All day awareness refers to keeping yourself alert for the whole day, which makes it more likely you’ll lucid dream. Here’s all you need to know:
Lucid dreamers are often told that at certain points throughout the day, they should do reality checks, and test their reality. These reality checks will help them lucid dream. The REAL goal though, is to be CONSTANTLY testing your reality.
What’s all day awareness?
The main idea is that you should aim to ALWAYS be aware of your senses, your surroundings, and the LOGIC of the world around you. Being constantly aware of whether the world around you feels weird or not. To be always aware of whether you’re dreaming or not, so that lucid dreaming becomes NATURAL.
It’s about time we talked about awareness and what it really means for you in daily life. Awareness refers to your mental state when thinking about and experiencing yourself and your life. You KNOW you’re doing something AS you’re doing it..
So for example, as you reach out your hand to dunk your tea bag in the morning, you KNOW that you’re doing that, it’s your choice and you’re aware of the fact that you’re in a house, in your dressing gown making a cup of tea.
You’re making choices and you’re alert and conscious of that fact.
How to practice ADA (All day awareness)
Here are a few ways to practice all day awareness and use it to have more lucid dreams.
1: Learn how to meditate
Meditation is something I ALWAYS bring up in most of my articles, simply because it has so many uses, and it is so closely linked to an applicable to Lucid Dreaming. It’s something everyone can learn to do, and something everyone SHOULD learn to do.
By meditating, you calm your mind and focusing and being self aware becomes much easier. Imagine that normally, with awareness you’re trying to find something in the dark with a flashlight.. You get brief ‘rays’ of awareness and you’re struggling to really find the object.. It’s just too easy to fall into the darkness and become engulfed in the shadows..
But then when you meditate, you get a sense of clarity.. You don’t need the flashligght, because instead of searching, you’re just ‘turning the light on’ and turning round and saying ‘Oh.. There it is’.
It just makes awareness easier and much more attainable throughout the whole day. I find when I meditate every morning, I almost have my whole day as a reality check, because my mind is just in the right place.
2: The ’10 minute back’ technique
A little technique I like to use sometimes for awareness is the ‘ten minute back’ technique. Every ten minutes, I’ll look back on the LAST ten minutes and sort of recap everything I’ve just done. It’s HARD to keep this up over the whole day, believe me, but if you do manage to perfect it, you’ll experience AWESOME Lucid Dreams.
I’m talking about the ones where you become lucid and you relax cause you feel SO aware and in control that you don’t worry about waking yourself up.. You’re IN. You’re in the world and you’ve got time to play with.
Those types of Lucid Dreams are really something special.. It’s like you’re really in another universe and you can just do exactly what you want.
A good way to try and do the ‘ten minute back’ technique is to set a timer, but over the course of a day, the timer might get annoying, so you’re best to just try and do it in your head first. If that doesn’t work, then you can always go back to doing it hourly, and doing the same thing..
So every hour, look back and remember in detail what you’ve just been doing. After a while of doing this, you’ll get to a point where you’re sort of ‘watching yourself’ do things in reality.. You’re experiencing your thoughts and feelings almost as an outside observer, and because of this, you’re VERY aware of everything.
3: Noticing tiny details (Become Sherlock)
A major part of the ADA technique is being able to notice really small details in the world around you, without TRYING to. The goal is getting to the point where you’re like Sherlock, noticing tiny clues and details without really trying.
The idea is that by training your subconscious to be more critical and alert, you’ll be more likely to naturally have a lucid dream. You’re becoming Sherlock, looking for clues around you, to work out what’s going on. The only difference is that you’re training yourself to see clues without really looking.
Here are some ways you can start noticing more details in the world around you:
- Stare at a photo for 30 seconds, and then turn it over. Now write down EVERYTHING you can remember about the photo.. The people in it, what they’re wearing, where it is, etc
- Stare at a photo of a bedroom and try and work out who the person that lives there is and what they’re like
- Walk through a room and then close your eyes. Now ask yourself tiny details about it like how dusty the floor was, what the temperature was etc
- Repeat the above steps but ask yourself ‘Did anything seem weird or unusual about this?’
- You get the idea. Train yourself to be more aware and ask more questions about the world you’re in
- Do this every day, for as long as you can manage
It might be hard to maintain this level of thinking all day but if you can, you’ll be rewarded with lots more lucid dreams. Not only that, but they’ll be more vivid and profound because you’ll be very lucid.
Useful tools
Meditation is a huge part of ADA and there are certain tools you can use to meditate better, deeper, and more effectively. You want meditation to really help you feel better and lucid dream more, right? Here’s some useful tools:
- Sleep tracks for meditation. These are perfect for people wanting to get more out of meditation. Simply listen to them while you’re meditating!
- Binaural beats for inducing lucid dreams: Listen to the ‘sleep pack’ while you’re falling asleep, and experience more lucid dreams
