Complete guide on how to have lucid dreams takes you through the steps and strategies to achieve the right dream state and use it properly. It is easier than you think to learn how to have a lucid dream.
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What is a lucid dream
Various definitions of lucid dreams can be found in today’s specialist literature. Basically, these definitions contain a minimum criterion and, depending on the literature, further additional criteria. The primary characteristic of a lucid dream is: “A lucid dream is a dream in which the dreamer knows during the dream that he or she is dreaming.”
A lucid dream occurs accordingly when the dreamer becomes aware that he or she is in the dream at that moment. In the specialist literature one can often find information about additional criteria that expand the previous definition of a lucid dream. The other three additional criteria for defining a lucid dream are:
- The dreamer can actively intervene in the dream event.
- The dreamer is aware that he is asleep at that moment.
- The dreamer can remember the dream after waking up.
Learning how to lucid dream is actually not as difficult as you think if you know what to watch out for and how best to proceed.
The ability to learn how to get lucid dreams and control one’s own dreams, combined with the fact that hidden corners of the subconscious can be accessed, offers an almost infinite potential. Only your own creativity limits your personal possibilities that you can live out in the lucid dream. Isn’t that awesome? You don’t even know what to dream first, right?
In order to heat up your creativity a little, we would like to briefly introduce you to the purposes for which you can use your lucid dreams:
Lucid dreams as entertainment
You can use your lucid dreams for pure entertainment, for example you can fly over a city, experience wild adventures in fantasy worlds or enjoy incredibly intimate moments with people of your choice. But you will surely find many more examples that are also more precisely tailored to your interests.
Lucid dreams as a training strategy
In addition to the possibility of entertainment, you can also use a lucid dream to train your motor or mental abilities. Yes, exactly, right! Do you have to give a lecture in front of a large audience? Do you practice a sport that requires a certain level of skill and manifestation? Do you just want to get better at playing the piano or pronunciation of a foreign language?
You can make a lucid dream your optimal training location for more practice and security. In many areas you can thus gain a great advantage over your competition.
Lucid dreams as a personality trainer
In addition to these two factors, you can also use your lucid dreams for psychological purposes. Since you can access hidden corners of your subconscious in the dream, you can work hard on your own personality. For example, you can ask yourself about your strengths and weaknesses in a dream, naturally spice up your self-confidence and grow into a strong personality, all of course while you sleep!
And when you are plagued by terrible nightmares at night, lucid dreaming is finally the long-awaited release for you. Especially then you have a special advantage of learning lucid dreaming even faster and you can face your fear, for example by making fun of your fear or facing it.
Psychologists can also use lucid dreams to free their patients from certain phobias, anxiety attacks or trauma. Even overweight people can benefit from lucid dreaming while on a diet, as they can enjoy certain foods that have been eliminated from their diet without guilty conscience. As you can see, the potential of a lucid dream has no limits!
How to have lucid dreams: steps and strategies
Lucid dreaming is not as difficult as you might think. We’ll tell you now what you need:
1. A good dream memory (so that you can focus clearly on your dreams and don’t forget what you have dreamed right after waking up.)
2. A critical awareness during the dream (so that you can even recognize that you are in a dream, because most of the time you think in the dream that everything is real.)
Many may now think:
“Great, I don’t think I dream at all or if I do, then only very rarely and very briefly!”
or
“How am I supposed to recognize that I am dreaming when I am firmly convinced that I am actually awake, even in the most bizarre situation.”
Nobody has neither a good dream memory nor a critical awareness in their early days. The good thing is that you dream 5 to 6 times every night and a good dream memory and critical awareness can be wonderfully trained with certain techniques! And that very quickly. So it is usually possible to experience lucid dreaming within the first few weeks of training. Some even report being successful on the first day.
How to have lucid dreams: the training levels
The pyramid consists of 5 parts. The absolute basis of lucid dream training is the so-called dream focus. If you increase your dream focus, not only will your dream memory improve, but you will also open up the possibility of using your critical awareness. In order to train the dream focus, the classic dream diary can be used , with which your dream signs can also be analyzed. But more details on this later.
The 2nd level represents the dream consciousness. You need a heightened dream consciousness in order to even recognize that you are in the dream at the said moment and of course to maintain the clarity of your dream so that you do not return to an ordinary one Dreamy drift away. You can train yourself to be more dream-conscious, for example, with the famous reality checks , which we will go into in more detail later.
