Lucid How-to's

Putting down the tea cup, what I want to know is how many of you have worked with lucid dreams using hypnotic suggestion, either as a hypnotist giving the suggestions or as the person being hypnotized? Or...have you used self-hypnosis to lucid dream?

I have to begun to think (and I may be slow on the uptake here) that maybe to become proficient with lucid dreams, the techniques are all self-hypnosis with maybe the exception being the use of the dream machines...but that seems hypnotic, too, just not so vocal based.

All this comes into my mind from perusing Bill Perry's Lucid Blog. Bill was kind enough to respond to the Sunday Question about lucid dreaming, and I am so glad he did. His experiences are pretty interesting, as is his approach. He uses an anchoring technique and it is as follows:

• As you are lying in bed, simply visualize the dream you would like to have. Experience it as you would like to experience it. Get as far into the visualization as you can. Hear the sounds, see the sights, smell how it smells. As you are getting into this visualization, clench your hands into fists. Not tightly, but relaxed fists. Use it as an anchor.
• Allow your brain to tie the feeling of clenching the hands into fists with he feeling of what your prospective dream feels like.
• Next time you are lucid, clench your dream fists and remember the dream you want to have. Much like running a computer program, your dream will now “load up” for you.
• And, since you are now altering the content of the dream, you don’t have to stick exactly to the “script” you’ve made in your visualization. You can now make things happen by the power of sheer thought.
• Dream on!

This was taken from his blog posting How to Control Your Dreams. Using both self-hypnosis techniques and NLP, is this just another fabulous tool of hypnosis? When I was debating using the home-made sunglasses dream machine to use the lights as an anchor to remind you that you were in a dream and now could take control of it, Bill's technique does this without all the gadgetry. Definitely worth exploring.