Cultivating Awareness

For me, the path towards having more lucid dreams meant learning how to overcome “the waking dream”. I spend more time asleep at the wheel during the day than I care to admit. Remaining “awake”. Learning how to remain awake.

If I do nothing else in this life, let me at least not sleep through the rest of it.

Kabir Helminski wrote something (A Rumi passage) in the introduction of his book Living Presence, that sums up this idea for me:

The Master said:
There is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but did not forget that, then there would be no cause to worry; whereas if you performed and remembered and did not forget every single thing, but forgot that one thing, then you would have done nothing whatsoever.

It is just as if a king had sent you to a country to carry out a specified task. You go and perform a hundred other tasks; but if you have not performed that particular task on account of which you had gone to the country, it is as though you have performed nothing at all.
So man has come into this world for a particular task, and that is his purpose; if he does not perform it, then he will have done nothing.

DISCOURSES OF RUMI (TRANSLATED BY A. J. ARBERRY)

So I continue to try and use as many tools as I can to help me try and fulfill that task: