2) As you are falling asleep, stay focused on remembering that you are about to enter into a dream.

3) While awake, visualize yourself being in a dream, becoming aware that you are dreaming.

4) Wake up an hour earlier than you usually do. Stay awake for an hour, then go back to sleep. As you are falling asleep, stay focused on your intention to have a lucid dream. This technique is particularly effective, because we have more dreams at end of our night’s sleep cycle.

5) Believe that you can learn to lucid dream!

Upon awakening, while still dwelling in that netherworld between consciousness and unconsciousness, neatly packaged solution to some petty problem floats up into my mind. Whole articles with their sentences quietly arranged in perfect rows hang in air.

A perfect turn of a phrase, solution to a knotty problem with a difficult client, working out of composition of an illustration … such jewls are gifts of inner mind.

They are fragile bubbles that pop when exposed to direct morning sun. The trick is to capture quiet voices before they are drowned by noise of daily activity.

By extending quiet time a little longer I can sit at my computer and transcribe those thoughts.

Some say artists and intuitives hear it loudest. But we all have an inner voice. And it speaks to us. All we must do is listen.