Lucid dreaming is a riveting, fantastic experience that is readily available for us to access. Some people have lucid dreams all the time without even trying. For others, like myself, it takes an active practice and a good amount of effort to get the ball rolling. If you’re in my boat then I hope this guide helps you work through the initial difficulties and be well on your way to exploring the infinite landscapes of the dreaming world.
Step 0: How dreaming works
You might be thinking to yourself “I haven’t even had a dream in years! Can I even have a lucid one?” Yes and no… While it is true that you will need to first “have dreams” before you can start working on becoming lucid in one, the good news is that dreams happen every night regardless of whether we remember them.
Every single night we go through a repeating cycle of sleep phases:
-
Non-REM Stage 1 (N1): This stage is known as “light sleep” and it is our very first transition from the time we go to bed and the time we fall asleep. The body starts to relax, the brain activity slows down, and we start to shut off. This typically lasts a few minutes, but can take a bit longer for some people.
-
Non-REM Stage 2 (N2): This is also light sleep, but of a deeper kind, after we’ve transitioned into sleeping. Our heart rate slows down, brain activity further slows, body temperature decreases, and we experience sleep spindles. We spend a large portion of our sleeping cycles in this phase, with studies suggesting that it plays a significant role in facilitating plasticity which supports learning, memory consolidation, declarative learning, motor skills, and overall intellectual performance.
-
Non-REM Stage 3 (N3): This is known as “deep sleep” in which we are as KO’d as possible, turning down neural activity as far as it can go in order to repair body tissue, build bone and muscle, and strengthen the immune system. If you exercise then this is when your “gains” are made. It’s also the most difficult phase to wake up from – if our alarm goes off during this time we feel absolutely destroyed.
-
REM Sleep: Finally we have arrived at our bread and butter, Rapid Eye Movement. We begin to experience rapid eye movement, resembling a wakeful state of mind, and we start to have full dreams. The first REM cycle of the night is typically very short, lasting only a couple of minutes, but increases in duration as the longer we sleep. Closer to morning we tend to have much longer dreams.
We start off in N1 when we first go to bed and transition through these phases until we finish our first REM phase. At this point we return to light sleep, typically N2 but maybe even N1, and start the cycle over again. Regardless of whether you remember your dreams or not, you go through these phases every single night.
Step 1: Remembering your dreams (dream recall)
Now that we understand what happens to our body during sleep, we can move on to the actual practice. The very first step is to ensure we are remember our dreams regularly. If you already remember your dreams then you can skip to the next step. For many people, however, dreams seem to be a rarely remembered occurrence even though they happen every night, multiple times per night.
Ensuring Good Quality of Sleep
In an ideal world we fall asleep and go through the sleep phases in a well arranged and smooth cycle. In reality, many things can effect how well we transition through the different phases. For example if we go to sleep drunk then it might be very difficult for our body to go into deep sleep until the alcohol has been burned off in our system. This can result in us not feeling fresh in the morning AND the brain sacrificing REM cycles in order to try and recover physically. Heavy marijuana use can also have an impact on the quality of our sleep and the total amount of REM sleep that we get in a night.
In general if we want to have more dreams and remember them better we need to ensure we are getting a good quality of sleep. This can mean abstaining from certain activities before bed, not drinking caffeine in the evening hours, and minimizing the amount of screen time before sleep. That last one can be very difficult in our modern day lifestyle.
Getting ENOUGH sleep
Our sleep cycle starts with long periods of deep sleep and short periods of REM. The longer we stay asleep, the more we transition into longer REM periods. This should make it obvious why having a full night of sleep is very important for increasing dream recall. If we’re only getting 4-6 hours of sleep we will be having very little REM time to work with – not to mention impacting our overall health. On the other hand getting a full 8 hours of sleep will typically leave us having multiple long dreams before it’s time to wake up.
It can be rather difficult to get a full 8 hours, depending on what your life is like. For example if you’re raising an infant then getting a full 8 hours can be extra daunting. LUCKILY the amount of sleep in 24 hours matters more than getting one solid 8 hour block. In fact, studies have shown that polyphasic sleep (multiple sleeps in one day) can result in the same benefits with less total hours. This means that taking a nap throughout the day to compensate for your night time will be just as good (sometimes better) than one big block of 8 hours.
Keeping a Dream Journal
Ok so you’ve ensured you’re getting a good amount of quality sleep, but dreams are still not rolling in. Why? By this point we can be almost certain that we are having proper REM cycles, the problem now is that our mind works on trying to maximize efficiency. To put it simply… You haven’t convinced your brain that remembering dreams is worth the effort. If we spend years paying little attention to our dreams then the brain will simply discard the information as soon as we wake up. We need to convince it otherwise.
