Huh interesting, never tried lights before. The ambient lightning really feels strange now that you mentioned it. As if the shadow quality is set to very low, or turned off entirely. But I swear I was trying to read something in the past... the text felt quite profound and enlightening, but it was like trying to catch the water with a sieve, and I could only recall but a few words.
Are there any simple (relatively) and effective advices or techniques you could share? I once read on reddit about one particular reality check, look at your own nose and if you don't see it, then you're dreaming. And I guess that wasn't a lie... In my recent lucid dream I saw my nose. It was transparent, like if you would look at your nose with both eyes open.
I've had some very vivid lucid dreams where there have been distinct shadows, but maybe that's because I pay attention to them all the time in real life (I'm a lighting person for TV/film). Mostly though it's like you say, very abstract, soft lighting. Interestingly now you mention it, I find it easier to dream of overcast weather than bright sunshine, but I wonder if that's just me.
Same here, sometimes it's almost as if I "know" what the text says but if I focus in and try to read it normally it ends up garbled.
I started off with the wristwatch technique. If you wear a watch then several times a day (randomly, whenever it pops into your mind) stop and ask yourself "am I dreaming or am I awake?" Look at your watch and pay attention to the hands, is the time constant or are the hands jumping around?
If they're jumping around you know you're dreaming, if they're moving normally, casually note to yourself "I'm awake" and carry on as normal. After a while of doing it, you'll randomly start to do it in your dreams and the moment you 'realise' the watch doesn't look normal you'll gain control of the dream. Try to control your emotions, strong emotions can make the dream difficult to control and you'll lose focus and slip back into 'movie mode'.
Another technique I use is to take a moment every so often and look at my surroundings, I ask myself if anything is out of the ordinary. Familiar surroundings are never quite 'life-like' in a dream, it may be that parked cars are stacked on top of one another, or a door that's in a different place, or even a staircase in your house that you don't ever remember being there yesterday... I often combine this with another test so I don't accidentally think I'm dreaming when I'm really awake.
Similar to pinching your nose, you can also pinch your wrist. I've never done this one myself but in waking life it hurts and in a dream it doesn't. So if you do it a couple of times and it doesn't hurt you should snap into consciousness in a dream.
It also really helps to keep a dream diary. You won't remember much about your dreams to begin with lucid or otherwise, but the more you write the more dreams you'll have and the more opportunities to practice lucid dreaming.
Finally, a really easy but effective trick I used at the beginning is to tell myself " I want to have a lucid dream tonight" and really make myself conscious that when I did dream I was going to be really 'switched on' and aware so that I could become lucid. In new age terminology, you might say you were readying your mind to awaken, but I think it's more that our dreams are composed of the events we've experienced that day (and earlier) and being last thing at night the suggestion gets incorporated and suddenly you remember that you wanted to wake up in your dream.
Practice makes perfect though, it took me ages before I was having them regularly and able to control them, many a lucid dream ended with the world being sucked into a 'spinning vortex' and waking up having what you would describe as an out of body experience - the more you do it the more control you'll develop.
Hope that gives you a few thoughts to get started with :)
