Teaching Lucid Dreaming to a 5 year old
I'm David Gasca and this is Mystical Silicon, a weekly newsletter on mindfulness, how to make the world more alive, and a variety of other things I find interesting.
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Today’s post is a quick one. Let’s talk about Lucid Dreaming.
I’m often amazed at what you can teach kids at young ages. All kids are different, of course, but once they’re four years old or so, you can start teaching them more complicated things…
On a hike this weekend I was talking with my five year old son and I told him about controlling his dreams with lucid dreaming. I wasn’t sure if he was really paying attention but to my surprise, my son woke up this morning and shouted “I did it! I had an amazing lucid dream! I used the dream-sign-thing you taught me and I realized I was dreaming and I went to Ninjago world!!”
We proceeded to spend all breakfast talking about dream signs, dreaming and various other techniques for lucidity. It was tons of fun!
Some of you might be lucid dreaming experts but most of you, I imagine, don’t do this. I thought we’d talk a bit about what I taught my son and then I’ll share a few more resources.
Basic lucid dreaming has 3 steps:
LUCID DREAMING 101
(1) Know you can control your dreams
We all dream. We spend a third of our lives sleeping but most people only occasionally remember their dreams, let alone use the dream for any purpose. Generally people I meet dismiss sleep as mostly a waste of time except for its various physiological benefits. But dreams can be so much more!
The first thing I taught my son was that he can control his dreams. There are well established techniques that can allow anyone to do so. These techniques can at minimum let you be aware (aka lucid) in your dreams. At best, they actually form a whole discipline of spiritual and psychological practice. Lucidity is the simplest of practices, and once you learn the techniques you can become an active participant in your dreams; what was once a humdrum experience to be minimized in the pursuit of more waking hours, becomes something to be cultivated.
By following certain techniques that cost nothing more than a bit of your time, you can enliven your dreams. You want to fly? Done! You want to explore countries you’ve never seen? Done. Space? Go for it. Magic? Of course!
So how does one do it?
(2) Look for dream signs
Unless you are in the small minority that is naturally lucid, you almost never recognize that you are dreaming until after the dream is over. You might be in a dream with a dragon in your backyard, in a house that no longer exists, and you’ll think nothing of it; your dreaming-self with think it’s normal! Our dreaming-selves (and non-dreaming-selves) are amazing rationalizers: “of course there is a dragon in the backyard,” we tell ourselves. “It’s Romania! They recently discovered dragons!” And so we’ll continue dreaming without ever being conscious of it. When the morning comes, we’ll likely forget this even happened…
One of the simplest paths I’ve found to have lucid dreams (and the path I taught my son) was to look for dream signs. In dreams things don’t work the way they work in real life. These “dream signs” tell you that you’re dreaming.
There are many dream signs that are idiosyncratic to each person but there are some that are universal. The one I teach people is to look at your hands: in a dream your hands look weird. In real life if you really pay attention, you can see that your hands look a certain way: they have lines, certain scars, certain folds… In dreams, however, if you look at your hands, your hands will look different. For me sometimes they’ve looked like robot hands, other times they are covered in fur… For my son he said they had lines made out of black marker (I guess that’s what a 5-year old brain has more readily available).
Other common dream signs include looking for typos in written text - in dreams this is common. Words will also often jumble and the text will have changed if you look away and look back... Some other things that typically don’t work in dreams are light switches and digital watches. Additionally, if you start keeping a dream journal to improve your dream recall (recommended!), you will find a lot of dream signs that are particular to you. For me a common dream sign is that I’ll float when I’m running - gravity just won’t work properly…
(3) Do “reality checks” throughout the day and once you see the dream sign, you’re dreaming!
The final step once you know dream signs is you need to check during the day to see if you’re dreaming. For example, to find the “weird hands” dream sign, you need to look at your hands many times a day and ask yourself if you’re dreaming. These are called “reality checks.” If you do them often, at some point you will do this in your dreams and you’ll realize, “It’s a dream!” Once this is true, you can do absolutely anything you want. For my son it was going to Ninjago-land but you do you…
RESOURCES TO LEARN MORE
I could talk about Lucid Dreaming for hours but others have done it better and in more detail. If this is interesting to you, I’ll leave you with a few resources:
The movie Waking Life from 2001 is an absolute classic - it talks about dreaming at length and is a great introduction if you want to sit back and absorb.
Reddit is packed with lucid dreaming resources.
If you want a book / person to look into, try Stephen LaBerge (he taught at Stanford and a quick search shows me he has tons of stuff online)
If you’re interested in buddhism and spirituality, I highly recommend looking into Tibetan Dream Yoga. This video will give you an overview and this Rinpoche has books on the subject as well. I’m currently trying a lot of these practices since it extends Lucid Dreaming into levels far beyond anything I’d ever encountered in my life or any book…
And with that, I’ll sign off….
I’m so glad I taught my kids how to lucid dream. Let’s see how this continues!
Happy dreaming!
😴 😴 😴
Hey David, do you think there is a connection between the techniques of stabilising in a lucid dream to grounding and connecting with present moment in waking life?