The easiest way to do this is to create habits that require our brain to NOT discard our dreams as soon as we wake up. Here is a simple pattern to include first thing when you wake up. Try to do this even if you wake up in the middle of the night:
-
Stay in bed for a moment.
The moment that we start stretching, getting out of bed, and moving about our brain has switched into a new mode. Staying still after waking up can help the dream linger a bit. -
Try to remember your dream.
Instead of darting your thoughts towards what you need to do today or checking your social media, take a moment to ask yourself: “What was I dreaming about?” You might only recall vague impressions or individual symbols. It could be as little as “I think I saw something blue” or maybe “I was feeling anxious about something…” -
Write down what you can remember.
At first this might just be one or two ambiguous words, but don’t be discouraged. The act of trying to remember and writing it down will encourage your brain to prioritize the information. Very quickly, maybe even a week later, you will be writing down dreams that span a full page or more filled with intricate details.
Keeping a dream journal is considered an essential tool in lucid dreaming. You should be keeping a journal throughout your dreaming practice, even after you have a solid level of dream recall trained up. This will help you get to know your dreams and dream symbols, making it easier to recognize when you are in a dream.
Step 2: Reality Checks
OK so you’re getting good sleep AND you’re remembering your dreams. What next? We are now going to introduce a couple of habits that will try and trigger a sudden realization in the middle of our dream. There’s really not anything more to becoming lucid. There are definitely techniques to becoming a more capable lucid dreamer, BUT for now we are first trying to get there. The moment you REALIZE you’re dreaming, you are then lucid.
Reality Checks
A reality check (RC) is any action that can test whether we are awake or dreaming. Certain actions just don’t act the same in our dreams. Electronics frequently malfunction, light switches don’t work, and written words tend to shift or change when we look away. All of these can be used as reality checks BUT my personal favourite are RCs that use our own body. It’s available at all times (with very rare exceptions) and doesn’t require us to depend on a shifting dream environment that can have a hypnotic hold on us.
Here are two reality checks that are easy to perform.
Pinch your nose: If you pinch your nose closed and try to breathe through it, in the waking world we obviously won’t get far. In the dreaming world, however, the air will rush right through your etheric fingers. First off this is a very unexpected result, making for quick realization, and the air going through your fingers is a very unique feeling. This is my go-to RC as it’s quick and easy. When I’ve performed it in my dreams I’ve never once failed to realize I was dreaming.
Finger through hand: Another simple RC is to use those etheric hands on each other. First take a look at your palms – sometimes this can be enough to realize you’re dreaming since your hands might look very different than what you’re used to. Next take one of your index fingers and try to push it through the palm of your other hand. In a dream it’s very likely that the finger will go right through the hand as if they were ghost hands.
The trick to reality checks is to make them a regular habit. Do them as many times as you can throughout the day until it becomes automatic. Once it has become a habit, you’re very likely to do the action in the middle of a dream and suddenly realize that you are dreaming. If you don’t like the two example RCs, you can find lots of other ones with a quick google search.
For the “lazy way” you can stop at this step and you will likely start having lucid dreams sooner or later without needing to put any more effort into the practice. Unfortunately habits take a while to build up and that can mean having to wait for a month or two before lucid dreams start happening. Luckily there’s more we can do to maximize the possibility.
Step 3: Mindfulness & Dream Symbols
Doing reality checks is great, but what’s even better is being aware of the events and environments that we find ourselves in the middle of. It’s not uncommon to dream of places, people, or occurrences that are very different to our day-to-day lives. These can be helpful cues for performing a reality check and realizing that you’re dreaming.
Staying Mindful
It seems almost absurd when we wake up and realize that we were dreaming of a purple elephant dancing inside of a great concert hall on a spaceship. You wake up and think “how did I not realize I was dreaming?!” It’s a two-fold problem. On the one hand people are generally lacking in mindfulness. We’re so wrapped up in what we’re thinking and how we’re feeling about a situation that we don’t even pay attention to where we are or what is happening around us. The second part of the problem is that dreams tend to be very hypnotic in and of themselves, amplifying our tendency to get lost in them.
One of my Buddhist gurus once casually mentioned that he always knows when he is dreaming. He doesn’t do any reality checks, he doesn’t keep any dream journals, but he is always deeply aware of the whole around him. If you can do that at all times then first of all congratulations on being extremely skilled, and second you should be having lucid dreams all the time without any problems. This is great, BUT quite unrealistic for most people who are wrapped up in the typical concerns of daily life.
