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!