Yeah it’s funny how just a little bit of mindfulness of the present moment and attentiveness to your physical surroundings can trigger a lucid dream that quickly.  I started having lucid dreams almost immediately after starting to practice mindfulness meditation 5 years ago.
Eventually I wanted to kick it up a notch and increase the frequency and vividness of my dreams, so I started keeping a dream journal(to increase dream recall) and started taking supplements.  I’ve tried many, but the ones that I’ve found that seem to be the most effective for me are Melatonin, Huperzine-A and Calea Zatatechichi.  These supplements coupled with the “wake back to bed” method just about guarantee that I’ll achieve lucidity to some degree or another.  
Haha, I love how you just assume that I’ve done that. Us men are pretty predictable in that way I suppose. It’s how we’re wired, whattaya gonna do?  
You might be surprised to hear that sexual activity in my lucid dreams is quite rare, and that I tend to be far more interested in doing experiments with the environment and people within the dream.  Whenever I step into a lucid dream, I immediately think to stop and look around very mindfully.  I focus intently on my visual experience to see just how real it seems.
I will pay attention to very subtle things, that most people don’t think about, like the shifting and rotation of the three-dimensional objects as I move around the environment.  Somehow it fascinates me that my mind is able to simulate the 3D rotation of objects.  
I will also go around touching things to see how accurately my mind can simulate the sense of touch of certain textured surfaces.  If I find food or drink, I will consume it to see how well my mind simulates taste and the texture of the food or liquid.
I will test the consistency and static-ness of the environment by looking at a certain object, looking away from it, and then looking back at it several times to see if the object stays static.  
One of my favorite things to do is to go look into the mirror, if I can find a restroom or something. That’s when things usually get very trippy.  My mind usually does a very good job of simulating my facial features, but sometimes some very weird things can happen.  One time I looked in the mirror and my entire face was completely white, including my hair and my eyeballs, and then it morphed into an aged version of my face where I looked like I was 80 years old.  Other times, my facial features will just morph like my eyes will get really big or my mouth will get really small or whatever.  Other very disturbing things have happened when I looked in the mirror that I dare not even describe. 
If I can find a person in the dream, I will ask them questions.  One time, I went into a room where I found an older gentleman sitting in a chair just chilling. I went up to him and I said, “Hey so I’m dreaming right now, and we’re inside my dream.” He nodded his head as if to say “Yeah, duh.”  I then asked, “Are you dreaming to? Like do you have a body outside of this dream?” He shook his head No, and so I said “Oh okay, that’s very interesting, so how does that work? Do you just exist and live inside my mind? Do you have a life here?” He proceeded to explain that he lived inside the matrix of my mind and that everyone, including myself, lives inside a dream or some layer of the infinite matrix.  I was so shocked by this answer that I immediately woke up from overstimulation. 
If I’m not doing little experiments like that, I will be just doing the typical things, like running around super fast, jumping really high, sometimes flying, ya know... just having fun.  And by god, is it fun. 
 

There isn't a lot of variation that i have found to the facets of awakening.   Because awakening is not conceptual it is actual.  It is the collapse all duality or a collapse of self and other.  It is a non-dual state of consciousness.  Not preaching, but a non-dual state is a mystical state in which you become pure Consciousness itself.  That which you always were but were separated by the imaginary self.  So In becoming it - you also instantaneously become conscious of various facets of what you are.   This is because Consciousness is becoming conscious of itself - waking up to itself so to speak.   And those realizations were provided in Leo's video on the facets of awakening.  And during my awakenings i have directly validated all facets.   And it feels like waking up from a dream.    It's so freaking radical and hard to fathom that i can understand why there is so much criticism or demonization of Leo here.  Because this stuff is soooo damn radical.
We are talking about literally becoming God and becoming aware that you are God.  And becoming conscious of the nature of how you work.   There is nothing bigger and sometimes i myself cannot believe what i became conscious of.    Its something that i feel whether you are meditating or taking psychedelics that it will only happen when you are already at a certain baseline of consciousness and not before.  
So with all of that being said when posts saying God is not the Absolute or Nothing Matters are spotted by guys like Leo what do you expect - these types of posts are either false or incomplete.   But it can't be known until after awakening.  Leo is working on streamlining his teachings and these types of messages in fact will only distract from that.
Additionally, when users also come on and mock Leo in subtle ways that is also a huge distraction as well as being false.  Again due to how radical this stuff is,  i totally get it.   But at the same time that is why radical open mindedness is required.
 

