Welcome to the blog

What is this blog all about?
I originally made this blog in 2018, but I lost the webpage so I reposted all my posts here at lucidtogether.com

Here I share my own personal lucid dreams. It's therapeutic for me to write all this down, and I figured I'd share them with others because they're entertaining but mostly because it might inspire others to pursue lucid dreaming and find their spirituality on their own. I share my own personal journey with lucid dreaming, how I got started, how it changed my outlook on life, tips and techniques to do it yourself as well as some reading suggestions, and of course some existential questions about the soul and reality that come about as a result of lucid dreaming (at least for me).

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I first got interested in lucid dreaming in high school. I heard about it mentioned somewhere, and had never come across the term before. Both confused and intrigued, I googled it when I got home and Woah! That's when I fell down the rabbit hole.

I had never been exposed to any kind of talk about genuinely questioning your reality and pondering your consciousness or wondering about the possibility of alternative realities or whether this is all just a dream, aside from in sci-fi movies and books. After many lucid dreamers on the internet shared some pretty radical and crazy opinions, like our reality is probably a type of shared dream we haven't woken up from yet, consciousness is possible outside the human body, having occasional difficulties distinguishing between waking and dreaming, and the idea of a collective consciousness that ties all living things together. Not all these ideas were new to me, but I tied them all together with the quirky spiritual ramblings of hippiefolk. I rolled my eyes at those bits, but instantly became fascinated with the idea of waking up in a dream and realizing you're able to fly and do literally anything you can set your mind to.

So I started to read deeper on the subject and decided to start right away. I landed on the technique of constantly doing reality checks during the day. The point is to make it a habit that will eventually be performed in your sleep, so when you end up doing a check in your dream, the check fails and you realize you're dreaming, thus you wake up in your dreams. My reality check was looking at clocks. I read they don't work in dreams very well, so if you look at a clock and it doesn't make any sense, then it's a dream. So I started gazing at clocks everywhere, studying it at least once an hour, making sure every number was in its right place. It became boring, really, after a while. But I remember the first time I looked at a clock..and it didn't make sense. The numbers had fallen off and the hands weren't in the middle where they belonged. I thought "Hmm, that's strange." and just went on with my dream without questioning any further. I woke up mad because I was so close! I had forgotten why I was studying clocks, so I just dismissed it. I was so close to lucid dreaming, I cursed myself. But that just made me want to try even harder next time.

The next time it happened, I had such a strong sense of deja vu that I felt compelled to pause and remember why, and I did! I remembered it was a reality check, and the clock looked funny, so therefore..I was dreaming. I woke up in my dream for the first time! It was incredible! I finally understood all the fuss! I took a look around. I was in my high school. But it wasn't really my high school. None of it was real! It was such an absurd and illusory experience, but yet it felt so real, as if someone were to tell you you were dreaming right now as you were reading this very sentence.

But unfortunately, it all came to an abrupt end when I woke up in my first nightmare months later. It was so terrifying and had such a profound affect on my psyche that I stopped with my lucid dreaming prospects altogether. I quit all of it that day. It felt so real, raw and horrifying to the bone, and I chose not to talk to anyone about it and do the healthy thing of committing to working through the psychological issues it brought to light for me. Instead, I consciously decided to forget how to lucid dream, and stopped remembering to perform daily reality checks to prevent even the possibility of waking up in another nightmare again. I learned to shut down this entire beautiful and mystical experience full of possibilities and enlightenment..all out of fear.

