Book report, Lucid Dreaming and breath control...

T and I are into reading all this self-help stuff lately. T is reading The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

and I'm reading Meditation As Medicine, Activate The Power of Your Natural Healing Force by Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D.

... I thought you guys might be interested in this from that book:

Regarding Stephen LaBerge's research at Stanford University on Lucid Dreaming.

LaBerge finds the best way to learn or facilitate lucid dreaming is to ask himself, Am I Dreaming? while he's dreaming.

"[He] has found the best way to remember to ask this question is to ask the same question while awake, many times each day.
When people do this, he says, they frequently find that they are not dreaming but are not fully awake either - they are sleepwalking through their daily activities, only partly conscious of what they're doing. In this condition, their subconscious mind is often dominant, but not in a healthy way. It's often racing from one thought to another. Very frequently, these thoughts are fearful and anxious, because people, neurologically programmed for survival, are constantly looking for the next threat. Posing the question, Am I Dreaming? however, snaps people out of their anxious daydreams and reawakens them to real life."

Why am I telling you this? Not because I think we need to learn Lucid Dreaming (though I bet SE wishes she could... then she could go back and re-start that dream she was shaken out of last week... hehe). Anywho... it's because I believe most of us "sleep-walk" through our daily lives. How many times have you driven to work and you weren't able to recall the specifics of the drive? We do it every weekday, every week, every year....... over and over.

As part of the exercise that LaBerge prescribes is to try to remember to touch the frame of every door through which he walks as he asks himself, Am I Dreaming?
When not asleep, this door-touching exercise wakes you up to life, by making you conscious of even the most simple acts... like, walking through a door.
Are you sleepwalking through much of your existence? Try LaBerge's exercise, try touching door frames.
You will probably find that it's not that easy.... we are most often going through the motions of our lives, with very little conscious attention to the details. Most of us are struggling (consciously and unconsciously) with worries of the future and of past actions that we cannot change. We rarely notice the only truly real time... the NOW. Touching door frames is just an example and a good way to get started, but you can do it with so many "mundane" things. While brushing your teeth, filling out paperwork at the office... I was doing it while at lunch, (fork to mouth, read, take a sip of tea, fork to mouth.... Am I Dreaming?). You may be surprised at the details you notice that are NOT so mundane after all.

"The ancient yoga masters were also extremely concerned about the common human condition of sleepwalking through life. They devised their own system of overcoming it, a system that has endured for centuries, because it works on so many levels. The system they devised for learning to control the uncontrollable, and to become conscious, was the control of breath.

The control of breath is the foundation of advanced meditation. It is the doorway to consciousness."

And I guess that's a discussion for another day!