It is much easier to introduce moments of mindfulness than it is to stay mindful at all times. Just like we have made reality checks a regular habit, we can do the same with scanning our current situation. Try to take moments throughout the day to look around and ask: “Where am I? What am I doing? What was I doing before this?” Maybe everything seems normal, or maybe things are a bit weird and a reality check is in order. I would recommend doing a reality check regardless of what you find, but having these moments of mindfulness can greatly increase the chances of us breaking the hypnotic hold of our dreams for a moment and actually doing the reality checks. It will create moments that take us out of “automatic” mode and into “mindful action”.
Learning our Dream Symbols
If you’ve been maintaining a dream journal you should be getting pretty familiar with your dreams. It is very likely that you’ve noticed some personal patterns. Perhaps there are certain places you tend to dream about, maybe specific people, or specific symbols. It’s different for everyone, but typically everyone will find some kind of repeating pattern.
Learning these symbols and remembering them will go a long way in triggering our realization that we are dreaming. If you happen to dream of dogs often then attaching a reality check to every time you see a dog would maximize the opportunities for having a lucid dream. This is why it’s recommended to keep a dream journal beyond the first steps of increasing dream recall.
Step 4: MILD - Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreams
Ok you’re doing all of the above but still no lucid dreams. This can be rather frustrating. Luckily we have a couple more tricks up our sleeve. The first one is called a MILD, a mnemonic induced lucid dream. A mnemonic is any device that we can use to remind ourselves of something. For an easy example we might tell ourselves “when I go grocery shopping, I need to remember to get the milk”. Associating the grocery store with milk will make it more likely that we remember it as soon as we step foot in a grocery store, compared to simply telling ourselves “I need to get milk”. Our brains work by association, and when it comes to lucid dreaming we can weaponize this.
Here is a technique for leveraging mnemonics:
-
As you’re falling asleep you will need to remind yourself to perform reality checks. If you know a common dream symbol then you can repeat to yourself “When I see ______, I will do a reality check and realize I am dreaming”. If you don’t have a common symbol to associate, it’s completely fine to simply tell yourself “I will do a reality check and realize I am dreaming”. So far the mnemonic part hasn’t been used and that’s fine. Keep repeating the statement to yourself as you fall asleep.
-
When you wake up from a dream, either in the middle of the night or early in the morning, this is when we will use mnemonics. There is a tendency for us to return to the same dream we were just having, ESPECIALLY if we’re thinking about that dream. In this way we can hijack the dream we just woke up from to use as a mnemonic. Let’s say you were dreaming of driving a car while on a road trip. You will go back to sleep while telling yourself “I’m dreaming of driving a car, I will do a reality check and realize I am dreaming.” Keep repeating this to yourself over and over as you fall asleep.
-
To maximize chances of success include a visualization. Imagine yourself in the dream, doing whatever you were doing. Imagine doing the reality check and realizing you’re dreaming. In our example, as you tell yourself “I’m dreaming of driving a car”, imagine the dream scene and yourself in the driver’s seat with your hands on the wheel. As you tell yourself “I will do a reality check”, imagine yourself doing your preferred reality check. When you repeat “I will realize I am dreaming”, imagine yourself realizing you’re dreaming, feel that moment of amazement, and maybe even imagine what you’ll do next – maybe fly?
Obviously this method can’t ALWAYS be done. If you’ve woken up and it’s time to get ready for work, you won’t have the opportunity to do the technique. However if you’ve maximized your dream recall and you’re ensuring a good amount of quality sleep you will likely be waking up a couple of times directly out of dreams with an hour or two of sleep left. If you’re NOT waking up a few times automatically then we have ONE MORE trick for you.
Step 5: WILD - Wake Induced Lucid Dreams
Okay now it’s time to pull out the BIG GUNS. Wake induced lucid dreams are in some sense the most difficult technique to pull off, but the most effective once learned. What we’re trying to do here is essentially stay aware from waking directly into dreaming. While it’s difficult, it is very much possible.
We start off by leveraging what we know about our sleep cycle. Pulling a WILD from the start of the night is EXTREMELY difficult because we go through a solid 45-60m period from N1 to N3 before finally hitting a REM cycle. That means you have to stay focused and aware for a very long time. Beyond that our first REM cycle is typically only a couple minutes; meaning you have exerted a lot of effort for very little reward.
On the other hand if you have already slept for 4-6 hours then the shift from N1 to REM might only take a couple of minutes, with the dream lasting 20+ minutes. We might even slip “almost directly” into our dreams, with a barely noticeable N1-N3 cycle.