The concept of sleep, just like death, is itself imaginary.   Let me try to explain further.  
Consciousness is ever present.  In fact there is just Consciousness.   Zoom out for a second from your finite self.
Now the key is to realize it is both in a particular finite form (small self for example)  and pure infinite formlessless the "I AM" simultaneously.   The "I Am" is nothing and everything - in its purest form which as you said is pure void.  But don't mistake that for an idea of nothing or non-existence.   
So the key is realizing (through an enlightenment exp for example) that you are not only this particular finite consciousness but that simultaneously you are infinite Consciousness, which is then imagining it is a finite being that in turn imagines it goes to "sleep" or that it can "die"  or that it "has" consciousness that it can lose.  Not the case.
So there is no on and off switch for Consciousness.  In fact an on/off switch would only be something it imagines!   It just IS.  It can shapeshift into different finite forms and then imagine it is that form.  When the idea of that form ceases it collapses back into its formless nature - but note that even in form it is still formless. (And it is still imagining it is that form)
So nothing really happened or changed -  Its always present. 
 
 
 

It serves the purpose of maintaining your identity as a material being.
Once you realize there is no brain, your whole life collapses.
"The brain" is like the ultimate plot hole filler in the narrative that you call your life.
The purpose of the brain is not physical (as you assume) but imaginary. Without the story of a brain you have no way of explaining where you came from or what you are.

You will be directly conscious of the answer when you awaken to yourself.  You will discover that you are infinite and there cannot be anything outside of yourself.

The paradoxical nature of reality though is that you can become so conscious that you come full circle and realize you were perfect anyway.
Yet you can and should still grow.  Yet you were still perfect.  It's both, its either, and its neither.  
 

Well here it is being referred to the death of the ego - however there have been several times when i have had mystical experiences where i have been hit with an awesome force that feels like a tornado hitting your body from the inside - forcing you to surrender because it is too powerful for a mortal to handle - it feels like all of Infinity - which the finite cannot contain.  No chance as it will blow the doors off of you.

@Schahin No, I would not call anything destiny. Humans exercise a tiny portion of God's Free Will.
God has infinite Free Will. But also all of that Will is fully put towards actualizing Love. So in a weird strange loopy sense, God has no choice but to actualized Infinite Love. Then again, God freely chooses Infinite Love. But then again that is because God is so Infinitely Intelligent that it would never choose anything less. Which means it cannot be anything but Love. And so it goes, round and round in a vicious circle. As it must, because free will vs destiny is another one of those pesky dualities which must eventually collapse.
Contemplate this: what is the difference between free will and destiny?
Eventually you'll see that the two poles must meet and become one.
This issue is analogous to the wave/particle duality in quantum mechanics. The true nature of light is that it's not one or the other but has features of both. Likewise with free will and destiny.

@How to be wise it's total Solipsism and i have experienced this too where everything ultimately loops back to you in a paradoxical strange loop which can't be escaped.  Where ultimately your direct experience IS God's perspective.
So in one aspect this is true but in another aspect if you accept concept as being no less real than direct experience you can understand in concept that there are other perspectives and that yours is indeed finite..a part of a bigger Mind.  And i experienced this directly as well and became directly conscious that i am being other perspectives simultaneously - where it was no longer just concept to me.
But the Solipsism as God (your point) is what i experienced last.
So its both.  Inifnity is a mofo.

Reality is absolutely relative - meaning its a shift in perspectives.  For example you can look at one of the fingers and view it as a finger - relative to this perspective it is a finger.  Or you can you can keep your gaze on the finger and shift perspectives.  Now you see it as the whole hand.
So too can you as consciousness or God shift perspectives.  From your Ego's perspective to the fullness of God's perspective.  You are God regardless and that is Absolute. 
But your relative perspective can be anything it wants.  It can be a finger or the hand. And whatever that is is what reality is, literally.
That is the magic of God.  It is so infinite that it can tear down perspectives and build new ones.   This is so total that from a particular perspective no others exist unless you bring them into existence by thinking about them. (Imagining them)
All this from looking at your hand!
 
