The Most Popular Lucid Dreaming Technique
The most popular technique for lucid dreaming, which also happens to be one of the few that are scientifically proven, is Stephen Laberges MILD Technique.
Unfortunately this is also a technique that tends to often get misrepresented on the internet. So I’ll first begin by saying what the MILD technique is not.
The Mild Technique is not an autosuggestion technique. It is not something where you repeat affirmations to yourself in order to gain lucidity later on during the dream. I believe this misunderstanding came about due to a misinterpretation of what Stephen Laberge wrote in his now famous book, and as things often do on the internet, it spread and continually got diluted as it went from one person to the next in the style of the phone game done over the internet.
So what is the MILD Technique then.
MILD stands for Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming. The word Mnemonic here simply means that this technique is meant to be a device in which we use in order to remember something at a later date. Namely to recognize that we are dreaming once we are in the dream state.
This uses what is called prospective memory, which is the kind of memory you use when remembering to do something such as picking up eggs when you're at the grocery store, assuming you're not using a list.
It is remembering to do something when you need to do it without having to concentrate on it for the entirety of the time up to that point.
The steps to the MILD Technique are actually quite simple.
The first step is to set your intention to recall your dreams. Setting your intention is a strange concept but also reasonably simple. You just decide you are going to do something and you mean it. In a sense It’s no different than deciding you're going to go for a walk or deciding you're going to do the myriad of things you decide to do throughout the day.
Next you’ll need to wake up during the night and recall your dreams with as much detail as you can manage.
After this you should set your intention again, only this time set your intention to recognize that you are dreaming while you dream. Say to yourself I will recognize I am dreaming the next time that I am dreaming.
Now this, I believe, is where the confusion initially came in for a lot of people they read this part in Stephen Laberges book and believed that repeating this phrase was an important point to this technique, but that is not the case. What is important here is the setting of your intent combined with the part of the technique that follows this.
While continuing to focus on your intention, begin to replay your previous dream in your head. Try to visualize it with as much detail as possible, but don't worry if your not able to generate a detailed recreation in your minds eye, many of us, including myself, are not able to do this and even a vague recollection will do, so long as you hold your intention to become lucid and you concentrate on this with an amount of sincerity that shows you truly intend to follow through with this technique.
As you replay this dream in your head, pick out a point in it in which you can become Lucid. Reimagine the dream playing out exactly as it did before only with the alteration of you actually becoming Lucid at this point. Once you’ve imagined yourself becoming lucid, take some time to then imagine what you will do after you have realized that you are dreaming.
After you’ve completed the previous two steps, go back and do them again. If you are capable of repeating these steps until you fall asleep, all the better for your chances of recognizing the dream state, but this is not necessary. Even just doing this technique for a little while during the night can significantly increase your odds of having a lucid dream. I can’t give you an exact minimum amount of time to do this technique but if you want to get proper results you should basically aim to continue to repeat these steps until you feel you have properly set your intent to become lucid during your dreams, however long or short that may be to you.
Remember to write down your dreams and experiences, whatever they may be, whenever you wake up again in the morning.
And that's pretty much all there is to Stephen Laberges MILD Technique.
