Interestingly enough, Jenny and Erin have decided to have a contest on their blog for all the tagged bloggers. The contest (as I see it), is basically to see which of us can best answer the following question:

How big of a role do habits play in your daily life? Do your habits typically form intentionally or unconsciously? What approaches have you found successful in shaping them?

So, if I may, I’ll answer the question one part at a time.

How big of a role do habits play in your daily life?

I think this is a loaded question, because habits play a HUGE role in everyone’ lives. Show me a person without habits, and I’ll show you a person who has to read a driving manual each and every day before even getting behind the wheel.

Habits are a necessary outcome to the way our brains function. Without habits, life would be nothing more than a constant mess of signals all competing for our attention. As far as habits in MY life, I strive to develop good habits, as I’m sure we all do deep down.
I have been working on developing the habits that form the basics of Lucid Dreaming. I am not yet where I’d like to be as far as the frequency of my lucid dreams. My ultimate goal is to be able to have a lucid dream each and every time I go to sleep, if I so choose.

My deep belief in the power of building habits out of the basics is why I wrote the posts that are listed as “The Basics of Lucid Dreaming” in the sidebar. If you haven’t yet read those, I recommend it. It will change your life. Promise.

Do your habits typically form intentionally or unconsciously?

Both. Habits are ALWAYS being formed unconsciously. We do, however, have the option of forming habits consciously as well. Great care must be taken in forming habits, that we forming habits that will empower us to live the lives we choose. A great deal about habits has been written on some of the excellent Personal Development Blogs on the original list at Priscilla’s blog.

What approaches have you found successful in shaping them?

There are several. For the past 5 or 6 years, off and on, I have been learning as much as I can teach myself about Neuro-Linguistic Programming. To me, NLP is a promising technology and an awesome tool. I totally fell off the bandwagon for the past couple years. I finally decided to get back into it more more hot and heavy, and am now re-reading “Unlimited Power” by Tony Robbins. As far as specific tools to develop and shape habits, one NLP Pattern I’m particularly fond of is the “Swish Pattern”. This is an awesome tool because it takes a bad habit, and simultaneously replaces it with a more empowering habit. Two Birds, One Stone.

Another tool I’ve come into contact with lately is the NLP Pattern called the “New Behavior Generator”.

If you are open to developing great and empowering habits in record time, I recommend you read the following sites for NLP Information.

NLP 101

NLP University

Well, I guess that about covers it

Having been actively blogging in the Lucid Dreaming niche now since November 25th, I am already seeing something interesting.

Lucid Dreaming, or being aware that you are dreaming WHILE you are dreaming, is a niche which appears to be relatively small at any given point in time, but is in fact much larger than anyone realizes.

Remember that old adage about “the average person only uses about 5% of their brain”? Well, that adage has now been modified by scientists to mean “the average person only uses about 5% of their brain AT ANY GIVEN POINT IN TIME”. I think the “market penetration” of the Lucid Dreaming niche is the same way.
Lucid Dreaming is a niche which appears to be very small, and I think that overall, more people are aware of lucid dreaming than was previously thought, and at any given point in time, only a small portion of these people are actively searching out data on Lucid Dreaming.

So, basically, my prediction is that, through the efforts of people like Erin Pavlina and the folks over at LD4ALL.COM, and hopefully my blog, Lucid Dreaming will explode more into public awareness and become a very valuable tool in many areas such as entertainment and therapy.

As usual, had no trouble falling asleep. Before I know it, I’m walking around in the inside of some huge office building that is rather sterile looking. windowless, whitewalls. At one point, I see a girl I used to have a WAY MAJOR crush on, in junior school. I’ll call her “A”, since I haven’t seen her in years, and I’m not certain she’d want to have her real name published here.

Anyway, “A” is standing outside one of the many offices, and this one seems to be the only one that has any people in it. She is standing at a desk that is outside the office. I walk up to her, and say “Wow, ‘A’! Is that you? I haven’t seen you in years! How have you been?”

“I’ve been fine,” she says, “How have YOU been Bill?” (it’s at this point that I start to get that feeling that something isn’t quite right, because, thought she was always nice to me, she never returned my feelings, and usually talked to me only in passing).