 

@tedens you must have a mystical experience...it will be revealed to you and literally your mind opens before your eyes and you become conscious that this is all in your mind.  Its the most indescribable feeling ever.  To be One.  IT. Alone.
After you come back down its always in the background.  There is no going back.  I can forget for a little while but its not like before.
But now for me its total liberation.  And i can also enjoy being in duality as well.  Its the best of both worlds. 
I hope all of you reach it someday.

@Gili Trawangan ok i see.  Yes the ego can delude itself.  But when you actually become conscious of Oneness the ego will be dead and you will be awakening to yourself as God.  God enlightening itself.   That is Absolute and not relative.  The rebirth of the ego is then able to see through it's own illusion, therein transcending itself as the ego.
 

It is scary.  It's scary and radical.  When i became directly conscious of it i became sick just from the aloneness.   I had to leave work and suffered depression on and off for a few days.  Also dealt with insanity in between perspectives of my own dual perspective and God's perspective.  Its serious business.  But once you get past that its wonderful.  There is  nothing like the feeling of liberation and escaping the matrix.
 
Also remember its not just Solipsism or Gods perspective as i call it.  Its Oneness yes, and there is only you..but you can become conscious that you have divided yourself into everyone else and you are being them right now..since iInfinity has infinite dimensions, although right now you only have your perspective.
So if you want to look at it dualisticly they are separate from you.  If you are look at it non-dualitisticly they are you.  If you look at it from Gods perspective (Solipsism) they are being imagined by you.  So you see its all perspective.
If you are not comfortable with the non dual vantage point then just stay in duality.   Forget yourself again.  Its fine. It's what you do to escape yourself.  You can even go back to the materialistic perspective although that might be hard to fully believe it again knowing what you know.  But Just be happy dude.

@zunnyman When you are fully conscious that you are God, the notion that your body will decay does not even make sense. Since your body is totally infinite and omnipresent. The human body is no more you than a brick wall. I was looking at a brick wall the other night and I could not tell the wall apart from my body. The wall is as much my body as my body.
Being immortal is not about living forever through time. It is realizing that each moment is eternal already and that there is nowhere else for God to go. God cannot go anywhere because God is everywhere.
You will not become enlightened. Rather enlightenment will reveal that your birth was just an idea, a story. The story of you will be erased. What will remain is omnipresent consciousness, which is God. Your perceptual field will be radically recontextualized and realized to be the body of God.
You are not understanding just how radical enlightenment/God/no-self is! It's so radical you cannot imagine it, and it does not fit that materialistic paradigm you're using. That whole paradigm of a physical world will be wiped out at the moment of enlightenment.
There never was a self.
Ta-da!

Baseline human awareness is not high enough to notice the Eternity of NOW. Human consciousness is deliberately time-bound to aid your survival.
Eternity will only become noticable through practices or psychedelics. But Eternity is always the case. It is always NOW, NOW, NOW. Every temporal experience is actually eternal and has existed forever. But you aren't noticing it.
You must realize that you are inside the Absolute at all times. The relative is actually the Absolute when looked at deeply enough.

You guys liked that video? Then you NEED to watch this one.
 
 

