Therefore, the beginning of work should be officially announced. For the first time, a small group of citizens will appear in the world of tyrants and will start organizing a rebellion. It must never perform too loudly because such a rebellion will be revealed and suppressed ruthlessly. Also, it should not be too quiet because it will induce no effect. What is required of you is to cause the butterfly effect. Therefore, the best way to start this great adventure is by keeping the diary of your dreams – your lucid diary. That diary is already one huge step towards your first lucid dream. Choosing a notebook in a bookstore, finding the ideal color and size, your first entry on its pages, all of these represent a conscious determination to succeed; it is a one-way ticket to a country where no one has been before, with you as the first one to arrive. This is a very important moment because it represents the withdrawal of the most important factor – the magical link. When you pick a day to buy your lucid diary, it will also be the first day of your entire lucid opus. I advise you to get a notebook of the usual size, without excessive patterns or tables for dates and times. Your diary will be a report on your inspiration and imagination, so it may be full of drawings and patterns that will require a lot of blank space on the paper. It will be your reconnaissance squad, not your gravestone epitaph; it must point to the vitality of your spirit, not to the passive darkness of oblivion and nothingness. Choose it well; work on this whole thing. You will see later that all the effort you put in the beginning will certainly affect many things later. I would not like to spend too much time on the form and appearance of the diary; I am quite sure that you will find what is ideal for you. What I want to dwell on, however, are two things – a record form and a form of interest. Let me go over the details of these ideas. At the same time, you will be more and more dedicated to your lucid opus and closer to the goal, just because your attention is sharpening more in this place, which I think is very good. Here I would like to tell you about what I have already said in the book about the Probationer, and it concerns the whole of this thing.
A note in this diary does not serve to admire your phantasmagorias but to dissect them, measure them, probe them with the flame of childish intrigue. There are countless models upon which the dreams are correctly recorded, and it is up to you to construct the one that suits you the most. When you record a dream, it is important to write it down immediately upon waking, no matter how convinced you are that you will remember it later. There is no need to wait for an ideal moment to write down a dream, but it should immediately be followed by awakening. More than an authentic experience in the morning will become distant and pale as soon as noon. It is also crucial that you give your dream a name. As if it were a movie, try to provide the best name to your last night’s blockbuster. Furthermore, find the symbol around which the dream is revolving. It is usually an object or a person around which the whole dream happens – try to discover and name what that is. Your subconscious uses sleep as we use adjectives in order to describe a specific noun; a dream for your unconscious nature is what a delightful verse is to a poet. Therefore, you need to find what is being adorned by that strophe, what is behind the stylistic figure of your subconscious, what kind of phenomenon has turned on the mischief behind your closed eyes. Is it a person who exists in real life, maybe someone from the past? Is it an object, or perhaps an event, emotion, or thought? In any case, it must be one term, not two or three, not more or less, but one and only. Come closer to that term from the state of wakefulness. What does it bring when you think about it? Is it pleasure or discomfort, fear or ignorance, lust, or need? Get out of the role of a dreamer; you need to transform the dream into a creative force of your intent, not to remain a passive and random cobweb of your unconscious. You have to allow a diary to breathe and develop; you must never be satisfied with one form of recording because inevitably, there will appear another one to replace it. Write in the third person. When you make a journal entry, do so as if you are writing about someone else, as if you are writing a biography. Then, write in the second person. Write to him instead of yourself. Give your dream logical legitimacy. List the actors of the dream. Give a title to your role, whether you were the main subject, an observer, helper, victim, savior, or conspirator. Are you a judge, prosecutor, or defense attorney? Who are you in the dream anyway, and to whom? Maybe you are an object of someone else’s dream, just a secondary object of a wider event? Maybe you are a stimulus to someone else’s awakening?
In the beginning, you will be lucky if you have written anything down at all. At first, your dream memory will be fragmentary, connected in small pieces that will progress over time. What you have to exercise here is patience. And most of all, the totality of memory; by no means fragments, you need continuity in memory, even if it is for just over a moment – if it is in one cycle and made of one uninterrupted part, it will be a hundred times more important than the one from several smaller wholes. Even a few minutes of uninterrupted memory is much more valuable than an experience of a whole night full of holes and darkness of oblivion.
All this, even reading this before writing down anything in your dream diary, crushes a possibility of failure so powerfully that we can say quite openly that it is already approaching the dawn of awakening. Not in reality, but in a dream, in an environment that is much more adapted to your true being and a landscape that is intended for such an endeavor, where your Self and your new awakeness will be in its completely natural environment.
Haron-press 