Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming

Stephen LaBerge & Howard Rheingold

Preparation for learning Lucid Dreaming. Exercise cataloging your dreamsigns, page 47

1. Keep a dream journal

Keep a journal in which you record all of your dreams. When you have collected at least a dozen dreams, proceed to the next step.

2. Catalog your dreamsigns 

While continuing to collect dreams, mark the dreamsigns in your dream reports. Underline them, and list them after each dream description.

3. Classify each dreamsign using the dreamsign inventory

Next to each dreamsign on your list, write the name of its category from the dreamsign inventory. For instance, if you dreamed of a person with the head of a cat, this would be a form of dreamsign. 

4. Pick target dreamsign categories

Count how many times each dreamsign category (inner awareness, action, form, or context) occurs and rank them by frequency. Whichever occurs most often will be your target dreamsign category in the next step. If there is a tie between categories, pick the one that appeals to you.

5. Practise looking for dreamsigns while you are awake

Make a habit of examing your daily life for events that fit under your dreamsign category. For instance, if your target category is action, study how you, other people, animals, objects, and machines act and move. Become thoroughly familiar with the way things usually are in waking life. This will prepare you to notice when something unusual happens in a dream.”

Self-Integration: Accepting the Shadow, page 254

“Psychologist Ernest Rossi has proposed that an important function of dreaming is integration: the synthesis of separate psychological structures into a more comprehensive personality. Human beings are complex, multileveled biopsychosocial systems. Our psyches have many different aspects: these different parts may or may not be in harmony. When one part of a personality is in conflict with another part, or denies the existence of other parts, unhappiness or antisocial behavior can result. Achieving wholeness requires reconciling all aspects of one’s personality. Integration, however, needs to be only a matter of repairing malfunctional relationships between the different parts of the personality. It can also be a natural developmental process.”