How to practice lucid dreaming

You wanna give lucid dreaming a go?

I hear, you’re interested in how to practice lucid dreaming?
I’m by no means an expert, and unfortunately not a natural either, but I know how to do it, and I can teach you a few tricks how to have your first lucid dream in the course of a few weeks.

Keep in mind that it does take maybe a month or more for the first results, because you have to develop some kind of routine during your awake time.
Also, be aware that I can’t be made responsible for possible uncomfortable experiences like sleep paralysis (which I’ve never experienced as a bad thing though btw.), or in case you have a mental condition or tendency like anxiety, depression, paranoia, multiple personality disorder or whatever else, I’m not sure how wise it is whether to try lucid dreaming at all.

For me personally, it’s a fun thing to do occasionally, and I like it. Never did me any harm. So, if you’re unsure, you might wanna read up on it more or talk to a professional. I’m not the right person for that.

If you wanna have a more detailed look into lucid dreaming, I can recommend Stephen LaBerge's and Howard Rheingold’s “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming”. The cover looks horrible, but it’s a good read, and includes an in-depth and better step by step instruction than mine.

Alrighty, with that out of the way, let’s get started!

1) Remember your dreams

First of all, you need to be aware that remembering your dreams is the very first step.
Now you might say: “but I can’t remember my dreams in the morning” or “as soon as I try, they fade”. Yes, that’s normal. Your brain keeps itself entertained while your body sleeps and makes up all kinds of crazy stories. So when you wake up, brain goes out of idle mode and leaves the dreams behind.
Now, there apparently are people who don’t dream at all ever, so for those people I don’t know what to suggest. You can always try, what I’m telling the others now.

Cobb says:

So basically, when you wake up, try to stay in bed a bit, maybe eyes closed, and try to remember what you’ve just dreamed. Maybe you only remember the last moment before your alarm got you, maybe a bit more.
Try this a few times, and if you want, you can even write everything down in a little dream journal.
Do this for a week and you start remembering more and more.
You’ll even begin to realize that you dreamed more than one dream. Like episodes that aren’t necessarily connected. I enjoyed that part as well, because you start to understand with how much bullshit your brain comes up at night :D

2) Analyze your dreams

For a while I had a dream journal next to my bed.
(I blurred the photo a bit. I don't want you to easily read what I wrote down ;) )

So, maybe after a week or two, you should have become better at remembering dreams. At this point, I highly suggest to write them down, or at least the most important keywords, so you still have an idea what the dreams were about days or even weeks later.
Make headlines, sketch sceneries, use coloured pencils, go wild. Try to enjoy keeping the journal, so it doesn’t become a chore.

Now, you should have a few pages of dreams ready. Look at them and try to find recurring elements. You always dream of elephants, of barred windows, of the colour yellow, of a feeling of stress, even a certain taste or smell. Or you always have trouble walking straight, or everything is blurry. Anything.
If you don’t find one or two immediately, just keep looking. Sometimes they’re hard to spot. Or you simply didn’t think about writing them down earlier.

So, when you’ve found one, let’s say there’s always a TV somewhere, sometimes running, sometimes off, let’s take that. That’s your _dream symbol_ now.

Reality Checks

Okey, Reality Check sounds maybe a bit weird, but LaBerge called it that if I remember correctly, so I just stick with it.

In order to achieve a lucid dream you need to realize while dreaming that you’re in fact dreaming right then. In regular dreams, we usually just observe like we’re watching a movie or we’re forced to do what our dream makes us doing. We’re passive. Lucid dreaming is taking control over what’s happening. In other words, you try to get out of brain idle mode without physically waking up.
That may sound impossible, but it’s not.

So, for you to get there, we need reality checks. A reality check is something that tells you that you’re awake. Dreams world have slightly different rules than our actual world such as lack of continuity, weird physical laws etc.
Paying attention to these differences help us getting lucid in our dreams.

Remember in Inception when Cobb asks Ariadne in the café whether she remembers how she got here? First she wants to explain, then realizes that she doesn’t know. That’s a reality check.
I.e. Think about what happened the last five minutes. Did you walk, did you drive, does everything add up, or is there a gap in your memory that you can’t explain? If there is, you might be dreaming.

Other checks are digital watches or clocks. They never tell you real times in dreams. Rather something like “95:X4” instead of real time. Light switches usually don’t work either or do something else than switching the light on. So do elevators. And there’s a lot more.

3) How to practice with reality checks

Okey, not that kind of checking out. Moving on...

You know what a reality check is, but now you may ask how in Cthulhu's name you start doing them in your dreams.
In fact it’s easy, you need to do them while you’re awake, so you start doing them absent-mindedly in your dreams as well.

Now, here’s where the TV (or whatever your dream symbol is) comes into place. In order to do reality checks in dreams, you have to develop some kind of routine during your awake time. If your recurring dream symbol is a TV, you might wanna do a reality check whenever you see a TV. Every single time.
Look at your watch, at the time on your phone. Try to think of the last five minutes, how you got here. Where were you five minutes before? Hit a light switch, does it work?

