There’s a simple way to get much more out of your lucid dreaming efforts, and it’s. Breathing! Breathing in a certain way can give you deeper, more vivid, and more interesting lucid dreams.
The vast majority of people living today only breathe to a fraction of their capacity. They breathe ‘in the neck’ meaning they take short shallow breathes that only seem to go down as far as their neck.
Breathing like this is what most of us are used to, but it’s not the best way for overall health, relaxation, and a bunch of other things; confidence, healing, memory, and a lot more. The truth is, most people don’t breathe deeply either because they:
- Don’t see the need
- Don’t know how to
- Don’t understand the benefits
What is meant by deep breathing?
Deep breathing means to take air in to your body as far as it will comfortably go, and then exhale fully, from the depths of your stomach.
When you take a deep full lung full of air, you should be able to feel your pelvic floor slightly pressed, almost as if the air is forcing your pelvic floor towards the ground. Many people don’t feel this, as they breathe a lot less deeply than they probably should.
Your overall health will improve if you start breathing deeply, but that’s another post. You’ll also notice you start sleeping better as well. For now, we’re talking about deep breathing for use with lucid dreaming, and relaxation.
It will help you relax and meditate, as well as aid you when you’re trying to perform a Wake Induced Lucid Dream at night. With Deep breathing, you can relax much easier, and your energy and thoughts become more channeled and controllable.
How to breathe deeply and fully
So how do you do it? Well firstly, ensure that the muscles associated with breathing are relaxed, loose and ready to take the air into your body.
When you take a breath, you notice usually the air rushes along the roof of your mouth, down your neck and your chest will slowly rise, right? The muscles that are either directly or indirectly involved with breathing are:
- Your Jaw and Mouth
- Your Neck/Throat
- Your Chest/shoulders
- Your Stomach and Core
In order to breath deeply, you’ll need these to be loose and relaxed. It’s quite common for tension to be held in the chest and particularly the stomach, which needs to be noticed and released. The muscles and areas of the body mentioned must be completely relaxed and loose, to do this, start by focusing on your jaw, feel the tension, and then let it hang open, let go of any control of the jaw and notice it drop slowly.
Then focus on the throat. This is not exactly an easy one to manually control, for this area, stand shoulder width apart, tilt your head up and using your feet/calf muscles to lift yourself up and down, make your body bounce up and down.
The trick is to get your heels to impact the ground so that you almost feel winded when you hit the ground. This will allow you to loosen your throat and you may even notice you make deep vocal noises as you’re doing this, that’s normal, let it happen. Noises actually help you to relax your throat. Now look at your chest and stomach.
A good way to relax them is to lay down and put a hand over each, and keep the hand a few centimeters above your body. Breathe in and out slowly, noticing which hands move and try and get both of them to rise every time you breath.
You may feel a little strange at this point, as most people are not used to deep breathing. That’s fine, just keep with it and eventually you’ll find it easy. So now you’ve relaxed the muscles in your body used for breathing deeply, it’s time to actually start breathing deeply. The best way to start learning how to do this is to stand in a clear open space.
Relax all of your muscles, and stand comfortably. Tilt your head back slightly as you did before, and focus once more on your stomach, as this is going to be most difficult part to control and master. The stomach usually holds a lot of tension in which needs to be released for meditation and relaxation.
Take a really long slow breath in and gold it for 10 seconds, feel the pressure on your lungs and the pelvic floor? If not, take in more air and try again. You should feel a gentle pressure when you have lungs full of air. Now slowly let it out whichever way is most comfortable for you, through the mouth or nose.
Repeat this until you are able to breathe deeply for about 5-10 minutes. This is all you need to be doing every day for now. About 10 minutes a day of deep breathing is a good place to start from.
How does deep breathing help lucid dreaming?
When you breath deeply, you’re letting in more oxygen to your body, which is essential for a number of things, you can’t survive without oxygen. It is needed for the bodies main systems to function, and taking in more of it through deep breathing can help you relax for lucid dreams as well.
If you try the breathing techniques just before bed or even while you’re lying in bed trying to induce a lucid dream, you’ll notice that your thoughts become clearer, and your energy is more focused.
Deep breathing inside a lucid dream?
This is an advanced Lucid technique, which enables you to ground yourself in a dream and make it more stable by breathing or collecting your energy while you’re lucid.
To deep breath in a dream, just do the exact same things you would normally, but bear in mind of course that you’re not actually inhaling air in a dream, at least, your dream body isn’t (your real one is, obviously).
It will be more about the feeling and the thought you use to breath deeply in the dream that will ground you. Even if you just ‘think’ that you’re breathing deeply and focusing, you will become more focused in the dream.
Using your ‘Chi Energy’ to ground yourself
An easier way to ground yourself in the dream might actually be to stand with your feet shoulder width apart and focus on your hands and try to ‘feel’ the energy in the center of your body. Your ‘Chi’ energy. this can also be used inside the actual dream, as an advanced stabilisation technique.
Its a concept of energy used commonly in martial arts, but the principle is that there is energy flowing through everyone’s body all the time, an easier way of looking at it is that it’s your ‘intent’ or your focus. What you’re focusing on. So focus on the energy in the centre of your body, and try to feel it coming up through the ground through your legs and into your chest, then out through your arms and hands.
Imagine it like a loop, the energy comes up through the ground you’re standing on, and then you push it back into the ground from your hands. By grounding yourself and focusing like this, and with the deep breathing exercises Shown in this post, you should be able to focus more and you’ll find it easier to relax.
Useful tips for breathing more deeply
Breathing deep is a very easy way to boost your lucid dreams, sleep better, and have more energy. It doesn’t sound like it would, but sometimes the simple things are the most powerful. Here are some useful tips and links for you:
- Meditate using these MP3 tracks (proven to help you relax deeper, sleep better and have more lucid dreams)
- Consider getting a background noise generator if you have trouble sleeping and relaxing. they provide white noise, waterfall sounds, and more relaxing sound effects to help you relax
- Learn some basic meditation techniques for lucid dreamers and practice them daily!
