The Best Time to Start Lucid Dreaming is Now
If you spend a third of your life sleeping, why not make it fun?
You’ve heard the term here and there. Lucid dreaming. While the astral plane might just seem out of reach, there are quite a few ways to become mindful and eventually work your way up to controlling your dreams.
(Disclaimer: while there are a ton of guides floating around online, this is what has worked for me over the course of a few years. Results may vary.)
Writing down your dreams. The easiest way to start your journey is remembering your own dreams. I started doing this on a whim and it slowly became habit over the course of a few years. You don’t have to start out recalling every detail of your nightly adventure, but you will over time. My early entries started out in fragmented sentences with just the key details- “blue house” “watching TV” and eventually moved up to “Sitting in my high school literature classroom” and “visiting the farmer’s market out west”.
After writing them down for some time they became full fledged, multiple paragraph entries. On nights I was feeling especially ambitious, I even remembered multiple dreams!
The hardest part about starting your dream journal is getting up and immediately writing the information down. Dreams often disappear like migrating butterflies and you only have a limited amount of time with your memories of them, so it’s better to just wake up and write them down instead of laying there and risking falling back asleep. It doesn’t matter what you write your dreams down in- while I did once write them in a fancy diary, a spiral bound notebook does the job. If you’re feeling especially lazy, just type them down into a note app on your phone and clean them up later. Writing dreams down takes dedication.
Once you start writing down your dreams, you’ll eventually notice common themes in them. Identify them. This is different for everyone. Some people have recurring dreams about their childhood or fears. Some are more specific such as teeth falling out or showing up to work naked. Dreams often lack logic and once you start questioning it the dream can fall apart.
This leads to doing reality checks. These could range from anything to counting your fingers to make sure you only have ten to asking yourself if you’re dreaming in real life. A simple one for me is asking myself if I’m dreaming when I go a mall in the real world so I get used to doing it in a dream, thus making me realize I’m in a dream and giving me control over it. Make note of places you go often in dreams. My most common places are schools, arcades, and malls.
This also works in practice for places you don’t visit regularly. Elementary school serves as a good example. I haven’t been in one in years and have no reason to visit one in the real world. The same goes for my childhood home. I had a particularly lucid spell when I moved out on my own last year- my mother no longer slept in the bedroom down the hall so it was easy when I saw her in a dream to say “I don’t live here anymore so I must be dreaming!”. I would then walk out the front door and go on my own adventure.
The most important part is believing it. Sometimes you might just realize you’re in a dream- what next? You have to believe that you can control your dreams. As a kid this was a very easy task. Twelve year old me could easily whip up a great dream plot for an adventure and summon characters like nobody’s business. I didn’t question why I was hanging out with people I’ve never met and didn’t mind it at all. I could stay out on RPG-like adventures day after day in dream since I didn’t have to worry about getting myself up for work in a few hours.
If you want to see someone in your dreams, you have to believe they’re waiting behind a door when you open it. It sounds odd in practice but even a shred of doubt can make the task harder. Another easy way to summon someone is reaching out your hand behind you and grabbing for them. They’ll be there and now you have a new friend in your dream!
A simple exercise involves clutching your hand tight and thinking that an object will be in it when you open it. Something small. A key or marble would work great. This helps you work your way up in dreams since a lot of people jump to overambitious tasks that wake them up such as flying or trying to sleep with someone off the bat. Not unlike painting, lucid dreaming is a skill you curate (unless you’re incredibly lucky or determined).
This leads me to the next part- mindfulness. Dreams can bring up a lot of things on our subconscious. Fear, stress, unfinished business. Stuff you didn’t even know you were worrying about. On the flip side, mindfulness in this sense is focusing on the things you want to dream about.
If I wanted to dream about being at the beach I’d spend some time focusing on that thought before bed. This ties into the part about believing it and convincing yourself into having a dream you want. I would look up pictures of different beaches and listen to ocean sounds before bed. While it can get a lot more complicated than that, the concept is the same. Trying to go to another era in a dream? Look up old photos and stories about that time period.
Never been to space? That doesn’t matter. Imagine yourself floating in a colorful galaxy full of stars. It becomes easier the more you do it the more you immerse yourself into this state.
This concept also works for getting up during the night which is commonly referred to as the wake back to bed (WBTB) method. You get up, get a drink, go to the bathroom, and think about what you want to dream about before (hopefully) slipping into a lucid dream about it. This is the easiest consistent method for me since I often wake up halfway through the night.
It also helped to get up and write down what I want to dream about. You could look at it this way as writing a story and picking it up later. Since the details are cemented on paper, your brain can fill in the rest.
Another thing for me was
having things that reminded me of my dreams around my room.
Purple fairy lights that made an appearance in them were a cheap purchase that helped me remember to do reality checks. I purchased fake flowers that appeared in my dreams. I drew pictures of my dream characters and looked them over from time to time.Once you get down the basics, lucid dreaming becomes easier and more frequent. I went from having one every few months to one every month in a short period of time. Right now I have a lucid dream every other week which increased with reading my dream journal before bed and practicing mindfulness so my brain wasn’t bogged down by stress dreams about real life.
Maybe by reading this, you’ll have a lucid dream tonight!