Lucid Dreaming Kit Review
This is my review of the Lucid Dreaming Kit, one of the original 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 a 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.
What is The Lucid Dreaming Kit?
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. Don't expect to learn any in-depth science of the sleeping brain.
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
Effects of The Lucid Dreaming Kit
As you know I'm a lucid dreamer already, having on average 2-3 lucid dreams per week. But I went through the workbook step-by-step as if I was a total beginner. That week I had four lucid dreams, so it certainly didn't hurt.
There was one bit I was really impressed with: how fast my dream recall increased with a timer method I had never used before. Usually I remember one or two vivid dreams each morning naturally. But when I used Bradley's method, I consistently recalled 4-5 dreams each night. This had never happened to me before.
The Audio Stimulation CD
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. It was indeed relaxing and hypnotic for me. However, I found a few flaws with the Audio Stimulation CD:
- They use spoken words on the CD. True brainwave entrainment shouldn't include any words because they create a distraction to the frequency following response.
- I didn't find the verbal lucidity cues effective at all. The most likely explanation is they didn't coincide with my dreams. The only time I heard them was when I was falling asleep or when they 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. There are even claims that smartphones and smartwatches can detect when you're in REM sleep based on movement transferred through the mattress.
Conclusion
Overall I'm largely torn on the Lucid Dreaming Kit. On the positive side, it raises awareness of lucid dreaming and provides some genuine value to beginners:
- Condenses a whole lot of information for the complete newbie
- Doesn't bog you down with unnecessary and complex terminology
- Offers an intensive schedule for inducing lucid dreams
- Dramatically improves dream recall with one simple method
- Genuinely seems to help some people have their first lucid dream
It 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 expensive. So it really depends on your budget and your level of existing knowledge of lucid dreaming.
Investing in a course can motivate you to follow through on all the techniques, and that's a really powerful motivator to get you lucid dreaming. 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.
It also comes with a money back guarantee. This gives you 90 days to trial the course, and if it doesn't work for you, send it back and get your money back (minus the original shipping & handling). I'm confident they do honor this offer.
If you're brand new to lucid dreaming and have no qualms with spending $59.95 then do give it a go. You can order it 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 other options out there which may suit you better.
Update: Eight-Hour CD Version
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."
Unfortunately, instead of including the new version in the Lucid Dreaming Kit, the Eight-Hour CD is sold separately for $29.95.
About the author
Rebecca Turner is a science writer, illustrator, explorer of consciousness - and founder of World of Lucid Dreaming. She is currently studying for a biology degree in Auckland and blogging at her site Science Me.
The Anatomy of a Dreaming Supplement
A lot has happened in the last 5 months. But how did we go from business as usual to changing the face of the entire lucid dreaming supplements industry? It’s a story that I think will interest you – and you might even learn a thing or two in the process. When I was first taken on-board as Chief Lucidity Officer in 2016, one of the first things I was tasked with was taking a good look at our operations and giving things a bit of an overhaul.
9 Reasons Why Everyone Should Lucid Dream
To lucid dream is to examine an intensely heightened state of self awareness, with all the senses activated - a uniquely human experience. What's more, lucid dreaming offers profound benefits that touch all of us, no matter our culture, beliefs or life circumstances. Ultimately, I think all of these benefits put together could play a serious role in advancing the human race.
How to remember your dreams
To lucid dream, I recommend being able to remember at least one vivid dream per night. That will boost your self awareness in dreams (making lucidity more likely) and also means you can actually remember your lucid dreams. Which is nice. Here are four detailed tips on how to remember your dreams more frequently. And if you don't think you dream at all - trust me, you almost certainly do. It takes an extraordinarily rare sleep disorder to deprive someone of dream sleep.
What Do Lucid Dreams Feel Like?
Years ago, before I had my first lucid dream, I had a very specific idea about what a lucid dream would feel like. I thought it would be intense and magical and a little bit spooky. This turned out to be a pretty accurate representation. Becoming aware in the dreamstate is like entering another world. One where physical laws can be manipulated (there is no spoon, Neo) and your fantasies can come true in an instant. There's definitely something magical about that - and it's as if the lucid dream world is a living, breathing organism that can react to your very thoughts.
How to have amazing lucid dreams
Experts agree that everyone is capable of having lucid dreams. Dreaming itself is a normal function of the mind. We all dream every night, even if we don't remember. And we all achieve conscious awareness while awake every single day. So what does it mean to combine these states? Why, the amazing ability to have conscious - or lucid - dreams. Sounds simple, doesn't it? So why do I keep hearing from people who say they can't achieve their first lucid dream?
Mugwort: Dream Sage of the Chumash Indians
It is estimated that these wise and wily Indians have been using mugwort in their healing and ritual practices for 13,000 years, where it is known as the ‘dream sage’. They use the herb to promote good dreams, which they consider an essential aspect of normal human functioning! But that’s not all...