The “penetrable palm”

There’s other reality checks as well, my two favourites are the “nose pinch” and the “penetrable palm”. I call them that, I don’t know if that’s official :D
For the “nose pinch” you close your nostrils with your fingers, so you can’t breathe through it. (Like you jump into a pool and don’t want water to get into your nose). Funnily enough, in dreams you can breathe through. So, whenever you’re able to breathe through your closed nostrils, you must be dreaming.

The “penetrable palm” is another check which is pretty weird.
You try to push the fingers of one hand through the palm of the other. As illustrated. It doesn’t work, unless you’re dreaming (or if it’s photoshopped :D )

It’s important to develop a routine with different reality checks. Because your brain will be telling you in your dreams e.g. that it’s completely normal for a watch to say it’s 55 past 29 o’clock.

After a week or so, you start doing the checks absent-mindedly and thus maybe even in your dreams.
And then...

Success?

As soon as you start doing reality checks in your dreams, you will become aware that you’re dreaming, and that is where the fun begins.
You need to know, that you're sometimes only partially lucid, at the beginning especially, and that you won’t have a lot of control over what happens. But with time, you will get better at it and the dreams last longer.
Now there’s a lot of practices out there on how to maintain lucid state and how to influence your dream surroundings, but I’ll leave that for another post. First of all you need to get to this point. Then we can think about the next step.

It doesn’t work!!

It will, trust me. Just keep trying. It took me a month or longer to have a partially (and pretty boring) lucid dream. It was over in a few seconds, then I lost control (or woke straight up, I can’t quite remember).

Just to be clear: You keep a journal, right? You have found one or more dream symbols? You do reality checks, when you see the dream symbol when awake? And have you been doing all this for a few weeks?

You can also try to go to bed early. Develop a good sleep routine. It’s also much easier to remember dreams in the morning when you wake up naturally and not by a blaring alarm. But yeah, I know how hard that is :)
Just don’t give up too soon!

But I really really can’t do it!!!

If you still struggle after a few weeks, you can actively try to induce lucid dreams by varying sleeping patterns.
There’s several ways to do that.
One is to set an alarm (best not a really loud one) in the middle of the night. Try not to turn on too much light, so you don’t wake up too much. Stay in bed and think of random things to keep your mind busy (e.g. not too hard and not too simple calculations like “what’s 243 plus 597”, in other words something monotonous works best) and lay completely still. What you try to do here is to trick your body into thinking you’re asleep, while you try to keep your brain awake. You may experience the occasional muscle flinch or the same feeling when your foot or leg has gone to sleep. That is just your body checking if you’re still awake or not and also the begin of sleep paralysis, to keep you from sleep walking. Just don’t worry and ignore it. Keep doing some calculations.
If it works, you may experience a sensation of falling through your mattress, which is exactly what you’re looking for. Then you’re experiencing the start of a Wake Induced Lucid Dream (a “WILD” as LaBerge calls it).

Theoretically you can try to WILD at any time throughout the day. But if your body isn’t tired, it’s really difficult. Unless you’re experienced with meditation, you might not manage it.

However, in my personal experience, afternoon naps work just as well. Sometimes when I’m not working and get tired at around 4 or 5pm, I can simply lie down, try to stay awake and let my body relax. About once every four or five times, I manage to induce a lucid dream. And they’re usually pretty good.

In fact, now that I write about it: I had my first lucid dream experience this way, before I even knew that lucid dreams were a thing.

Maybe you can try that too.

Is lucid dreaming dangerous or bad for my health?

Well, let’s put it this way: It’s the same as with the discussion on guns or violent video games. Guns and games aren’t dangerous per se. It’s the way you use them that can be dangerous.
They – as well as dreams – can be a lot of fun, but if there’s something bothering you, if you use them as a form of escapism or if they give you something that you couldn’t have without them, they can become a problem.
If you wanna have lucid dreams to be with a dream girl- or boyfriend, and at the same time you stop seeing actual people, well, then you’d rather stop doing it. But that isn’t the problem of lucid dreams, it’s a psychological problem.

As for the question about health... Lucid dreaming isn’t bad for your health as far as I see it. First of all, the times you become lucid physically are the same as sleeping. Your body will still be rested in the morning after a night of lucid dreaming. I can’t say how it is, if you constantly dream lucid, for me it’s usually a few very short episodes once every week or so. Not hours and hours each night. Maybe a natural can explain that better.
But generally it isn’t a bad thing. Your brain is idle anyway, so you might as well change the idle mode a bit more to your liking.

So, have fun practicing now!

What are your coolest lucid dreams? Your weirdest?

I’m curious, guys and girls.
What are your experiences?
And what’s more, for those of you who start trying now, please keep me updated on your results in a few weeks.
I'd like to know :)

Sleeping cat in a box tax

tl;dr: Dreams are fun. Lucid dreams are more fun.

Mandatory front page edit? Well, why the hell not. Send me pictures of your sonic screwdrivers. Or anything doctor who related. TARDIS dresses? Hell yeah.