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Lucid dreaming is basically when you are aware that you’re dreaming and you can have some kind of control over the experience.
Think of it as a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure game! Or something like that…
It sounds kind of cool, doesn’t it?
Are you ready to learn a little bit about how lucid dreaming works?
Let’s see what AskReddit users had to say about it.
1. From a veteran.
“I came across lucid dreaming when I was in 8th grade and have been learning about it since.
Ill tell you my experience:
I fell asleep around 10:00am and I started to dream. I left my house in the dream and then realized I was dreaming, after I realized I looked at the floor and the detail of the flowers were so realistic.
Then I ran and flew in the air like superman than I woke up.
Here are some tips.
When lucid dream don’t get to exited or you will wake up.
You can do anything you want while lucid dreaming.
You can hold your nose and breathe out of it while dreaming to see if your lucid.
Having s*x in a lucid dream is very realistic and vivid but don’t get to excited because you will wake up.
If your dream starts to fall apart or you start to wake up spin in your dream in circles to stabilise the dream and you can also rub your hands.
You can summon anything you want by thinking of it while dreaming then turning around or by calling the person name out loud and then entering rooms.
I’ve been lucid dreaming ever since.”
2. Write it down.
“I’m a natural lucid dreamer but I never forced it (never used any techniques myself).
There are techniques to enhance your abilities of lucid dreaming. I’d advise you to stay away from (most of) those, cause you might get sleep paralysis, or worse case you might get trouble distinguishing real life from your dreams.
One ‘safe’ method is writing down everything you remember right after you wake up from (any) dream. Research other methods on the risk of getting sleep paralysis.”
3. Catch 22.
“I discovered it before I knew the term when I was a child.
I used to get nightmares pretty regularly and I remember one time having the thought that I didn’t need to worry because it was just a dream, while I was still in the dream. From there I started influencing it whenever I had that realization. It wasn’t until years later I learned about lucid dreaming.
It can be very realistic but it’s a catch 22, you have to realize it’s NOT real first in order to do it so anything you then dream is known to be unreal or it wouldn’t even be happening. Rarely I will lose myself in it a little.”
4. Here’s the plan.
“I was always a lucid dreamer and just assumed everyone else was.
It wasn’t until people started talking about strange dreams or nightmares and their inability to stop them that I realized anything was different.
To start the one thing I’ve told be that some people have said worked is start with plan.
Go to sleep with a grafted idea so when you’re in it you can recognize you’re dreaming. Also you not in control the whole time, as you go through the different levels of sleep you will gain control and lose it.
It can be as realistic, but I also dream in color and can smell and taste which I understand not everyone can do.”
5. Open the door.
“If you manage to realize you’re in a dream and want, say, a basket of kittens, don’t try to make it just appear in front of you.
Make it behind you and turn around to get it, or open a door and it’s on the other side.”
6. Does it for me.
“I learned by doing it, usually in nightmares, after realizing that a dream didn’t make sense or after waking up and then immediately falling back asleep.
To do it, I’d recommend just waking up and falling asleep a bunch of times in a row, that usually does it for me. I’d say to set aside a morning when you can sleep in, then after you first wake up, set an alarm for 15-25 minutes, fall asleep, wake up, reset the alarm and so on. Eventually you’re likely to find yourself in a lucid dream.
They vary in how real they seem. The more you concentrate on them being a dream and trying to control things, the less real they seem. Just flying or taking note of the fact that you are in a dream won’t usually disturb it too much, but altering the dream substantially will often wake you up.
For instance, I had a dream that I was on a mountain, being rushed by Tolkienesque orcish/goblinoid creatures and I tore apart the landscape (and a bunch of them) with my mind, to prevent them from reaching me. But this also led to me waking up eventually. On the other hand, just flying around is usually fine.”
7. Wild stuff.
“Step one is to realize you’re dreaming. Then I concentrate kinda like how they power up in DBZ. Then I fly away.