Then I ask her, “Are you married?”

“Yep, expecting 2 kids in a few months.” (More of the uneasy pre-lucid feeling).

I start to ask her another question, then I wake up. Of course, as soon as I woke up, I was thinking, “NO! I want to get back into that dream and see how she’s doing!”.

So, I closed my eyes, and used a technique similiar to that Erin Pavlina uses to continue dreams.

Since I had just woken up, it was fairly easy. I closed my eyes immediately and remembered all I could about right where the dream ended and remembered how I felt. I fell asleep and, while maintaining my consciousness went directly back into the dream. I was lucid this time, and was right back in the same building, in the same hallway. The desk is there. The funny thing, though? The office is now empty, as if nobody had ever been in there, “A” is not there, the desk, which was previously cluttered with papers, is not barren. Nobody at all to be found. Once again, I am alone in a lucid dream. This seems to be a pattern with me. I start walking through the building, but quickly lose lucidity, because I really lost interest, since “A” isn’t there to talk to anymore.

What is my brain trying to tell me?

The main one that sticks out in my mind is experimenting with Shared Lucid Dreaming. I think that if two or more people could get into a mutual lucid experience, it would open up the floodgates of potential for even more ideas. And it just sounds flat out COOL to me.

I am interested to know what sorts of experiments you’d like to try out when the time comes.

Let me know with a  comment.

I’m a huge fan of Darren Rowse’s Group Writing Projects over at ProBlogger, so I’d like to do something similiar here.

The major reason I’d like to do this is that Lucid Dreaming is recognized by a surprisingly small but growing group of people. I think this could be a really interesting opportunity to help expand the awareness of Lucid Dreaming more into the mainstream.

So, without further ado, submit your entry, according to the following guidelines:

1) Your entry should be somehow relating to Lucid Dreaming. Whether it be a lucid dream you’ve had (there are most welcome) or a specific technique you’ve tested to go lucid (and tell how well or poorly it worked).

2) Your entry should be as detailed as possible, without going overboard. Since this is my first time trying out this approach, I’ll be using the Ready, Fire, Aim approach used by Steve Pavlina
so any feedback after this is done will be most welcome.

3) Either email me the entry, with both the Title and Text to LucidBlog (AT) gmail.com, or if you have your own blog simply post your entry on your blog and then tell me about it.

4) Your entry should be in by midnight PST on Friday December 8, 2006. I intend to have all the entries I can fit up on here by Sunday or Monday at the latest, work schedule permitting.

5) If you put an entry on your own blog, I’ll give you the choice of having me run the text here, or simply linking to your blog. This would be an awesome opportunity to build your blog’s link popularity.

That covers it. I’m sure that if I am able to keep this going, I’ll be able to refine the guidelines and process to work better.

That’s it for now.

Dream on!!!

The short answer is “anything”. The long answer is “Whatever you can come up with.” You can do anything you want. In a lucid dream, you are the God of your dreamworld. You are in control, whether or not you’re able to exert conscious control yet. You are still the one making the whole thing up.

Lucid dreams are many things all put together. They can be the ideal practice field for your upcoming game. They can also be an excellent place to explore your spiritual or religious beliefs in depth.

There are also very experienced Lucid Dreamers who also happen to be Master Meditators. Imagine this, they are able to get into a lucid dream state, BEFORE they even start their meditation. Meditation is basically a process of going inward and being in touch with your inner mind. Lucid Dream is the same thing. So, in a lucid dream, you’re ALREADY in a form of deep communion with your inner mind. To meditate from that place gets you even deeper into the meditative state.

One area of research I’d like to get into is the prospect of SHARED Lucid Dreaming. That is, two or more people being able to get into Lucid Dreams together and occupy the same Dream Space. What I see as the promising application of this is the development of a form of mutual non-verbal communication. It’s been long rumored that telapathic communication might be communication with primitive thought-forms rather than complicated linguistic patterns such that spoken language is. So, a person in Moscow and a person in Sydney would be able to communicate just fine in a shared lucid dream, since thought is purely symbolic at the basest levels.

How about you? What would YOU like to do with your budding lucid dreaming skills?