The first two levels of the pyramid alone enable you to trigger lucid dreams. With certain lucid dream techniques, supplements and / or gadgets, the chance of a lucid dream can be increased even further.
The dream focus
For some people, the dream focus is so small that they often make the statement that they would not dream in the first place. However, this has been proven to be FALSE, since in an undisturbed night sleep, about 5 to 6 dream phases are passed through in REM sleep alone.
But don’t worry, if you also think that you cannot dream, your dream focus can be trained, and even quite quickly. You can increase your dream focus so much that you can remember several incoherent dreams per night’s sleep and call the details of the dream much more strongly into your consciousness.
For starters, however, it is good progress if you can remember 1 or 2 detailed dreams . The technology is very simple:
1. Before you go to sleep, make a resolution that you will remember your dreams. Feel free to occupy yourself with this thought for a few minutes (this is the first time you activate your dream focus).
2. As soon as you wake up, you try to remember your dream. Try to bring as many details as possible into your consciousness (this will train your dream focus).
3. Write your dream in as much detail as possible in a dream diary (this will further increase the training effect).
These 3 points are crucial to increase your dream focus. How intensely you ultimately do these 3 points is up to you. The more you deal with them, the stronger your dream focus will be. For quick success in lucid dreaming, you should approach these 3 points as intensively as possible.
So get yourself a notebook as soon as possible that is always near your bed. Alternatively, you can also use a voice recorder or a smartphone app in which you have combined all possibilities. A well-suited app for taking notes is Evernote or Simplenote, for example , which you can download for your computer and smartphone for free.
So write down as many dreams as you can. When you wake up from a dream, we recommend that you write it down immediately, otherwise you will soon forget it. Maybe this sounds like tiresome work to one or the other, but if you want to learn lucid dreaming effectively, you shouldn’t do without it at this point.
If your dream focus has risen to a high level over time, you can also leave out the dream diary if it is too strenuous for you. At the beginning, however, it is an absolute must! Because the success of a lucid dream ultimately depends on it! Do not forget that dream focus is the first level of the learning pyramid and is the absolute foundation.
In order to use the full potential of the dream diary , it is also advisable to keep a list of dream characters. Dream signs can be objects, places, experiences, people, animals, or in short: anything. These dream signs appear almost exclusively in dreams and are therefore different for each individual. For example, if you often dream of dogs, you put “dogs” on your dream character list. This is very worthwhile for lucid dreaming.
This mental attitude ensures that further dreams in which this dream sign occurs can be more consciously experienced. In these dreams your dream focus is automatically increased. If you follow these 3 steps daily and create a list of dream signs, your dream focus will increase significantly within the first few weeks and be very pronounced within a few months. From now on only one step is missing for lucid dreaming.
The dream consciousness
Because of this, we do not question our dreams, nor do we realize that we are dreaming in this moment. Fortunately, there is an almost simple trick to circumvent this problem and activate your prefrontal cortex after all, but it usually only takes some time.
So-called reality checks are used to increase dream awareness . It is a logical check of the currently experienced state of consciousness.
For this purpose, certain tests are carried out (more on this in a moment …) in order to be able to determine exactly whether one is dreaming or not. The funny thing is that you do these tests while you are awake. Even if you think this reality test seems completely insane, it has a very important reason.
As you may have already heard, one processes everyday life in a dream. Since you also go about your usual activities in the dream, you will also carry out this reality check at some point in the dream when it has become a habit. At that moment, when you realize that you are dreaming, your prefrontal cortex becomes active and you wake up in your own dream, so to speak.
As you can see, anyone is able to learn lucid dreaming. You just have to ask yourself critically: “Am I awake or am I dreaming?” and check this state logically. That is the key to a lucid dream. But how can you check exactly whether you are dreaming or not, if you take everything as plausible in your dream? If you ask yourself: “Am I awake or am I dreaming?” just put like that, there is a high probability that you will be satisfied with simple answers and the lucid status will not be achieved. This example is intended to illustrate this situation:
I sit in a restaurant and don’t eat my food like with normal cutlery, but with a small garden shovel. I think to myself: “Is that a dream?” It immediately occurred to me that I am in a hardware store here and that it is so common here to eat with garden shovels.
