Posts
Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life by Stephen LaBerge (2009)
, 10 Oct 2016
This is a short how-to book on lucid dreaming by Stephen LaBerge PhD, a Stanford researcher and one of the fathers of the field.
Generally speaking, this is an acceptable introduction to lucid dreaming if this is first time you approach lucid dreaming or dreamwork in general, as it is written in a very simple English, with very clear how-to techniques to remember dreams, to facilitate lucid dreaming, to deal with nightmares (face you demons!) and a bit of introduction about the importance of dreamwork and the virtues and the uses of lucid dreaming.
The e-book comes with a series of audio mp3 recordings downloadable from the editorial house's website (as mentioned at the beginning of the book). I found the recordings quite good. The narrator has a wonderful calm voice, which is great to induce relaxation, but also a clear way of explaining things. Probably, they are good enough on their own and quite the core of what the book says.
I didn't know about Lucid Dreaming Inducing Devices (LDIDs) like the NovaDreamer and the DreamLight LDID, which are mentioned in this book as they are developed by LaBerger's team in his Lucidity Institute in Hawaii. For obvious reasons, he doesn't mention others, which can be found, reviewed and linked here.
This is not a book as it has just 89 pages filled with too many records of dreams, too many unnecessary quotes, quite a lot of unnecessary verbal weed, plus the notes and bio. The core of the "book" is about 40 pages, not more! Besides, the bibliography is really old, the most modern book referenced in the book is from 1997.
RENDERING FOR KINDLE
The conversion to e-book was obviously done without the least care and not proofread. There are too many items misspelled to list them here. It will suffice to say that dot is used at times instead of comma, words that should be capitalized after a period are consistently written in lower case, Dr appears as dr a few times, and the surname Dement (funny enough, the surname of a psychiatrist mentioned in the book) is written in lower case at least two times. If you pay me, I will edit the book for you, dear editor...
MY RECOMMENDATION
MY RECOMMENDATION
If this is your first approach to dreamwork and the first book you find,
it will certainly help you with the basics. However, if you really want
to delve in all the nitty-gritty of lucid dreaming, especially in the
scientific research on dreaming you need to read LaBerge's traditional book, written 20+ years ago or so, or Robert Waggoner's
because the introduction on the subject in this condensed book is
really full of platitudes and generalizations. Otherwise, you can visit LaBerge's institute of research Lucidity, where a lot of free material is provided to the general public.
NOTE
It has been years since I have lucid dreamed, which happened spontaneously while I was a teen. I have been doing archetypal dreamwork for a few years now but not lucid dreaming, so I bought this book to use lucid dreaming for problem solving. I haven't gotten any result as yet, but as LaBerge says that it can take up to a month of constant self-training, I will wait and see and add a PS. Wish me luck :)
Posted in
Post a Comment
Comments are Moderated
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.