Lucid Dreaming

One of the more elusive but extremely rewarding ways of boosting your guitar progress is lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is when, while asleep and dreaming, you realise that you're actually in a dream and become able to treat the dream world as such.
There are several levels of lucidity one can attain, at the lowest level the dreamer realises that they're in a dream but still treats the situation as reality, running from scary elements and avoiding danger as if it would hurt them. At the highest level the dreamer has total control over everything in their dream world, they can teleport, fly, dodge bullets and simply dissolve problems and challenges that might have arisen in the dream situation.

You can probably guess how this relates to guitar, it's like using your imagination during the day except that it all feels just as real as reality, you'll be getting extra hours of practice time in a world you have total control over, which means you could be jamming on a beach in Hawaii or composing melodies with Mozart in the 18th century, whatever you can think of, and you'll still be able to feel your fingertips on the guitar as vividly as in real life.

Sounds good right? It is, but lucid dreaming takes a lot of dedication, practice and perseverence, just like guitar, so if you've learnt how to apply yourself to guitar, those same skills of discipline and hard work can be adapted to lucid dreaming. If you haven't learnt how to manage yourself yet, you can use lucid dreaming as an incentive to do so, since the benefits go way beyond guitar, you can solve personal issues, meet people you've wanted to meet, chill in a UFO, it's great fun once you manage to do it.

Here are some tips to get started:

- Get Paul Scheele's Self Hypnosis Paraliminal CD: Dream Play

- Before you go to sleep, decide what you want to dream about and decide to notice that you're dreaming once you're there.

- Keep a dream journal, every day when you wake up write down anything you can remember from your dreams, whether they were lucid or not, if you don't have time to write it down, make sure to think about your dreams throughout the day so you don't forget them, or get a dictaphone.

- Get into the habit of performing reality checks, these have never really worked for me but many people find them to be essential and you have to know some to be able to verify that you're actually dreaming, so that you don't mistake reality for a dream and thoroughly embarass yourself.

- Read a book or watch movies about lucid dreaming before going to sleep, the dreams you have during the night tend to reflect what you were thinking about while awake, if you happen to have a dream about lucid dreaming, you're likely to think about checking if it's a dream or not.

The world of lucid dreaming is incredibly vast and if you're going to tackle this I recommend that you do a good amount of research, it also helps to figure yourself out and keep a clear mind, good luck!

Learn about yourself

It's easy nowadays to find out about other people's practice methods and follow routines people have come up with to obtain results, but with such a wealth of information at our fingertips, how do we know what will work for us? We certainly don't have the luxury of spending large amounts of time trying everything out. The answer is to learn about yourself, because everybody handles things differently, techniques that worked for other people won't necessarily work for you and techniques that didn't work for others might be just what you're looking for.

There is a very useful, practical and scientific method of personality classification called the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (known as MBTI). This system was created during World War II to determine which wartime job a person should have based on their personality, it states that there are 16 different personality types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and some far more common than others. This system is still in widespread use today within the corporate world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator

To determine your type, take this simple online test:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

Once you know your type, take note of your strengths and weaknesses and think about how you can apply these to guitar practice, if you're an extrovert, maybe you should have a teacher or practise with other people, if you're an introvert, it's probably better to practise alone etc.

Meditation

Focus is something that's essential to good guitar practice and playing. By focusing, one can increase the value of any time spent on the instrument, meaning that if you focus, you won't have to practise as much to obtain the same results, this is why some people can do in 4 years what some could never come close to in 30 years.
To be able to practise guitar properly and not be distracted by the thoughts bouncing around your head, you must clear your mind, the way to do this is through meditation.
Meditation is a skill that can be practised on its own but can also be practised with the guitar. The way to do this is to sit down with your guitar and have your fingers do something that doesn't require a lot of thought, like forming a chord or performing a stretch, then meditate.
There are many resources online teaching how to meditate but the number 1 thing I've noticed about meditation is that it's not something you DO, but it's a bunch of things you DON'T do. So when you practice, forget about:

- How good you think you are

- Whether what you're doing is difficult or not

- Whether you should already be able to do this or not

- Everything

This sort of goes hand in hand with the idea of convincing yourself that what you're doing is easy, professed by many great players, except we're taking it a step further and just forgetting about what's easy and what's hard in the first place. Telling yourself something is easy is also telling yourself something else is hard, just forget the whole notion of difficulty.
Also a useful thing to remember is that if you start to think that it's boring, you're not doing it right.