Hahaha... this kind of naivete is exactly why I said what I said. This is not how life works.
Life ALWAYS works at the expense of other life. You can minimize that to some degree, but you cannot eliminate that totally. Just the fact that you are alive means some other organism cannot be alive. For example, the fact that you were the winning sperm means that millions of other sperm had to die.
The problem is that you're not yet conscious of the trade-offs and costs of life. Study more closely how life works. Life and death are a duality which necessarily must feed off itself. It's not just an accident that wolves must hunt rabbits to survive and squirrels must hunt acorns. For every acorn that a squirrel eats, that's one potential oak tree that dies. So don't think that squirrels are innocent little creatures. Squirrels are acorn murdering machines.
This needs to be accepted and understood, not avoided or worked around. You must profoundly realize how life and death are intertwined. Otherwise you will be under the illusion that if we could just get rid of death, everything will be peachy. No! The point is to realize that death itself is inevitable. You cannot be alive without dying.
Cooperation and competition are a duality. You cannot have a life of 100% cooperation and zero competition. You must realize how the two co-arise.
You have a self/ego for a very good reason: because you need it to survive. Selfishness plays an important role in life. You cannot just be 100% selfless and stay alive. If that were possible, ego would not be needed and it would not exist. You must realize that selfishness and selflessness are a duality too. You cannot have one without the other.
With all that said, we can still work towards a more selfless society. But don't get overly utopian about it. People still gotta shit, eat, make money, fuck, and kill. Be clear-eyed about such realities. Life has hard stakes. Don't take survival for granted. It's very easy to create a sceneario where you will have to kill to survive, and you will. You do it every day. You just conveniently ignore it, because it's not useful to your survival. You are a survival machine first and foremost.
When a Native American hunter killed his prey, he would say a little prayer for taking the animals life. He realized that he had to take the animal's life to sustain his own. That is what it means to be aware of your selfishness. This is not something to feel guilty about. This is something you can turn into a spiritual experience. Survival is a spiritual experience (if you look at it the right way, without taking it for granted).
It's very important to face the brutality of life, rather than trying to avoid it, pretending like it's not there. Life is fucking brutal. Business is brutal. Relationships are brutal. Etc. This brutality is a real test of your capacity to love. Your love can become so strong precisely because life is so brutal. You can cry for every carrot you eat. "Thank you carrot, for giving me your life. I promise to use your energy towards the highest good."

Such a door exists. It's called 5-MeO-DMT.
The problem is, most ego-minds are too terrified to walk through such a door. They cannot help themselves. Their ignorance is too deep.
The best way to hide an amazing thing from everyone is to make it too good to be true. Then no one will bother to try it under the assumption that nothing can really be as good as that.
Therein lies the whole tragedy of our situation. We are in heaven but we insist on creating our own hell.

@Dlenger1 The intellectual questions are a good beginning point, but ultimately you have to graduate from that to basically just sitting in silence with a calm mind and focusing intensely on "the seer" or consciousness itself. Just sit and kinda stare at consciousness itself.
The problem with asking too many questions is that the mind then gets in the mood of giving verbal answers, which is never going to be enough.
The Neti Neti method is helpful here. Anything you identify as yourself, you must negate by realizing that that thing or property cannot be the True Self.
What you're really looking for is formlessness. "The seer" is formlessness. So any from you think you are cannot be it. And you have to be very careful about not thinking "I am formlessness" because that is still form!
This is supposed to be frustrating process and it takes intense concentration to break through. You will not break through if you do this process without intensity and consistency. 20 minutes of inquiry is just not going to produce enough intensity for a breakthrough. It's very important to schedule some long periods of time for nothing but inquiry. Like a solid week of full-time 12-hours-per-day inquiry. That is how people break through in practice. You must concentrate on it like an obsessive psychopath.

Yes the Ego is so Total in its self deception than it cannot perceive or comprehend non-existence.  It fears it.  Even though non-existence is happening right now - right on top of existence.  
It fears death, which in reality there is no such thing - you are Infinite right now - you cannot escape yourself - (or infinity) because you are actually God/Infinity as a part of Infinity/God or a part of itself.
Consciousness minus the ego/formed is Absolute Infinity - if is formless.  It is Being.  There are no dualities or distinctions there.  There is no survival or non-survival.  
So if you meditate and do self inquiry and other techniques long enough a mystical experience will occur and you will become only formless.  You as the ego shall dissolve.  You will no longer be the ego.  And you will experience Being as Being.  This is the ultimate Bliss.  Better than a heroin high.
Anyone out there who has not had a mystical experience after years of this may want to ponder using pyschedelics as a tool to speed the process.
This was a lengthy reply but i felt the question needed a lengthy explanation.
 

