that would be noticeable, a change that people could see on my physical body, not just feel energetically around me. I’m a redhead with hazel eyes, which means they have brown and green colors mixed in them. Most people notice that my eyes change color slightly depending upon the color shirt that I’m wearing. Overall, my eyes look more hazel-brown. So I wondered, could I make my eyes look greener?
I began a series of exercises in which I would lucid dream, and each time I would see another me standing with her back to me. I would call my name out loud and as she turned around, I would look at her eyes, looking at me, and they would be a bright, beautiful green. I continued this exercise for six weeks, never telling anyone what I was doing. About a month into this practice, my close friends began to comment to me that my eyes were so green and that they had never noticed it before. My husband remarked on this many times, as did other friends and associates. It was exciting, and each time someone mentioned it, I would go to a mirror to see how green my eyes were looking that day.
After about six weeks, I got sidetracked. It was such a busy time in my life then that after long days, I was so tired at night that I was just grateful to fall into bed and pass out. I had no energy to even think about trying to lucid dream. I know many of you reading this can relate—we all want to explore our spiritual practices and do things like setting aside time to meditate or do yoga or put something new that we’ve learned into daily practice, but as the old saying goes, life is what happens when you’re busy making plans. I was a busy mom and wife and working and doing all the things that go with family life.
About three months later, I finally felt things had calmed down enough that I could go enjoy a dinner out with my girlfriends, so I called them up and arranged a date. It had been so long since we had seen each other, and we were all looking forward to an evening out to catch up on each other’s lives. Sitting down at dinner, someone asked me what was new, and as I started talking, one of the girls interrupted me and said, “Are you wearing contacts?”
Shocked, I said, “No, I’m not wearing contacts. I’ve never worn contacts. I don’t even wear glasses. Why in the world are you asking me if I’m wearing contacts?”
“Your eyes aren’t green anymore. They’re hazel.”
The other girls then were all studying my eyes and saying, “Yeah, your eyes are green. How did they change to hazel-brown?”
Here’s the really interesting thing: I had known these women for several years, and they were now at this dinner, all pretty convinced that my eyes had always been green. They were now confused about why my eyes were hazel-brown with only small flecks of green.
I should explain at this point that in my twenties and early thirties, I rarely discussed my metaphysical training and explorations with friends where I lived. I was living in a Bible Belt area of the United States, where people who were not fundamentalist Christians were bullied and treated poorly. It took me a while before I opened up and shared my psychic abilities with my friends in this area, and this experiment happened before I began to write and teach publicly.
So here I was at this dinner with my girlfriends, who had no idea that I had ever done anything metaphysical in nature. They didn’t know I been reading tarot cards and doing astrology charts since the ages of twelve and thirteen. They didn’t know I saw auras, had prophetic dreams, and did psychic readings over the phone for clients in other parts of the world. They knew me only as a wife, a mother, and a fun girlfriend who liked to spend time with them.
Now they were looking at me very confused, all ready to swear that I’d always had green eyes, and they couldn’t understand why my eyes were hazel-brown now.
I was amused and not quite sure what to say, as I was not ready yet to reveal who I was and the things I did, like lucid dreaming. They were all staring at me now and looking into my eyes, and I realized that it had been several months since I’d done any lucid dreaming.
I guessed the effect of my eyes looking greener only lasted for a short period of time, back when I was focused on this in my dreams, which was the last time they had seen me. I thought about my eyes looking so green back then, and I loved how they looked. I could see this beautiful green color in my mind. I said to my friends, “I know, I love when my eyes are green.” As I said this to them, I was picturing how my eyes look so vibrantly green in my lucid dreams.
My friends gasped and pulled back a bit in their seats, some putting their hands over their mouths in surprise. “Your eyes just flashed bright green for a minute, really bright, and now they are back to hazel-brown. What is going on with you?”