It depends on my mental strength how much I can do tho. Sometimes I can alter the real world and use my hands to open my eyes if I’m done with the dream.”
8. A little tip.
“I don’t do it on purpose but when I do lucid dream I try hard to stay in the dream. The most annoying thing is being in the dream and thinking about the real world because that wakes me up every time.
It could be something as small as thinking about what time it is or if I’m late for school. Try to stay in the dream state without being too aware.”
9. Time to fly.
“I’ve been able to do it for years. I’m deathly stupidly terrified of zombies so lucid dreaming is great.
A lot of times when I realize I’m dreaming it’s if there is a mirror and I look into it. I’ll get brave and continue my dream but when sh*t hits the fan I’ll yell at myself to wake up. The one thing I cannot do is run forward if I need to get away it has to be backwards but I can fly.
The flying is so real when I wake up I feel like I can still fly the feeling is so strong still until reality hits. If they’re good dreams I’ll finish them up the way I want. This doesn’t always happen I can’t control when it happens.
It’s just always the same bathroom I end up in with the same mirror I look into and I can control my dreams.”
10. Doesn’t always work.
“I learned about lucid dreaming when I was 12. I had a dream people were falling from the sky off of tall buildings with smoke pouring out of them.
It hit me on such an emotional level I wrote my dream down. 3 months later 9/11 happened and I saw my dream on tv — people jumping off the towers because it was a better alternative than burning alive or getting crushed by debris.
I started doing research about dreams that seem real and started trying to predict futures. This is also when I realized my dreaming in color was unusual. For a while I thought I caused 9/11 and that had it’s own traumatic effect on my life, but now I listen to quite a bit of youtube lucid dreaming meditations and every now and again I feel a deja vu moment like my dreams coming true again, but never anything as insane as 9/11.
I do wake up less rested after I lucid dream. It’s also good to bear in mind that intentional lucid dreaming doesn’t always work. Have realistic expectations, and understand it takes practice.
You are not going to feel like you are in a movie or t.v. show, it’s like you’re awake and dreaming at the same time. You can make decisions but it doesn’t always move the dream forward.”
11. Out of body experience.
“Lucid dreams are a type of “out of body” experience. In the simplest terms, when the body goes to sleep but the mind is awake, you’re “out of body.”
I had a lot of these experiences in my early twenties. I first heard about how to do it on some random internet forum. I experienced the vibrational state the first night I tried and quickly became obsessed with the mechanics of the process.
There are basically two ways to enter the OOB state. The first way is to split consciously from the waking state by concentrating on an object. This is a really bizarre experience that may or may not be accompanied by hallucinations. The second is to “wake up” inside of a dream, usually through a willful action that questions reality, like pulling on your finger to stretch it out, jumping up to fly, or walking through a wall.
When you enter consciously, there is a certain tangible aspect of the experience that is lacking in lucid dreams. Everything feels much more physical. I would basically “pop out” in a mirror image of the physical world and would feel like I was still in my body. Subconscious imagery could intrude quite easily, though, and then I’d fall into a dream.
When you “wake up” from the subconscious state, i.e., a dream, you’re basically doing the opposite of this. You realize that your body is asleep, but your mind isn’t fully awake. The problem is you are enveloped in subconscious imagery and often can’t dig your way out of it before losing that spark of consciousness.
This is why lucid dreams can feel a bit more “manufactured.” When the subconscious imagery is wiped away from your mental lens, you find yourself in the same state as you would in a conscious split.
The material there is basically super pliable and we can manipulate it with our creative imagination. This can pose a problem for those who are easily convinced by personal experience because it can be very difficult to determine the source of any particular projection.
Maybe it’s your subconscious, maybe it’s another being. Sadly, the experience itself can tell you nothing about the truth of the experience.”
Now we want to hear from you.
If you have any experience with lucid dreaming, please fill us in in the comments.
We look forward to it!
