A Simple Guide to Lucid Dreaming

A Simple Guide to Lucid Dreaming And Improving Your Dream Recall


Preamble

Lucid Dreaming, the conscious control of one’s own dreams, can be a difficult skill to master but I think that it’s one that every living person could benefit from to some degree. Being able to truly establish lucidity requires a very deep and personal understanding of the self and to be able to improve it further requires even further understanding. While it might be initially tempting to go for the allure of turning all your dreams into grandiose fantasies, if you’re anything like me you will find that quickly loses its appeal as you realize that there are stark differences between the dream world and the real world. Indulge as you will, no one can see you in your dreams but yourself, but do recognize that is not the true benefit.

The true benefit of lucid dreaming is in the deep understanding of your own mind and how it functions, the interplay of the conscious and subconscious mind and the ways in which they are both separate and a unified whole. Lucid dreaming is an intensely introspective exercise and with the help of some critical thought can help you a lot in understanding how your own mind really ticks.

Now, with all that business out of the way, a good starting point for this is that for roughly every 1-1½ hours of sleep you get you should be having 1 period of sustained REM, a dream. If you wake up in the morning and you don’t remember any dreams it’s not because you weren’t dreaming, it’s because you don’t remember them. Dreams can fade rapidly, they’re largely managed by your subconscious mind and your conscious and subconscious are naturally quite partitioned. The ultimate goal of lucid dreaming is basically to put some doorways or windows in these partitions, so it is easier to see into or travel between them.

But first we must know where the partitions are, so we’ll start with dream recall. The term dream recall refers to your personal ability to remember your dreams every night, if you have ‘perfect’ dream recall and you slept for 8 hours you should be remembering something like 5-8 dreams. Less than this means your dream recall is imperfect and can be improved, giving you more chances at attaining lucidity. And if you have never managed to remember your dreams very reliably, there are some foods that can help to improve it as well. Dairy products are the most common and most effective a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is also pretty ideal brain food and can help things along if you’ve had a particularly mentally tiring day.

Improving Dream Recall
Below are a few simple methods for improving your dream recall, really the simplest thing one can do and pretty vital to being able to establish lucidity. You need to be present to be exerting control.

Dream Journaling
One of the most simple ways one can improve dream recall is simply by recording the dreams they do remember immediately after waking up. Dreams may fade from memory incredibly fast, so if you do choose to make use of dream journaling then you want to have something like a pen and paper within arms reach of where you’re going to be sleeping. Not a phone or anything that would be complicated to operate, that will cause the dream to fade faster. You would ideally want a simple open pad of paper with a pen that doesn’t need to be operated or a pencil and write down as much as you can remember. The more dreams you record you will often find that you remember more.

Mental Exercises
While it may sound a bit crazy at first, a lot of lucid dreaming comes down to what could be called something of a form of ‘jedi mind training.’ Your subconscious mind is made up of all your most basic elements, even things you don’t want to express. By doubting in your own ability to do something you will likely make yourself unable to do it. However, likewise you can do the opposite. By focusing and believing strongly in yourself you can get results and this goes for dream recall as well. Think regularly about your dreams, think deeply about them and focus on trying to remember them, especially when going to sleep and waking up in the morning. You need to establish the neural pathways to get things moving in the right direction.

Dream Labyrinths
As your dream recall improves and you chronicle more and more of your dreams you may find that you have an array of recurring or similar locations. Everyone’s mental structure is a bit different, so your mileage may vary, but it is a common feature of the dream landscape for these locations to arrange themselves into something of a maze-like and possibly interconnected structure. Some people report only having a single labyrinth while others having many and some have reported not being able to identify any at all. I personally am in the camp of having many dream labyrinths that my mind tends to cycle through. By recording the dream labyrinths you will better be able to remember your dreams as you navigate them and identify those memories as dream memories but you will also be able to use them as anchors for establishing lucidity.

Establishing Lucidity
Once you are remembering your dreams and have some limited conscious awareness of them, the next step is to be able to recognize that you are experiencing a dream while still experiencing the dream. Some portion of this comes down to simply being aware of your surroundings, so if you’re trying to establish lucidity it’s generally good form to be constantly paying close attention to things around you. We will cover this further in a following portion.

Natural Lucidity
Many people have some degree of natural lucidity to them. Every once in a blue moon while experiencing a dream they’ll catch onto what is happening and ‘break the fourth wall’ so to speak. If you’re one of those people, like I was, then you’re in luck. You have a jumping off point to get into lucid dreaming right off the bat. But I would suggest not to neglect your dream recall either, while you can dilate time to some degree in dreams you are still limited to only 15 minutes of REM at a time and remembering more dreams can add up. If you’re not one of those lucky people, don’t sell yourself short just yet. Anyone can establish and maintain lucidity with some practice and dedication.

