Date: June 26th, 2023
Lucid dreaming is being aware that you're dreaming during your dream. My freshman year of college is when I first learned how to regularly lucid dream. From my experience, the requirements for frequent lucid dreams are mainly habitual. I've since pushed those habits to the wayside and the lucid dreams have followed. This writing documents my process to habitually lucid dream.
At its best, a lucid dream is a perfectly customizable playground—a fully immersive VR game—where you can experience whatever you can dream of. You can lucid dream for fun, to outwit nightmares, for creative efforts, or anything else you can think of. For me, it's an interesting lark and seems well worth the habitual prerequisites.
There are devices and more clinical methods to lucid dream but I'm going to focus on the prescription I've tried and had success with. Here's the habitual prescription to start lucid dreaming:
Good sleep, which also tends to mean regular sleep times
Reality checks
Dream journal
Telling yourself you're going to lucid dream
Consistency and time
Setting an alarm 5-6 hours into your sleep, waking up for 30min-1hr, then going back to bed
I wasn't a fan of this method and didn't experiment extensively with it, but this is a common method
Good sleep - self-explanatory
Reality checks
The purpose of reality checks is to have a "reality check" you can do multiple times during the day so that this behavior will percolate into your dreams and tip you off to the fact that you're dreaming. Mine are looking at my hands and counting my fingers, looking at a clock, or recalling how I got to where I am right now. You'll also see one of these in the movie Inception, where Leonardo's character uses a spinning top to determine reality. It's weird that these reality checks work but for some reason when you check your hands in a dream, they might have fewer fingers or look non-human. When you look at a clock in a dream, the numbers seem to not make sense or be out of order. And, when you try to recall how you got to where you are in a dream you have no clue.
Dream journal
Make it a habit that as soon as you wake up, you document what you dreamed about—if you can remember. I'm not exactly sure why this helps but it fits within the broader idea to inspire lucidity which is to habitually think about dreaming.
Telling yourself you're going to lucid dream
The idea is that right before you fall asleep you have in your head that the next time you become aware, you'll be in a dream state. For me, I'd have this in my mind as I relaxed into sleep.
Consistency and time
I'm sure there's a spectrum to the skill of lucid dreaming. The last time I started trying to lucid dream, it took around a month to break into lucid dreams consistently.
What I had read and later experienced essentially broke down the levels of lucid dreams like so:
Level 1: you realize you're in a dream and then immediately wake up
Level 2: you realize you're in a dream but can't control your surroundings
Level 3: you realize you're in a dream and can fully alter whatever you want to within the dream
My experience has shown that you work your way up to the higher-level (more lucid) dreams over time. There are some tips I've found to be helpful when trying to level up your lucidity.
Level 1
To pass level 1, you need to keep yourself calm once you realize you're in a dream. The more comfortable you get with lucid dreaming the more aware you are of your "awakeness" during the dream. I partition awakeness into three buckets, from least awake to awake:
I'm sleeping but aware I'm dreaming
It feels more like a deep meditation rather than being asleep
Actually being awake.
Passing level 1 is all about calming yourself down enough so that you have enough time to stop the waking process in that weird meditative state and then reigning it back in until you just feel like you're sleeping.
Level 2
When you realize you're in a dream but still can't alter anything, it can be frustrating because there isn't exactly a foolproof way to get to level 3. However, I've found that it helps if you can manage to create a "training wheel" equivalent in your dream. This could be adding a door, that once you open, the object you're trying to create will be behind it. Or a wand you put in your hand that when you cast, will create the objects you're summoning. The training wheels are meant to help trick your mind into believing that what you're about to create, will be created.
Lucid dreaming does require you to become aware during sleep and this awareness is associated with higher brain activity. To my understanding, it's not definitive whether or not lucid dreaming degrades your sleep quality. My hunch would be yes, but I'm hoping regular sleep times and respectable total hours will counteract any negative effects.