I stopped visiting lucid dreaming websites, I threw away my dream journal, I even stopped saying and thinking the words "lucid dreaming" to prevent myself from accidentally remembering to perform a reality check. I was completely paralyzed by fear. Even thinking about the nightmare made my heart race. I was being such a chicken shit, but I was a high schooler that experienced her first (and only) ever lucid nightmare that I was unable to wake up from. It felt like I had entered a real-life horror movie, and was a prisoner there. Looking back on it now, I realize I always had the power to wake up, I was just so overwhelmed by fear that I didn't even realize I could or care to even try. I also realize now that nightmares get scarier the more scared you are, like a positive feedback loop. You see a scary monster, you get scared, the monster gets scarier, you get more scared and so on until you breakdown or wake up. I'm much more empowered and well-read on the subject now to fall in that loop again, but I understand why I gave up lucid dreaming altogether because of it. It was hella scary!

Now you might be thinking I must have gotten back into lucid dreaming to be talking this way about it and to be making a whole blog dedicated to lucid dreaming- and you'd be correct! But funny enough, it wasn't intentional. I didn't try again to enter my dreams or even think about the idea of lucid dreaming the night it happened. It just..happened. It's been almost 6 months now, and I still have no idea why that night was different than any other night, or why it led to me having the most intense and longest lucid dream I'd ever had. One which would profoundly change my world view of reality and make me question who or what I am and what my purpose is. I called into question the basis of everything I thought I understood about this world and how it works. I can't stress enough how much this experience has moved me.

****The entire lucid dream experience that night is in the blog post "How did I get here?"****

Over the following few weeks, I'd run into three different people I would describe as "intensely spiritual". The first was an Indian woman I met traveling Thailand with her friends who is a professional tarot card reader. Now the old me would start internally rolling her eyes, but this was the morning after the crazy lucid dream, so anything was possible right then. Even the prospect of genuinely taking her and her wacky beliefs seriously. Which I did.

The second person was a woman from Hong Kong who uses the constellations to read fortunes. Again, no eye rolling. The third person, and the one with whom I had the most contact was a British woman also traveling alone, training to be a tantric yogi.

It was so strange because I never run into these kinds of people, and then all of a sudden when I'm calling into question my whole reality and lifelong beliefs, and in a mess of confusion and loneliness, I'm met with beautiful people who offered me beautiful alternative explanations and immediate understanding. No judgement or give me the raised eyebrow I would have given someone else. It was nice. It's like my life led me to where help was waiting. And I found that once I started to question what I thought I knew, and started believing the impossible, I started experiencing it too. I met people who meditate, hallucinate while sober, exit their bodies and travel the world as a bodiless soul, believe in fate and cosmic purpose. I took it all in with an open heart instead of sarcasm and patronization, and magical things started happening to me. (The old me would definitely only write that last one sarcastically.) I've started to hallucinate while sober and feel the beauty of each moment fully.

I started to see the world only in the present moment, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

I keep mentioning how the old me would react to these situations and beliefs I have now because I need you to know what a complete 180 I've made since then. I feel as if that lucid dream was the catalyst of my spiritual awakening. I feel as if I had the most simple of epiphanies, that Aha! moment where some ideas I'd heard almost all my life finally made sense. Like, yes, I finally understand what you mean. We are all connected! Yes, I am one with everything and everything is one with me! And Yes, life is but a dream.

I'm beginning to understand all the things I used to roll my eyes at. I feel like I was blind before, or maybe too concerned with how the beliefs looked instead of what the beliefs were, if that makes any sense. I now see it from an entirely new and refreshing perspective that comes from a place of understanding and appreciation and love.

Don't get me wrong, I still have a long way to go in my spiritual journey. But I've finally broken through. I've only just started my journey, but at least I started. I'm awakening.

I just want to help others do the same.

To do that, I've realized two things.

We have to live in the present moment and we have to forgo all our fears.

I've realized that I'm terrified to publish this work because of what people (mainly my family and those that know and love the old me) would think of the new me and my newfound wacky ideas.

But in order to live true to me, I have to shed this fear. So this is me jumping right in and shouting “fuck you” to fear. And perhaps it might help others awaken, too.

I hope that whoever you are, wherever you are, if you're reading this right now, you too might start questioning your reality and start living completely without fear, and embrace unconditional love.

And whoever you are, I love you.