I was fascinated, realizing that when I tapped into the psychic energy and memory of my lucid dream, I somehow manifested this energy in this moment and briefly returned my eyes to green. I didn’t know how in the world to explain this to my friends. I gave them a flimsy excuse that I was experiencing some hormonal changes in my body. What they didn’t buy, however, was how my eyes had just flashed so brilliantly green. I tried to laugh it off and joke about how many drinks they must have had before I arrived tonight and quickly moved on to a different subject.
When I returned home, I shared the story with my husband and asked him if he’d noticed that my eyes were no longer green. He admitted that things had been so hectic with work and everything else that was going on in our lives at the time that he hadn’t gazed into my eyes in a while to even notice. Looking now into my eyes, he agreed that they were hazel-brown with flecks of green. Unlike the girls at dinner, he remembered the color of my eyes always being hazel. He asked me to try and flash my eyes green like I did at dinner with the girls, and I tried but it did not happen. I’m mystified why it happened in front of my friends but not again.
Over the next couple of weeks, I thought about my flashing green eyes, but I didn’t try lucid dreaming again during this time. One night around this time, I decided that my husband and I were long overdue for a romantic date night. I made reservations for us and got dressed up for the evening, including some sexy lingerie that I’d be revealing later that night when we returned home.
After a wonderful dinner and conversation, we were back home and preparing for bed. He was lying on the bed, and I came out of the master bathroom wearing my lingerie and feeling sexy and powerful and womanly. He was smiling at me, and I was feeling great. I posed and started slowly walking toward him with passion in my eyes as I held his gaze.
“Oh my god,” he said, and I thought, Wow, this lingerie is worth every penny I spent. I had no idea his reaction would be this great. He reached out and pulled me over onto the bed. He was gazing into my eyes, and I thought about how I was so in love with this man. My emotions were washing over me, and I was completely caught up in the romance of the evening and the love, passion, and desire that I felt for him.
It was then that I realized he was still just gazing into my eyes and hadn’t made any other moves. In fact, he was not really gazing passionately like I was—he was just staring into my eyes, scanning them like a scientist might.
“What is it?” I asked, sitting up a little bit. “Why are you staring at me like that?”
He was still looking into my eyes, and finally he said, “When you walked into the room and looked at me, your eyes flashed a brilliant green color. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen, except maybe in a sci-fi movie.”
Great, I thought, I’m trying to take one night to be a romantic femme fatale and instead I end up being something out of a sci-fi flick. This was not exactly where I wanted this night to go. My husband, on the other hand, was completely fascinated. Have I mentioned that he was not exactly the romantic type by nature? He was an engineer who loved to research and dissect things, and I’d just become his new subject of interest.
He was sitting across from me on the bed, holding my arms and saying, “Do it again, do it again.”
“I don’t know how,” I replied. “I don’t know how I did it either time, at the restaurant with the girls or here with you. Even worse, I don’t even know I’m doing it when I do it.”
This triggered a lengthy discussion between the two of us, as we were both researchers and scholars of spiritual work as well as practitioners, and we were trying to understand how this effect could occur through lucid dreaming. We went over every inch of my work, starting with the first time I decided to lucid dream about having green eyes. My husband created a chart on the computer to analyze all the data, and we continued going over the details long into the night. It was not quite the romantic night I envisioned, but it was still incredibly sexy in its own way, as we were soul mates, exploring all sides of each other on the mind-body-spirit level.
We finally concluded that when I was feeling very excited in some way, such as when I was with a group of people in a happy conversation or in the throes of passion with my man, it somehow activated the touchstone of this energy that I was building in my lucid dreams and created the effect of my eyes turning brilliant green. We determined that because I was no longer lucid dreaming or working in any way when awake either to attempt to manifest my eyes to look more green, my eyes have returned to their regular color. However, when my emotional energy field in my aura was highly excited, I appeared to be tapping into those spiritual fields and creating in a flash of light the energy memory of the green eyes.
