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.
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