I've been practicing lucid dreaming and the so-called "art of dreaming" for quite a while. It's a practice that goes in combination with martial arts and meditations. It helps widen one's perception and strengthen awareness. It takes the practitioner beyond what he or she is used to perceive as "normal" in day-to-day life. It helps make the mind more flexible, less rigid.
I've found that one of the first mistakes people do when they start experiencing lucid dreams is that they automatically assume that everything they see is the truth.
No, unfortunately it doesn't work that way. And here is my word of caution: things we experience in lucid dreams, no matter how real they may feel (even more real than reality itself sometimes!) CAN be and often ARE elaborate illusions. It doesn't mean they are completely fake or that they are lies. It simply means that the so-called "spiritual world" has even more tricks and illusions in it than our rational reality.
I don't know why, but for some reason when we start getting "spiritual experiences" which we cannot explain by the so-called rational means (psychological disorder, alcohol, hallucinations, etc.), we are right away convinced that these spiritual experiences show us the "real truth about life". From my own experiences and from what I've learned from others (the hard way), this is a very BIG misconception.
When we start experiencing lucid dreams, visions, and other interesting things, we should never assume right away that they are what some people consider Revelations. Not in any religious sense, just revelations of something that can be called "absolute truth". Nope. I wish it was that, but it happens very rarely.
In reality a human being has to practice A LOT, train a lot, and become very strong physically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually to get even somewhat close to the point where he or she will be able to take one little thing (concept, idea, belief, experience, or just one word or phrase!) and study it deeply, and test it again and again - sometimes going through very uncomfortable practices - to be able to find if it's really TRUE or not.
So here is the first thing I believe is important to remember in relation to lucid dreaming. We should not trust everything we see and experience in lucid dreams. There can be tricks, illusions, lies, stuff made up by our own minds, or stuff made up by other entities to make us see just a fraction of reality... or a changed, mutated version of reality of life.
It is very easy to get caught up once you start experiencing lucid dreams. If you don't know what I am talking about, I can describe a lucid dream as the following:
1. A "dream" where you know that you are dreaming and also have the ability to control yourself, to think like you do in real life, and to consciously do things (touch, taste, move, smell stuff, walk, fly, change the surroundings, or transport yourself from one setting to another)
2. A dream where everything feels and seems REAL, even more real and physical than the regular world we live in.
Just to show you how it feels I'll describe one of my first such "dreams". I was in a corridor of a building that looked like an old abandoned hotel. Suddenly I realized that I was dreaming, but to my horror the dream was physically like the real world where I lived my day-to-day awakened life. I stared at the brownish old carpet on the floor and got caught up in looking at its design... I could see and feel the material it was made of. I touched the walls covered with flowery wallpaper and felt it with my fingertips, I could even notice little cracks and imperfections in the aged paper that had been on those walls for dozens of years... I walked and I felt my legs, my breathing, my heartbeat, I could think, I could hear and smell things... And that place where I was and me being there physically was MORE REAL than that other life where I supposedly lay in bed, sleeping. My "real life" in the real world where I was at that moment seemed very VERY far away and very faint... Like an old film... about someone else's life that had nothing to do with me.
And that's when I freaked out. The dream was more real than reality (!) and I realized that if I spent more time in it, I could literally forget that I came from somewhere else! And then - never wake up in that other (real?) world. My fear became so strong that I believe it gave a signal to my body to wake up, and I woke up with a fast-beating heart and horrified, for some minutes not knowing where I was and what the real reality was.
Why practice lucid dreams at all? I think that it can be useful for exploring both the world and yourself. I think that in such dreams we can find information and receive experiences that we cannot get in our awakened state of being - probably because in our "normal life" the brain and the body of a human being is set to function in accordance with physical, social, and other rules of the world... in accordance with all the agreements we have made with each other and the reality itself.
If many of us start breaking these agreements, the world will simply fall apart. The society still functions (however imperfect it is) because we made up all these rules and regulations (or rather someone has made them for us). The society as it is still functions because we have this matrix that holds everything together in a familiar, logical, rational way.
The realm of dreams if that place where a human being can send all these agreements to hell and start exploring something that is locked and out of limits for "safety reasons" when we are awake. But one should not take these
"dream" experiences lightly or trust them, like I said previously. Nowadays many talk of the matrix and distrust the matrix, well, that's understandable, how can anyone trust anything in this world anymore?.. But dreams can be just as tricky, but in a different way. I say - practice and exploration, but check and test everything, whether asleep or awake.