This led to some incredibly fun research in which my husband explored different techniques to arouse my passion in order to see my eyes flash green again. Those stories, though, are definitely meant for a different type of book.
If you’re wondering, I never tried to lucid dream my eyes into turning green again. While it was fascinating, I worried that I didn’t have enough information to know what to do if something stranger began to happen. I wondered, for example, what would happen if I continued and my eyes started flashing like that throughout the day. I also didn’t know the long-term ramifications of doing this or if I would have any control over the effects. After all, I wasn’t able to control the green flashing when I was overcome with an excited or passionate emotion.
In time the flashing calmed and then stopped, as I never put any further conscious energy into making my eyes turn green again. Over the years, however, I have noticed that in some very intense emotional experiences, my eyes will still turn green, beginning with a small, less intense flash. This occurs when I am very happy or excited about something. One of my theories for the power of this particular lucid dreaming exercise is that many times when I have dreams of my most recent past lives, I see myself with green eyes. It feels almost foreign to me in this lifetime to have the hazel-colored eyes that I do.
I think that is part of why it was so easy for me to tune in to changing my eyes during lucid dreaming and why the flashing of green would occur when I was highly emotionally charged.
How to Try Lucid Dreaming for Yourself
Step 1: Consciously State That You Want to Lucid Dream
Before going to sleep, announce to yourself that tonight you want to be consciously aware in your dreams so that you are truly aware when you are dreaming. This conscious statement programs the mind to do your bidding. It’s best to try this for the first time on a night when you are not too tired; otherwise, you will sleep so deeply that it’s hard to rouse yourself out of your sleep cycle.
Step 2: Describe Your Desired Dream
Now that you’ve told your mind that you want to lucid dream tonight, specifically describe what type of dream you want to have and what you want to do in the dream. For example, you might say, “Tonight I want to dream that I’m in a jungle. As I’m walking through the jungle, I will meet an elephant. The elephant will be friendly and offer me a ride. I will ride on this elephant and travel through the jungle.”
Step 3: Plan an Action That Announces Your Awareness
The next command to set in your mind is that you will do something that announces to your unconscious mind that you are aware that you are dreaming and that when you do this act, your subconscious, superconscious, and conscious minds will all become aware that you are aware you are dreaming. One example is to clap your hands every time you realize you are in a dream. Or you might wave your hands, stomp your feet, or whistle or sing a particular song. It doesn’t matter so much what act you do. What matters is that it is always the same act and remains consistent.
Step 4: Observe the Dream
Once you become aware that you are in a dream and you engage in the act that announces that you are aware of the dream and are now lucid dreaming, you will be watching the dream continue around you. It’s like stepping into a TV show, where you are often the star of the show. At first, you may just want to watch the dream unfold, paying closer attention to what’s happening in the dream while programming your mind to remember all the details when you awake.
Step 5: Make a Small Change
When you are comfortable observing as a lucid dreamer, the next step is to change something in the dream. In the elephant-riding dream example, you might change the shirt that you are wearing from green to pink or add a beautiful headdress to the elephant. Start with a small change like this to get comfortable with making changes in your dreams.
Step 6: Stop the Dream
Now that you can make small changes, you can practice stopping the dream, which really is making the conscious decision to freeze the dream. At this point, you can program your mind to wake you up from the dream, or you can choose to stay in the dream and change the outcome. In the elephant dream, you can have the elephant turn around and take you somewhere new, or the elephant could turn into a giant tiger that you are now riding around in the jungle.
Step 7: Test Different Outcomes
As you become more comfortable with lucid dreaming, begin to incorporate real-world scenarios into your dreams. Follow the previous steps; state what the dream will be about, and then go into the dream and try different outcomes to this situation. Some examples are choosing between two careers or deciding how serious you are about the person you are dating. In the lucid dream, create a day at each of the career choices so that you can experience which job feels right to you. Spend a day with the person you are dating and try out different scenarios to see how it feels when you are with them.