How To Dream Lucidly Every Night
Many people want to experience a lucid dream. If you’re among them, the first thing you need to think about is how you want to go about learning.
You’ll need to think about why you want to be a lucid dreamer, as well as the benefits of it. First, we’ll take a look at normal sleeping.
Normal sleep helps us refresh ourselves for the next day. However, when you experience lucid dreaming, you would be able to control the period of time when you were dreaming.
Instead of having to observe passively, you could be the person who leads your dream to be whatever you would like.
Would you like to stop just being a passive observer and make sure your dreams are whatever you want them to be? That’s what being a lucid dreamer is all about. You’re totally in control of your dreams, and able to explore new worlds that aren’t bound to the real world’s laws.
So if you want to become a lucid dreamer how do you do it? There are actually two ways. The first way is having a dream-initiated lucid dream (DILD), which is where the dreamer is in a dream and then realizes that they are, restoring their sense of consciousness within the dream.
The second way is having a wake-initiated lucid dream (WILD); where the dreamer goes from being awake, to being asleep with no change in consciousness. In other words, the dreamer enters their dream as if it were a door, rather than just “waking up” in a dream.
So, what methods are used to induce both of these kinds of lucid dream experiences?
Dream Recall
If you’re interested in being a lucid dreamer, one of the most successful methods you can use is dream recall. This is the ability to remember your dreams. By developing this ability, you’ll be more readily able to recognize them while you’re asleep.
That’s because you’re likely to have the same dream or dream elements on more than one occasion.
The way to practise dream recall is by keeping a dream journal. The dream journal is meant as a tool to write down anything you can remember about your dream, in order to recall it for the future. This should be done right after waking up; otherwise dreams will become harder to remember.
Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams (MILD)
This is a technique that was developed by Dr. Stephen LaBerge, one of the lead scientists studying lucid dreaming. The intent here is to simply tell yourself that you will remember something, like an object for example and then in the dream, when you see this object you will realize it is a dream.
To use this method, first go to sleep. Set an alarm beforehand to wake you up a few hours later (about five or six). Once you wake up, don’t go back to sleep. Read for a little while, or think about lucid dreaming for a while, then head back to sleep.
To use this process, go to sleep with an alarm set to wake you up five to six hours later. When you wake up, don’t go right back to sleep. Instead, do something else, like think about lucid dreaming or read a book, for about an hour. Then go back to bed.
According to Stephen LaBerge, there is a 60% success rate of this technique. The reason why is that you would have woken up during the process of sleep, meaning that your mind is not fully aware of this, and are still in the middle of REM cycle. So basically, it’s like going to your mind and telling it that you want to lucid dream.
Cycle Adjustment Technique
Created by Daniel Love, this method involves setting an alarm to wake you one and a half hours before your normal wake-up time. Once you get used to this early time, alternate your alarm between a normal time and the early one. When your alarm is set to wake you normally, you’ll find your body’s already ready to wake up early. That makes it more likely that you’ll wake up in your dream, and dream lucidly.
Wake-initiation of Lucid Dreams (WILD)
This method is described above. If you’d like to use it, the thing to do is to keep your mind awake during the process of your body falling asleep. This is one of the most interesting ways of entering lucid dreams, and is a lot like watching a movie. Just like when you’re watching a movie, you start in a state of readiness, and prepare yourself.Then, you’ll either hit play or start to fall asleep. The screen and what you see when your eyes are closed are both black. Just wait for your movie or dream to begin.
There are several different ways to hold onto awareness, including imagining going up or down a flight of stairs, chanting, counting numbers, breaths, or anything else, breathing control, and muscle relaxation. These and other self-hypnosis methods will give you something to concentrate on, but don’t do this when you’re tired, or you may lose consciousness.
Technology has moved on in recent years, and there are various devices like dreaming masks and other scientific appliances which contain such things as strobe lights to induce lucid dreams.
Definitely the easiest and most reliable way of inducing a lucid dream however is by listening to binaural beats sound frequencies via headphones.
These work by synchronizing the two hemispheres of the brain and have the effect of almost instantaneously changing your brainwaves to the REM frequency needed for a lucid dream to occur.
Combined with self affirmations and sessions of self hypnosis, these methods make it easy to become a lucid dreamer. You just need the practice and determination