1. Plan when to test your state
Pick five to ten different occasions during the day to test your state. These should be circumstances that are similar in some ways to your dreams. Any time you come in contact with something that resembles a dreamsign, test your state. Whenever anything surprising or unlikely occurs or anytime you experience unusually powerful emotions, or anything dream like, test your state. If you have recurrent dreams, any situations related to the recurrent content are ideal. For example, if you have recurrent dreams featuring your fear of heights, you should do a state test when you cross a bridge or visit a room near the top of a tall building.
2. Test you state
Ask yourself the critical question as often as possible (at least the five to ten specific times you selected in step one): “Am I dreaming or awake?” Don’t just automatically ask the question and mindlessly reply, “Obviously, I’m awake,” or you will do the same thing when you actually are dreaming. Look around for any oddities or inconsistencies that might indicate you are dreaming. Think back to the events of the last several minutes. Do you have any trouble remembering what just happened? If so, you may be dreaming.
From: Exploring the world of Lucid Dreaming: Stephen Laberge
In the course of this quest into the hidden limbo of my consciousness, I believed I felt explosions like the collision of occult stones or the sudden petrification of fires. Fires that would be like unconscious truths miraculously vitalized.
But you have to tread slowly on the road of dead stones, especially if you have lost understanding of words. It is an indescribable science which explodes by slow thrusts. And whoever possesses it doesn’t understand it. But the Angels also do not understand, for all true knowledge is obscure. Clear mind belongs to matter.
Human life runs its course in three alternating states or conditions, namely, waking, dreaming sleep, and dreamless sleep. The attainment of the higher knowledge of spiritual worlds can be readily understood if a conception be formed of the changes occurring in these three conditions, as experienced by one seeking such higher knowledge. When no training has been undertaken to attain this knowledge, human consciousness is continually interrupted by the restful interval of sleep. During these intervals the soul knows nothing of the outer world, and equally little of itself. Only at certain periods dreams emerge from the deep ocean of insensibility, dreams linked to the occurrences of the outer world or the conditions of the physical body. At first, dreams are only regarded as a particular manifestation of sleep-life, and thus only two states are generally spoken of, namely, sleeping and waking. For spiritual science, however, dreams have an independent significance apart from the other two conditions. In the foregoing chapter a description was given of the alteration ensuing in the dream-life of the person undertaking the ascent to higher knowledge. His dreams lose their meaningless, irregular and disconnected character and form themselves more and more into a world of law and order. With continued development, not only does this new world born out of the dream world come to be in no way inferior to outer physical reality as regards its inner truth, but facts reveal themselves in it representing a higher reality in the fullest sense of the word. Secrets and riddles lie concealed everywhere in the physical world. In the latter, the effects are seen of certain higher facts, but no one can penetrate to the causes whose perception is confined merely to his senses. These causes are partly revealed to the student in the condition described above and developed out of dream life, a condition, however, in which he by no means remains stationary. True, he must not regard these revelations as actual knowledge so long as the same things do not also reveal themselves during ordinary waking life. But in time he achieves this as well: he develops this faculty of carrying over into waking consciousness the condition he created for himself out of dream life. Thus something new is introduced into the world of his senses that enriches it. Just as a person born blind and successfully operated upon will recognize the surrounding objects as enriched by all that the eye perceives, to, too, will anyone having become clairvoyant in the above manner perceive the whole world surrounding him peopled with new qualities, things, beings, and so forth. He now need no longer wait for his dreams to live in another world, but he can at any suitable moment put himself into the above condition for the purpose of higher perception. This condition then acquires a significance for him similar to the perception, in ordinary life, of things with active senses as opposed to inactive senses. It can truly be said that the student opens the eyes of his soul and beholds things which necessarily remain concealed form the bodily senses.