What is lucid dreaming? Well, I'm sure some of you already know the answer. But for those of you who don't, lucid dreaming is basically the art of becoming aware in your dreams. To become lucid in a dream means to realize that it is a dream, at which point you're able to control yourself freely inside of it. That's just getting started though. Once you're in a lucid dream, the possibilities are endless. For starters, you can't die in a dream because you'd just wake up.
This means in a lucid dream you can face your fears and phobias. Or take on a horde of zombies or soldiers armed with guns and live to tell the tale. Not only do you have nothing to worry about, but you have everything to experience. And in such a dream You can literally conjure up any object you like, go to any place real or fictional, meet any person real or fictional, or even use superpowers the likes of which only comic book characters have ever dreamed of. Anything you can conceive or imagine can be done in a lucid dream, and afterwards you just wake up feeling refreshed.
Aside from the obvious potential for fun experiences, lucid dreaming is actually a very beneficial practice for numerous reasons. For one, if you're planning to get lucid regularly, you're going to need to have healthy sleeping habits. And I can't stress how beneficial it is to have a good sleep pattern. Two, you can face your fears in a comfortable setting and get over past negative experiences, knowing that at any moment you can click your fingers and make whatever it is you're scared of disappear. Or just open your eyes and wake up. Three, dreams are a direct link to the inner world of the subconscious mind, the world from which all your inner inexplicable complexes and drives originate.
And so delving into your dreams with a heightened level of control can allow you to better understand what makes you who you are today. Four, you can train and practice skills in the dreamworld. And since an hour of dream time seems to pass by slower than an hour of real time, you can really maximize your efficiency by practicing skills at night in your dreams as well as in the day in your waking life. I could go on listing more and more benefits, but I see I've said enough, and you're already curious as to how to do it, so let's move on. So before I explain the methods by which you can go about achieving your first lucid dream, I want to lay some groundwork on healthy dreaming habits These are just as vital as the methods themselves and will both improve your chances of having a lucid dream as well as improve the dreams themselves in duration, clarity, and so on.
First of all, we need to look at your sleeping pattern. When I initially came into lucid dreaming myself I was what you'd call a night owl. I stayed up at night, slept during the afternoons, and my sleep pattern was pretty much all over the place. I did manage to have a few lucids on occasion. But it wasn't until I got in sync with a normal circadian rhythm that my lucid dreaming career really took off.
So your circadian rhythm is basically the pattern through which your body achieves the best possible sleep. This pattern is modulated by melatonin which is a substance normally released by the brain when there's an absence of light. As such when you're sleeping in the day you get less melatonin and poorer quality sleep, while sleeping in the night means everything works as it should.
So you should be aiming to be waking up around anywhere between 5 AM and 9 AM, or as close to those hours as you can manage with whatever schedule you're on. As for going to sleep, between 8 PM and 1 AM is best, obviously depending on when you wake up in the morning. A general rule of thumb is to get up around the time the sun's up and to go to bed about a few hours after it's fully set.
Next up, dream journals. Are you one of those people who doesn't remember any dreams or perhaps feels they don't have any at all? Well don't fear because everybody dreams. But not everybody flexes their dream recall enough to remember them. The trick to fixing this is to start a dream journal. It's quite simple really. You just have to grab a notebook and each morning when you wake up jot down what you remember of your dreams. If you don't remember anything then just jot down I didn't remember my dreams tonight. The very act of actually writing that down will tell your brain that tomorrow you plan to remember some dreams.
And as such your recall will go up. After just one night of doing this you should start to recall dreams the next night. And after a few weeks you should be recalling several each night. So now that we've got some of the basics of healthy sleeping and dreaming habits out of the way, let's go on to how to have your first lucid dream. So I'm going to assume you've already got your sleep pattern normalized and have started a dream journal. If you haven't you should do these things first. Now the first thing you're going to need to do is grab yourself an alarm clock. Set yourself an alarm to wake up at your normal time, but also set one for six hours after you go to bed. If your alarm doesn't have an option for multiple alarms then just set one for six hours after you go to bed.
The trick is when you fall asleep you pass through several different sleep cycles. And the one in which lucid dreaming can occur is called the REM cycle. In REM, or rapid eye movement sleep, the mind is far closer to alert wakefulness than in deep sleep. And so the possibility to realize you're dreaming and gain control arises, as does the ability to actually recall your dreams and have vivid dreams in the first place. You have multiple REM periods over a night. But around six hours after falling asleep is when the longest one should start. And so if you want a good chance of lucid dreaming, you want to be able to wake up during that time and then perform an induction method to induce a lucid dream. Now when you wake up after those six hours you should use the bathroom if you need to and make notes of any dreams you remember in your dream journal.
And after that, lay down, close your eyes, and just imagine what it would be like to have a lucid dream. Think about what you'd like to do. Maybe there's a place you want to go, or maybe you want to visit someone famous. Whether you just want to fly through the sky like Superman. Whatever it is, imagine yourself doing it. And as you do that, repeat to yourself a simple mantra. A mantra is basically a positive phrase that you repeat over and over to imprint something into your mind. In this case I use something along the lines of, I will be aware and lucid when I enter this next dream. Or maybe just, I will have a lucid dream tonight. Something simple like this will work. Now once you've got your mantra, I want you to repeat this over and over for the next two to three minutes while you're lying there.
After that point, all you have to do is relax and go back to sleep. Nothing else is actually required. And with just this method, you should be able to have your first lucid dream pretty quickly. For me, I tried this method and it was the first method I used to consciously induce lucid dreams. And I had a lot of success with it. In my first month I was able to have about 20 lucid dreams. And that's it. If it doesn't work for you the first night don't worry. It didn't for me either. For me, it was the second or third night I tried it when it finally worked. But you can keep doing it daily for just a few minutes of your time each day. And you'll soon be having lucid dreams on the regular. Once you're in your first lucid dream, the next thing you need to learn is how to keep it stable.
Well REM sleep is great just because the increased alertness allows us to have lucid dreams in the first place. It also has the downside that too much of an increase in excitement just sends our alertness right up to the awakening level and wakes us right up. As a result, many people's first lucid dreams end rather abruptly as they're so excited to have finally achieved it, and the excitement alone ends the dream. There are several tricks to stabilize your dreams. I'm just going to go into the quick basics. First of all, you should probably stay calm and stay relatively still when you first enter into a dream. I know when you get into a lucid dream you may be so excited that you want to immediately run off and do something. But it's better to get a full awareness of your surroundings before you do that. So perhaps sit down, look around, observe what's around you, listen to the sounds around you. Smell the scents around you, and use all your senses. You basically want to engage all of your senses so that the scene solidifies in your mind.
Now if you start to find the dream crumbling around you, becoming less clear, you can try rubbing your hands together or spinning around quickly. Some people find that speaking aloud and just asking for clarity or dream stability works too. Most of all, just slow down and ensure that your senses are fully engaged with the scene. That should do the trick. Don't be worried if you struggle. I mean, everyone struggles a little at first. And if you want to have long lucid dreams, you're going to have to practice. Everyone starts somewhere. Anyway, this will be the end of my quick introduction.