Do not let this freak you out - just be your perspective.
Yes you are infinite, but picturing other perspectives is just concept - it's not ACTUAL.
If you get lost in concepts that can actually be a detriment to you in this work and get you trapped in your own mind.
Just be yourself.
Your'e God right now.
When you become conscious of certain facets of the Absolute or the entire thing, via a mystical experience or experiences,  you ultimately will realize you are God - and that is unimaginable bliss.
Also keep in mind your perspective will progress in consciousness until it merges with Absolute infinity into the Absolute Oneness that you always were!

Careful! Perception is not actually happening via the brain or the eyeballs. Perception as it is commonly understood is not really happening at all. It's a conceptual scheme you're imagining. BEING is what's really happening, not perception. Perception is BEING co-opted by ego/devil.
Without the ego, perception does not occur. But this doesn't mean that colors and sensations vanish, they simply get recontextualized as something other than "my perceptions".
The very notion of "perception" is already infected with ego because it assumes that perceptions are things which happens to you through your nervous system. This is not actually true. Perceptions are not caused by the nervous system. You merely imagine they are. In fact, you imagine your entire nervous system. "My nervous system" is a sneaky metaphysical construct which you use to ground your sense of reality.
It would be helpful to stop believing in perceptions or a nervous system.
You must completely unground your sense of solid reality. Your mind must become so free that you cannot even tell what a human body or a coffee table is, because those are all conceptual things. You must even forget that you are on a planet Earth or inside a physical universe, since those are all conceptual projections which are grounding the ego.
You must reach a point where your entire sensory field is free of all conceptual interpretations or groundings. At this point, you will not know what anything is. You will look at your hand and not even recognize it as a hand. You will not know what "hands" are. Because "a hand" is actually a conceptual construction. You actually have no idea what that thing called "a hand" is. Even to call it a "thing" is already incorrect.
This is extremely tricky and subtle stuff. I cannot stress that enough.

And how is it you are going to achieve that when all of your fear is grounded in duality?
Nondualty is not an ideology, theory, or even a worldview. It is the very nature of yourself and existence. So long as you are operating from duality, you will never be able to overcome fear, master your emotions, or move away from animal behavior. Nor will you ever be cool, calm, collected, or happy. Because all of that is the foundation of being an separate ego self.
You're not appreciating yet how deep all of your emotional problems go. They are not something you can just solve with a few self-help techniques. To resolve those issues requires that you literally experience your own death because death is what you're running away from.
Nor will you be able to resolves those issues within the materialist paradigm.
The benefit to you of nonduality is that you will experience what it means to live for the very fist time in your life. Everything you've done up to this point was a sick joke. You have never actually lived yet.
The way life works is: you only get what you give.

@Leo Gura stop picking on yourself!

Guys im gonna tell you what i think can be a very key step to getting enlightened.
While meditating stare at your hand.
Now look at one of the fingers on your hand 
See it as the finger.  A part of the whole hand.
Now keep staring at the finger.  But now become conscious that it is the whole hand.
That "shift" in consciousness is what ultimately can lead to Enlightenment if you can do that.
You will start feeling the sensations in your body that is the bliss of a mystical experience.
Heres why this is so effective.
You are first seeing the finger as that part.  A part of the whole hand.  That is like what your consciousness is like to Universal consciousness or God.  Or another way is that you yourself are a finitude of infinity.
If you can make this shift in consciousness just keep doing it over and over until the mystical experience happens.
You can start working on that shift in consciousness with your little consciousness vs God Too..once u can make that shift...well fuck you will drop to your knees and weep 
This is the whole chabang guys.  All reality is is a shift in perspective.  You can look at things as a part and be conscious that they are the part and you can look at the part and become conscious that its the whole thing.
That's how God works his magic.  Its all shifts in consciousness
I would like Leo to comment on this too because for me as soon as i make the shifts ..i feel Being.  On days like today anyway..when i had a mystical experience.
But you have to keep doing that over and over.  
How fast enlightenment happens may also depend on how spiritually gifted you are too so don't get discouraged.   I know I'm making this sound easy so maybe it isn't going to be easy for everyone.
But this it guys.  Not just looking at the hand.  But doing the shifts in consciousness.