The first time I could manipulate my dream, when I realised I was dreaming and that this realisation had not woken me up, I was quite happy the next morning. I was unsure that it had actually happened. For all such lucid dreams before that day, I had assumed somewhere in the back of my head that I had been dreaming about controlling my dreams and was not actually doing so.
There was no such thing as Google* then, so such information was not easy to find. In fact, I did not know what to look for to search for such information. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was quite a common thing (I used to think I was like the superman of dreams), that there is aterm for it - Lucid Dreaming, and sure enough, there is a lot of research and investigation done in this field.
Interestingly enough, there were common themes to such research (the wiki page linked above has a good summary of some of that research) and my investigations. I was broadly concerned about three things - How to have only such dreams, how to restart a dream in case you got too involved and it was no longer a dream and more of a day dream and if such dreams could be used to look into the future (yes, I am like this only!).
My way of trying to have only such dreams was to try not to dream dreams in which I was not aware. However, therein lies a contradiction - if you are not aware that you are dreaming, how do you control/reduce such dreams? The other way of approximating this was to ensure that any lucid dreams, once identified, were strongly encouraged. And that is whatpoint two was about. My way of lengthening such dreams was to go back to sleep to try and continue the dream. However, I read very recently about how rubbing hands in a dream would help lengthen such dreams. The side effect of rubbing hands together is that particular areas of the brain which helps such dreams.
A lucid dream is a cool place to be. But it is a delicate balance - one has to be cautious enough not to stop dreaming and aware enough not to forget that one is dreaming. If ever you also are a fellowlucid dreamer, try looking in a mirror or a watch and funny things happen. Another fun thing to do is to try and read a newspaper. This is something I have been doing and have not yet been able to make sense of what I read... I blame it on the intense media messaging which hits us in this day and age.
And by the way, the title of this post, literally means Dream Sailor-ing.
* There I go about Google again. By the way, this blog got a page rank update and am now on the first page for the search phrase Saurabh Kumar. Yay!
