Theresa Cheung - How to Catch a Dream: 21 Ways to Dream (and Live) Bigger and Better

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First published by Thorsons 2022

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Theresa Cheung 2022

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Source ISBN: 9780008501983

Ebook Edition January 2022 ISBN: 9780008501990

Version: 2021-11-11

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To all the big dreamers

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

You do not sleep. You believe you do because your body sleeps, but a deeply alert part of you never sleeps. While your body slumbers, youremain wide awake in the extraordinary world of your dreams.

As dreams rarely make sense, you may believe they are your brain simply reprocessing and consolidating the events and lessons of your waking life. But dreams are anything but meaningless. Not only are they the key to a more fulfilling life, but you can wake up in them and gain truly life-changing insights with your eyes wide shut. If you use the twenty-one proven and practical nightly dreaming practices in this book, you will learn how to dream (and live) bigger and better.

Bigger and better

You mustnt be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. This delicious line from Eames, the character played by Tom Hardy in the science-fiction movie thriller Inception(2010), never fails to motivate me when my waking life feels diminished.

Inceptionmarked a radical turning-point for me as an established dream-decoding author. It wasnt just because its mesmerizing cinematic depiction of the dream world made dreaming cool, everything about it ignited within me an intense desire to dream bigger and better myself.

From then onwards, I promised myself I would fully commit to better dream recall, deeper dream decoding and learning how to trigger the lucid dreaming state. And this book is the result of that commitment, and the techniques and approaches that actually worked for me. Ive experienced first-hand their benefits for personal growth and seen how effective they can be for others. Today, Im on a mission to bring dreams, in particular lucid ones, right out of the shadows, so they are no longer dismissed as nonsense or something to be feared. I want the whole world to catch their dreams and fall in love with them, and, by extension, themselves.

So, what is a lucid dream?

Dream recall and decoding is a potent self-help tool this book will explore but it will also introduce you to the art of lucid dreaming, which is the most vivid and creative way to dream. Lucid dreaming happens when the parts of your brain associated with cognitive functions, memory and self-awareness (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the bilateral frontopolar prefrontal cortex, the praecuneus, the inferior parietal lobules and the supramarginal gyrus, to be precise!) activate and you know you are dreaming