If you are aware you are dreaming while you are asleep, you are having lucid dreams. This is also referred to as conscious dreaming. Imagine you are in a dream and realize you are dreaming. When you are in this state, you can do just about anything you want in your dream.

This might sound almost unbelievable, but conscious dreaming is an ability you already have and can learn to harness with some practice. It?s not hard to start lucid dreaming and through this ability you can express yourself and come to full self-actualization. There are even some techniques which have been proven to produce lucid dreams that you can use.

To begin you need to think about what you want to gain. Do you want to have fun and live out your fantasies, or do you want to use lucid dreaming to help solve problems in your life. Maybe you are just curious about what the experience is like. It does not matter what your goal is as long as you keep it in mind and stay confident that you will achieve it.

Once you know why you want to start conscious dreaming, you will then need to become more practiced in the techniques which can produce lucid dreams. Dream recall is the way that most people choose to begin ? this is simply training yourself to remember your dreams.

You need to remember the dreams you have every night in order to start conscious dreaming. Try to remember every detail. A good way to do this is to keep a journal of all your dreams. Keep it beside your bed and record everything you can recall about your dreams. Do this every morning when you wake up. Do not wait until later in the day as you may forget. The longer you are awake the more you forget about your dreams.

This a powerful technique for training yourself in the skill of dream recall. When you are able to recall your dreams, it becomes easier to recognize a dream while it is in progress. In fact, a lot of people find that before long, they will start to ?wake up? in the middle of their dreams, beginning to have lucid dreams.

Hypnosis is another widely used method for lucid dreaming. It is a good way to get into the state of mind you need to begin lucid dreaming. A hypnosis session works quickly to help people to recall the tiniest details in their dreams. This can be done in only a few sessions. Once you have this level of dream recall, you are ready to proceed with conscious dreaming.

You may wake up suddenly when you are having a conscious dream in the beginning. This is not unusual. Go over the events in your dream as you drift back to sleep. If you focus on them hard enough, you will go back into the same dream and perhaps control the events and the outcome of them.

Another technique is to set your alarm for two or three hours earlier than usual then going back to sleep once awoken. It is a lot easier to have lucid dreams in the hours before you usually awake. It may even be unclear to you if these were dreams or you were just thinking as you lay awake. With practice, this technique will lead to conscious dreaming.

Watch your sleeping patterns closely. In this way, you will be able to tell what time is more likely to have this type of dream. Do not deprive yourself of too much sleep, as being extremely tired makes you sleep deeper and lucid dreaming is unlikely to occur in this stage of sleep.

However, you may be glad to find out that lucid dreaming can help to alleviate insomnia and other sleep problems. When you learn how to use the ability of conscious dreaming, you can train your mind to stop the worries which keep you up.

You may think that learning lucid dreaming takes years of practice, but in fact it?s not so hard at all to learn ? with just a little practice, you can be a conscious dreamer too!

All of us can have conscious dreaming experiences; and by using the techniques listed here, you?ll be able to get into the driver?s seat of your dreams quickly.