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Dreaming Yourself Awake – Or How to Read 300 Pages and Still Not Lucid Dream


Amazon calls this book “the real deal.” I call it a Buddhist-flavored sleep aid with occasional moments of clarity.


Alan Wallace’s Dreaming Yourself Awake promises to unlock the secrets of lucid dreaming, altering your dream reality however you like. What it actually delivers is a lot of vague encouragement, some meditative techniques, and a handful of moments where it suddenly feels like it might be onto something—before losing itself in a fog of New Age buzzwords.


The Good, The Bad, and The Um… What?


Wallace’s biggest strength is his attempt to merge Western philosophy (cue Bertrand Russell) with Buddhist meditation (shamatha). His core idea is that you don’t just “wake up” in dreams—you first have to wake up here.\


The book has three takeaways:


1. Relax your body.


2. Stabilize your thoughts.


3. Examine reality constantly until you realize it’s all an illusion.


There are some thought-provoking discussions on the nature of consciousness. But does it help you actually lucid dream? Well, sort of. If you dig through the fluff, you’ll find a few simple techniques—but most of the book is vague, repetitive, and full of motivational platitudes.


If you want a meditation book with Buddhist philosophy, this is decent.


If you want an actual roadmap to lucid dreaming, this is not it.


So, How Do You Actually Learn Lucid Dreaming?


You could spend hours reading through abstract concepts and wandering explanations… or you could just experience the lucid dreaming state directly.


💡 One session of Holotropic Meditation = instant access to the same theta waves that power lucid dreaming.Instead of memorizing techniques, you’ll feel what lucid dreaming is like—right away.


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