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The first, the candle concentration exercise, involves concentrating on an actual candle flame. It
will strengthen your ability to concentrate and provide a vivid sensory memory of a flame as a
basis for the visualization. The second, visualization training, will help cultivate your ability to
produce vivid and detailed imagery.
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After you have mastered these two exercises, the dream lotus and flame technique should be
easier for you.
(Adapted from Tulku. 21)
Attention on Other Mental Tasks
You can also use any cognitive process that requires minimal but conscious effort to focus your
mind while falling asleep. Thus, in what is now a familiar story, your body falls asleep while
the cognitive process carries your conscious mind along with it into sleep. The basic approach
requires that you lie in bed relaxed, but vigilant, and perform a repetitive mental task. You
focus your attention on the task while your percep-tion of the environment diminishes and
gradually vanishes altogether as you fall asleep. As long as you continue to per-form the mental
task, your mind will remain awake. Ten years ago, as part of my doctoral dissertation research,
I developed the following technique for producing WILDs with this strat-egy. 22
COUNT YOURSELF TO SLEEP TECHNIQUE
1. Relax completely
While lying in bed, gently close your eyes and relax your head, neck, back, arms, and legs.
Completely let go of all muscular and mental tension, and breathe slowly and restfully. Enjoy
the feeling of relaxation and let go of your thoughts, worries, and concerns. If you have just
awakened from sleep, you are probably sufficiently re-laxed. Otherwise, you may use either the
progressive re-laxation exercise (page 53) or the 61-point relaxation exercise (page 54).
2. Count to yourself while falling asleep
As you are drifting off to sleep, count to yourself, 1, I m dreaming; 2, I m dreaming,..., and
so on, maintaining a degree of vigilance. You may start over after reaching 100 if you wish.
3. Realize you are dreaming
After continuing the counting and reminding process for some time, you will find that at some
point, you ll be saying to yourself, I m dreaming..., and you ll no-tice that you are dreaming!
Commentary
The I m dreaming phrase helps to remind you of what you intend to do, but it isn t strictly
necessary. Simply focusing your attention on counting probably would al-low you to retain
sufficient alertness to recognize dream images for what they are.
You can make rapid progress with this technique if you have someone watch over you while
you fall asleep. Your assistant s job is to wake you up whenever you show any sign of having
fallen asleep, and to ask you what number you reached and what you were dreaming.
The watcher s task may sound difficult, but in fact it s quite easy to tell when you have fallen
asleep. There are several observable signs of sleep onset: with dim light, you can observe the
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movement of the eyes under the closed lids. Slow pendular movements of the eyes from side to
side are a reliable sign of sleep onset, as are minor movements or twitches of the lips, face,
hands, feet, and other muscles. A third sign of sleep onset is irregular breathing.
As you practice the exercise, your watcher should wake you from time to time and ask for your
count and dream report. At first you will find that you will have reached, perhaps, 50, I m
dreaming... and no further, be-cause at that point you started to dream and forgot to count.
Resolve then to try harder to retain consciousness and continue with the exercise. After a few
dozen awakenings over the course of an hour or so, the feedback will start to help. Sooner or
later, you ll be telling yourself, 100, I m dreaming... and find that it is really finally true!
(Adapted from LaBerge. )
Attention on Body or Self
If you focus on your body while falling asleep, you will sometimes notice a condition in which
it seems to un-dergo extreme distortions, or begins to shake with mys-terious vibrations, or
becomes completely paralyzed. All of these unusual bodily states are related to the process of
sleep onset and particularly REM sleep onset.
During REM sleep, as you will recall from chapter 2, all the voluntary muscles of your body are
almost com-pletely paralyzed, except for the muscles that move your eyes and those with which
you breathe. REM sleep is a psychophysiological state involving the cooperative ac-tivity of a
number of distinct special-purpose brain sys-tems. For example, independent neural systems
cause muscular paralysis, blockade of sensory input, and cor-tical activation. When these three
systems are working together, your brain will be in the state of REM sleep. and you will
probably be dreaming.
Sometimes the REM systems don t turn on or off at the same time. For example, you may
awaken partially from REM sleep, before the paralysis system turns off, so that your body is
still paralyzed even though you are otherwise awake. Sleep paralysis, as this condition is called,
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