Mental Exercises
Whether you have natural lucidity or not, you can improve it by performing some simple regular mental exercises. By training your brain to constantly look for flaws or oddities in the reality around you and recognize them for what they are you can improve your chances of doing so in a dream. It’s very common in dreams for details of locations or objects to change rather suddenly or make no logical sense, pay close attention. Buildings that seem larger on the inside than the outside? Printed books with titles that make no sense? 32:32 on the digital clock? It’s things like this that can tip you off.
Beyond this point there are also active reality checks which you can try making it a habit of performing with the hopes you will then do them in a dream, setting up a mental pattern that will then imprint on your subconscious mind. Doing things like interlacing your fingers and watching closely, to see if your fingers pass through each other or otherwise act strangely, trying to do something mundane with your mind like flip a light switch while doing nothing else, etc. Ideally try and do things and do them in such a way that won’t make you look totally insane while you’re doing them. All these methods are commonly referred to as “MILD” or Mentally Induced Lucid Dreaming. This is the healthiest and most sustainable form of lucid dreaming you can do, ideally you want all of your lucid dreaming to be of this form.

‘Forced’ Lucidity And Actively Influencing Dreams
Perhaps you’re having trouble establishing your lucidity, perhaps you’re just impatient or otherwise can’t wait, maybe you just want to give things a shot for the hell of it. Whatever your reasoning, there are some methods commonly used to ‘force’ lucid dreaming or try to influence the dreams so that specific things occur, in my opinion none of them are especially mentally healthy. But I have done both, and in my experience they do work.
First we’ll address the forced lucidity, commonly referred to as “WILD” or Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming. Before going into how to do it, be aware that at least in my experience and from the texts I’ve read, when done correctly WILD does something with your brain function while sleeping and will leave you with a strange sense of malaise for the following day. You will be dead tired mentally, like you didn’t sleep at all, but you will be completely physically rested making it impossible to go back to sleep and simply ‘restore’ yourself.
With the warnings out of the way, WILD is really quite simple. The ultimate mental goal of it is to keep your conscious mind running as you fall asleep. This is done by focusing as you fall asleep and making sure that, even as your body relaxes and sinks into sleep you’re still aware of your perceived surroundings. A common approach to this is to slowly count as you fall asleep and focus very intently on the counting. Any time the counting drifts even slightly immediately correct it or start over. This will keep you conscious as you transfer over into the dream state in REM and make it much easier to establish lucidity, though it’s not 100% effective 100% of the time.
Now, if you don’t want to kill your next day but you want to influence your dreams then you can do so by another rather simple method. The point of it is to imprint a specific thought pattern into your subconscious so that, during that night’s dreaming, you will go through it and it will influence the dream. This is highly unpredictable and the results can be far from what you expected, your subconscious doesn’t necessarily perceive things the same way your conscious mind does and may ‘misinterpret’ things, but a common approach to this is to think of a specific thing you want to do that can be expressed in one sentence. You then take that sentence and you write it over and over and over again on at least one full sheet of paper, front and back. More than one if you want to make a deeper impression. Then, once done writing it, read the sheets of paper. Front and back, without skipping any lines. Remember, dedication is the key. If you did this correctly you may be able to influence your dreams that night. For best results I would advise doing it right before going to sleep. What kind of influence this may have on your mind if done on the regular is as good your guess as mine, but I would guess not very good at all. Best avoided if you can stand it.

Improving Lucidity
So you’ve established lucidity on something of a regular basis but maybe you’re finding some aspects of your control rather… unsatisfactory. Maybe you have some trouble performing some acts or overcoming certain things, well there are some tricks for improving your established lucidity as well. Your mileage may vary, there are other methods than just the ones presented here but these are just a few things that I found applied in my case.

Innate Lucidity
Ultimately, your goal when establishing lucidity through use of WILD or MILD should be to achieve some form of innate lucidity. That is, when you are lucid focus on the sensations of dreaming. Try and notice how things are different, how even just existing in a dream feels different. Come to recognize that feeling and understand that everything that is in the dream is in fact a part of you, an extension of your own mind and are not capable of harming you in any physical way. Stay calm and serene and in control, resolute in your place of power over your surroundings, and your dreams will not be able to do anything to you. You must cast aside fear and doubt in the dream world, those feelings will only sabotage your lucidity and make it fail. The more firm you are in your belief that you have control the better your control will be.

Strengthening Established Lucidity
Once lucidity has been well established and you have accepted that your mind is only your own and all that kinda mystical sounding business from prior, perhaps you’re finding that you’re still limited in some senses. You maybe cannot be harmed in a dream but you have trouble jumping higher than ten feet or flying far or it keeps becoming a nightmare or whatever you may be trying to do or change. In order to improve your own lucidity you have to push your own mental boundaries, it’s a very literal case of the only thing holding you back being yourself. It’s your own doubts in the dream that stop you from being able to do those things, try to actively work away those doubts. Exercise your control in other ways and try to mentally reassure yourself of your own control and ultimate place as the final judge of everything that goes on in your dreams. With time and dedication you can improve.

Attaining ‘Absolute Lucidity’
Now some people can eventually attain a status which I refer to as absolute lucidity, wherein they have become so familiar with the sensation of dreaming and innately lucid that they are always lucid dreaming and nearly completely unshakable in their lucidity. No matter what happens, no matter how horrible or nightmarish or jarring a dream may become they still can hold on and stay aware and in control. Not everyone can achieve this status but it is possible. One simply has to focus on attaining innate lucidity and maintaining calm. Panicking at any point during a dream can cause you to slip back into the flow of the dream and lose your lucidity or simply have an adrenaline rush and wake completely back up. If you can manage to achieve this state, from here the only journey is one further inward to better understand yourself.