Just the thought that you were in the hardware store was enough to make you think that you are not in a dream. What was missing was a reliable check of your state of consciousness, the reality check. This situation could easily have been used to trigger a lucid dream. Here is the correct reaction:
I sit in a restaurant and eat my food with a small garden shovel. I wonder if this is a dream. I looked around and read the label on a poster: “Hardware store for garden products”. I looked away briefly and looked at the poster again. Suddenly the letters have changed: “Restaurant for garden lovers”. Based on this indicator, I became wide awake and clear, but was still in the dream event. I took the opportunity to fly between the shelves of the store at breakneck speed. A feeling of endless freedom surrounds me.
So that you will also carry out this reality check in the dream, it is absolutely necessary that you also have to carry it out very carefully in your waking state. Even if you think: “Oh, it is clear that I am not dreaming right now.”
You will be amazed the first time you do a reality test in a dream. As usual, you will expect that the reality test will be positive, although afterwards you will find out euphorically that you are dreaming.
As already mentioned, the reading test is an absolutely reliable reality check. You can use this reality check almost anywhere and even without anyone in your environment noticing. Alternatively, you can look at a clock. A quick look away, when you look at the clock again, will reliably change the time if you are in a dream.
Another reality check that is particularly recommended is the breath test. To do this, cover your nose with your fingers and try to breathe through your nose with your mouth closed. While you cannot do this in the waking state, it is possible in a dream.
You can also use a dream indicator object as a reality check, similar to the film Inception. In Inception, Leonardo Dicaprio uses a top that he turns. If itfalls over when the rotational impulse subsides, one is in the waking state. Otherwise he dreams.
Perform these reality checks at least 5 to 10 times a day. Give yourself enough time and then think about what you would do if it had been a dream. In order to immensely increase the effect of the reality checks, you should always use them when you stumble upon a dream sign.
For example, if you often dream about dogs, the dream sign from the example above, you should do reality checks whenever you see a dog. If you stick to it for a few weeks, you will also carry out these reality checks in a dream.
You just have to be patient and make the reality checks a habit, then your next lucid dream will soon await you. As you can see, the 1st step, the dream focus and the 2nd step, the dream consciousness , are already sufficient to trigger lucid dreaming. However, one can increase the chance of lucid dreams even further by using lucid dream techniques.
The lucid dream techniques
There are now countless techniques that can increase the chance of lucid dreams. All lucid dream techniques can generally be categorized into dream-induced lucid dreams (DILD) or wake-induced lucid dreams (WILD) . In a dream-induced lucid dream, as the name suggests, you realize during your dream that you are dreaming. So in principle you carry out a reality check and thus achieve the lucid state.
There are also countless creative techniques that support this system. One example of this is the urge to urinate technique (UILD). In addition, over a period of time you get used to performing reality checks when you go to the toilet. If you want to dream lucidly, you should drink a little before bed so that you will feel the urge to urinate while you sleep. In a dream you often go to the toilet in such a situation and then carry out a reality check as usual. So these are techniques that build on the basic technique of reality checks.
A very famous technique that is also suitable for beginners is the Waking Back To Bed, or WBTB for short. You can try out this technique soon to boost your dream focus enormously and to massively strengthen your dream consciousness. The technique works as follows:
Set yourself an alarm clock that will wake you up after about 4 to 5 hours of normal night sleep. You stay awake for the next half hour and do a lot of reality checks. You can take a stroll through your apartment, have a drink, have a bite to eat or read a book – preferably one about lucid dreams. It is important that you fix the thought “I will notice right now that I am dreaming.” Then after half an hour go back to bed and fall asleep with this thought.
You will see that due to your waking phase, your dream focus is increased and your dream consciousness can be activated better. So you can see that certain techniques can further increase the chance of lucid dreams.
Lucid dream supplements
Due to the fact that the first three levels of the pyramid are very good at triggering a lucid dream, we will only briefly discuss supplements. But before you want to stimulate your lucid dreams with pills or herbs, you should first ensure a healthy, balanced diet.
A healthy diet ensures that your cells are optimally supplied with nutrients and that your hormonal balance is balanced. Since the quality of your sleep also depends on your state of health, this means: A healthy diet ensures a better dream focus and stronger dream awareness.
If you still want to increase your chances, you can use certain herbal remedies. A famous plant that can promote lucid dreams is Calea Zacatechichi, which is also known as the dream herb. However, there is not enough research into where the effect comes from. Nothing is known about possible side effects either, which is why supplements generally always carry a certain risk factor with them.
It is also clear that drugs such as cannabis can also lead to more intense dreams and thus increase the chance of lucid dreams, but this is strongly discouraged as possible side effects can arise. So drugs of all kinds should be removed from the list of lucid dream supplements.
