Meaning of a Dream

This is my review of the Lucid Dreaming Kit - one of the original online lucid dreaming courses. The kit is centered around an ebook called "How to Lucid Dream in 7 Days" by Bradley Thompson. It also contains an Audio Stimulation CD containing binaural beats and verbal lucidity cues.

This is an intensive guide that guarantees your first lucid dream in 7 days or your money back. That's quite an overhyped claim - and I'm not convinced it will work for everyone that fast. But it is at least possible to have your first lucid dream within 7 days, and taking the course certainly won't hurt your chances.

Bradley Thompson's lucid dream kit is a quick-start guide to lucid dreaming. It contains a lot of nuggets of information for beginners to boost your dream recall and help you start having lucid dreams. However, if you are already knowledgeable in lucid dreaming then this is not the course for you. It really is an intensive guide for beginners.

The main component is a practical ebook called How to Lucid Dream in 7 Days that you must read every day for a week. If you fail to commit to this schedule, I can tell you right now this won't work.

In each lesson, you'll learn a little more about how lucid dreaming works, and how to apply it to your sleep time. This is not intellectual - in fact I found the ebook to be dumbed down so don't expect to learn any in-depth science of the sleeping brain. However, it does give you an (albeit superficial) footing to get started.

Specifically, the Lucid Dreaming Kit teaches you:

How to remember all of your dreams Four methods for going lucid on demand The logical feedback technique How to stop yourself from waking up from a lucid dream The drink that boosts your dreaming How to turn nightmares into lucid dreams

As you know I'm a lucid dreamer already, having on average 1-2 lucid dreams per week (sometimes more, sometimes less). I did indeed lucid dream that week, four separate times, but I can't definitively say it was due to the Lucid Dreaming Kit.

However, I went through the workbook step-by-step as if I was a total beginner. There was one bit I was really impressed with - how fast my dream recall increased. Usually I remember one or two vivid dreams each morning. But when I used Bradley's method, I recalled 4-5 dreams in one night. This has never happened to me before, and it was really quite easy.

So, although Bradley is first and foremost an internet marketer, I do believe he is a lucid dreamer, or at least consulted with one to write this book.

The kit also includes the Audio Stimulation CD. This is a 72-minute binaural beats recording to help you meditate, relax into the dream state, and become lucid.

You know me, I love brainwave entrainment, so I'm biased. It was indeed relaxing and hypnotic for me. However, I can find flaws with the Audio Stimulation CD:

The CD is old school and uses binaural beats as opposed to the latest technology of isochronic tones. There is growing evidence to suggest that binaural beats don't actually produce a true brainwave entrainment effect at all - instead it's a kind of Ganzfeld Effect. To learn more about what this actually means for your lucid dream meditation, read my article on binaural beats. It doesn't mean it's not deeply relaxing or can't be used for lucid dreaming; it's just not entirely proven that the sounds on this CD cause a scientifically-proven entrainment effect. (If you want this, check out Meditation Power's lucid dreaming isochronics.) Perhaps this is why they can get away with using spoken words on the CD. True brainwave entrainment shouldn't include any words (or music, for that matter) because they create a distraction to the frequency following response. If there is no entrainment going on, then they can talk all they want. I didn't find the verbal lucidity cues lucid very helpful. The most likely explanation is they didn't coincide with my dreams, which is a bit of a haphazard way of doing it anyway. The only time I did hear them was when they occasionally woke me up. (On the plus side, waking up in the night can help you to lucid dream more, because you have more opportunities to DEILD and incubate another lucid dream while you fall asleep. But I'm sure that wasn't the intention here.) There are now several lucid dreaming apps which do the same thing, only better, because they are timed to coincide with your dream sleep. Your smart phone can actually detect when you're in REM sleep and most likely to be dreaming, based on movement transferred through the mattress. It can then deliver verbal lucidity cues which you naturally integrate into your dream world. Such apps start at a few dollars and so undermine the value of this as a useful lucid dreaming CD.Overall I'm torn on the Lucid Dreaming Kit. On the positive side, it does provide value to beginners because it:

Condenses a whole lot of information for the complete newbieDoesn't bog you down with unnecessary and complex terminologyOffers an intensive schedule for inducing lucid dreamsDramatically improves dream recall with one simple methodGenuinely seems to help some people have their first lucid dream in a weekIt clearly condenses a lot of knowledge into bite-size nuggets of information, and is delivered in one intensive week of tutoring. That's the best thing about this course.

On the negative side, it is very expensive. This is a course produced by an internet marketing outfit who are very good at making their products look slick and professional, and charge a premium for that "must have it" factor. At $59.95 this course is not cheap.

I guess the question to ask is: what are you prepared to pay to increase your chances of having your first lucid dream this week? Investing in a course can motivate you to follow through on all the techniques, and that's a good thing. But if you're just going to dabble with it for a couple of days and forget about it, then it's not a good investment.

I would be remiss not to mention that the Lucid Dreaming Kit does include several other digital resources (like the dream diary, reality checker, and lucid dreaming screensaver) but these are more just freebies thrown in as an afterthought.

The makers do also offer a money back guarantee. This gives you 90 days to trial the course, and if it doesn't work for you, send it back to them and get your money back (minus original shipping & handling). I'm confident they do honor this offer.

If you have no problem with the price then give it a go. Order at the Lucid Dreaming Kit website.

If you haven't yet made up your mind, why not check out my other lucid dreaming course reviews. You'll see there are many other options out there.

Since writing this review, Bradley Thompson has released an eight-hour version of the Audio Stimulation CD to help you have more lucid dreams.

As I alluded to my in review, the original 72-minute CD is a little clumsy. It's not an exact science - because it can give you reality prompts when you're not dreaming. It's also less effective for those who find it difficult to get to sleep or who wake up frequently at night.

The new eight-hour version is said to be much more effective which more accurately positions the verbal reality prompts over a full eight-hour sleep period. In Bradley's words, "...rather than randomly trying to catch your mind while in REM, we're aligning your sleeping patterns so we can be SURE they're in REM when we send out the audio prompts."

Notably, the new CD does still use old school binaural beats.

Unfortunately, instead of just including the new version in the (already pricey) Lucid Dreaming Kit, Bradley and his team decided to charge extra for the Eight-Hour CD. It costs $29.95 and is available to order here.