Here is how we’ll approach it:
-
We start by setting an alarm to wake ourselves up in the second half of our sleep window. This can take a bit of experimentation. Your aim is to find a time you’re likely to have a dream. Start by setting an alarm 6 hours after your bedtime.
-
If the alarm goes off during deep sleep then you will be awoken feeling very groggy and heavy. You will want to toss the alarm out the window and go back to sleep. This means we picked the wrong time and the next night try adjusting your alarm by 15 minutes forward.
-
When we get the timing right we will be waking up right out of a dream. This is the sweet spot we want to hit, as waking up in the middle of a dream will help us remember the dream easily. Not to mention you won’t feel like a truck ran over you.
-
After waking up, take a moment to regain some level of awareness so that you can focus. It’s important for the WILD technique that we are capable of focusing. Some people find it’s helpful to get out of bed for 10-15m and set their intention to WILD, others find it more conductive to stay in bed and after a minute or two to try and go back to sleep. You will need to experiment a bit to see what works best for you. If you’re falling asleep so fast that there’s no room to focus then add a bit of a wake window. If you’re finding it hard to fall back asleep then minimize how much you disturb yourself.
-
As you’re falling asleep the goal is to stay aware. Some people will find repeating the MILD technique to be helpful in this endeavour, others find it too distracting and prefer something as simple as counting numbers. The point is that you’re trying to stick your attention to something that takes enough attention not to lose focus, but not so much attention that you can’t fall asleep.
-
The next part can be a bit terrifying to first-timers. During a WILD we will stay aware through the process of falling asleep, through N1-N3, and directly into REM. First we will notice hypnogogic imagery – quick flashes of stuff. We might see some patterns, or maybe even a full dream scene for a moment. They tend to be momentary, but grow in duration as we fall asleep. Let them be, if you try too hard to focus on them then they will vanish quicker and you’ll find yourself regressing back out of sleep.
As you shift through N2/N3 you will feel the experience intensify. Some people hear voices or whispers, strong auditory experiences. People often jolt out of bed thinking there’s someone in the room, or something unpleasant coming towards them. At the same time you might feel bodily sensations like vibrating or tactile touch. All in all this phase is very trippy and can be difficult for beginners to get through. Luckily you’ll find that there’s nothing actually happening when you jolt awake. Eventually you’ll learn to relax into the experience and let the weirdness do its thing. It is a good sign, because it means you’re almost at your goal. -
If you’ve managed to get through this transition then you will be amazed to suddenly find yourself in the middle of a dream. No need for reality checks, no need for mnemonics, you are lucid right off the bat.
There are some Tibetan dream yogas that closely resemble the WILD technique, but tend to aim for staying fully aware from the beginning of the night all the way into morning. This is something that is EXTREMELY difficult to do even for the most experienced of meditators. Luckily we don’t need to pull off such a feat, we just need to find a good timing in our sleep cycle and persist through a single shift from N1 to REM.
Final Tips
Some people will start having lucid dreams within a few days or weeks of starting the practice. If you’ve went as far as step 5 and are still not lucid dreaming after months of persistent effort then perhaps it is time to take the foot off the gas. If we’re stressing too much about trying to have a lucid dream it can work against us.
-
It’s good to find a balance of effort. Enough effort to make the practice an important part of your day-to-day, but not so much that it stresses you out and creates a negative association.
-
There are certain herbs that you can find online that will help make dreams more vivid and increase the likelihood of becoming lucid. This can be very helpful for some people, but of course be cautious of interactions and allergic reactions. Approach herbs with caution and respect – taking very low doses at the start and working your way up to recommended dosage.
-
Learning to interpret your dreams, making them more meaningful to you, can help with becoming lucid. Don’t look at OTHER people’s interpretations of symbols, instead try to figure out what different symbols mean to YOU specifically. A great book on this topic is “Man and His Symbols” by Carl Jung.
-
If you’re looking to REALLY dive deep into all of the mentioned techniques and learn more about the wonders of lucid dreaming then I would recommend the book “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming” by Stephen LaBerge. He has contributed immensely to our understanding of dreams and lucidity. He ran many experiments and was a pioneer in the scientific community.
I hope you enjoyed this guide and I wish you the best of luck in your dreaming journey. While the task may seem daunting, it is a rite of passage. Once we become proficient in gaining lucidity, there are many techniques that we can use for increasing the level of lucidity, exploring the unconscious, maximizing control, performing magick, etc… However these are all going to be left for a later post 