As for dreaming, I don't know how to lucid dream. But if you wish to recall your dreams, you simply journal them once you wake up. Then the dreams will become vivid and they'll stay with you
Heh, ya, already do that, at least with the good ones. I've gotten a lot of great story ideas from my dreams in the past. Despite my love of creating art, my ability to mentally visualize things is quite weak most of the time, including in my dreams. I have a great spatial awareness in my mind, probably well above most others, but it's more of an abstract and intuitive understanding than a visual one, if that makes any sense. I can only hold fleeting and dim images in my mind that are usually gone as quickly as they form.
Though there have been a handful of instances where I had amazing moments of clarity, where I saw things clearer in my mind than I could ever even hope to with my own eyes. One happened in a dream shortly before I woke up many years ago, it only lasted a few seconds and I think the shock of it ended up waking me up. Which seems to be a theme, every time I get one of these clear and vivid images the excitement of it takes me right out of the mindset I'd need to maintain it. 2 of the other times were back when I read a book about astral projection some years ago and started doing the suggested exercises before, and as, I was falling asleep out of curiosity. On 2 occasions over a couple of month period I found myself with my eyes still closed but able to see my room with a level of clarity I've never experienced before. The first time was from my laying down in bed perspective, the other was from above my bed looking out over to the side of the room opposite of the direction my body was facing. In both cases I couldn't contain my excitement and within a second or two of becoming aware of the situation I was wide awake and the experiences had ended.
The last one was kinda weird. I do a fair bit of meditation to relax and every now and then I like to spend some time doing visualization exercises concerned with activating chakras. In the past I never gave much regard to whether they were real or not - all I knew was when I would go through such routines I would feel genuinely energized and refreshed afterwards, far more so than with meditation alone - and that was good enough for me. But this one time while deep in meditation the thought came to me, "I wonder what a chakra really looks like," and I directed my attention to the spot in my chest where the heart chakra is said to be located and basically willed my awareness to move to that location and somehow it seemed to work and for just a moment I saw one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life. What I saw in my mind's eye was something like a giant emerald that took up most of my vision. Though while it was faceted and gleaming like a gem, it wasn't solid, the best description I can come up with for it is liquid light with a semi-solid appearance. The surface of it kept moving and changing and it had this brilliant green glow emanating from it's depths and gave me the impression of gentle warmth and pulsating energy. Again the shock of this sudden vision ripped me straight out of my meditative state and I immediately lost it. I haven't managed to see it again since, I think because when I think about trying to see it, I automatically start to lose focus as my mind starts to race and the meditative state is gone before I can even consider trying to shift my perspective to other parts of my body, heh.
Now, I can't say any of those experiences are proof of chakras or astral projection or any of that. For all I know they could have been just ordinary hallucinations made possible thanks to the relaxed state of mind I was in combined with my desires and expectations. I have often had auditory hallucinations in the same sort of situations of deep meditation and drifting off to sleep, those usually happen in the form of a quick and sudden blast of clear sound, usually nothing intelligible, but they also usually catch me off guard and make me wide awake as well, at least for a few minutes while I calm back down. Though I will say, at least with the last one - before that vision I always thought of chakras as bright white points of light, that was always how I visualized them before then anyhow. So I'm not sure where my mind would have got the inspiration in that case if it was just a hallucination.
