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Dreams are a natural reaction of the brain, mostly during the REM phase of sleep. Everybody dreams, although some of us don’t remember much the following morning, mistakenly believing that we dream very little or not at all. Sometimes, usually by some external stimulant out of our control, we are jolted while inside a dream, not enough to fully wake up but enough to regain some of our natural waking state while inside the dream. Imagine suddenly realizing that you are standing in the middle of the sea on a rowboat although your most recent memory is coming home from work, and your home is nowhere near the sea. That is what “waking up” inside of a dream feels like: you realize that something or everything is out of place and doesn’t fit your regular perception of reality. People experiencing this usually do one of two things: they freak out, forcibly waking up or they realize that they are experiencing a dream and decide to go with the flow. The balance between losing consciousness and going back into the full dream state, and being too conscious resulting in waking up is a frail one, so most lucid dreams are cut short by lack of self-control.

What is a lucid dream? A lucid dream is a state of situational awareness inside a dream, basically the realization that you are dreaming while you are still asleep. Who gets to have lucid dreams? There are people who do it by chance, and others who follow a set of rules meant to condition them into inducing lucid dreaming on a frequent basis. Can I do it? Yes, you can! I did it, so I see no reason why others wouldn’t be able to achieve the same results. How do I do it? Keep on reading and you’ll find out.

Lucid dreams are awesome. They provide an amazing playground that, although hard to control at first, offers literally infinite possibilities for those willing to put in the time and dedication to master this state. Here’s how I did it: I was in college and one of my assignments was to write a paper on something that interested me but I had never tried before. I decided to go with inducing lucid dreaming because as a child, I had a lucid dream by accident, and the memory kept intriguing me. I started browsing internet sites and quickly realized that the methods described were as many as the sites themselves. I decided to look for a pattern in all the techniques. I found out most of them had a similar structure based on 3 pillars.

Firstly, during the day, you have to make so-called “reality checks”. What that means is that during the day, you stop what you are doing, and perform a series of simple tasks to prove that you are awake. There are many options to choose from, like asking yourself what day it is, asking where you are at that moment, making a mental recap of your actions since waking up in the morning and so on. The point of these reality checks is to do them as often as possible during the daytime, and create a habit that will eventually carry over to the dream, where performing these actions will have different results than in reality, alerting the person that they are dreaming. If you can answer the questions easily, you are awake. If you can’t answer these questions, you should have a better look around, because you might be dreaming. I chose the simplest suggestion which was looking at my hands to see if they looked right, combined with occasionally asking myself one of the 3 questions mentioned above. I did this religiously over the course of the next week, looking at my hands and asking whichever one of the questions first came to mind as often as I could.

Secondly, you have to keep a dream journal. A dream journal is just a normal notebook you put on your bedside table. The first thing, and I can’t stress this enough, the very first thing you do when you wake up is to open that notebook and write your dream in it, in as much detail as you can remember. If you wake up and go to the bathroom, or drink a cup of coffee or do anything else first, the clarity of the dream fades and you forget details. They are important because if you do this correctly for a few days, you will notice that the dream you remember is just the last one to play out in your head and that there were more before it. The longer you do this, the more you will be able to go back in your recollection of your dreams with an increasing amount of detail. After the first two days of doing it, I could remember 2 dreams per night. Four days later, I could remember 5 dreams. I wrote the dreams in reverse chronological order, backward from the moment of waking up. The dreams were playing one after another. I could tell one from the other by a complete change in setting, style, and mood of the dream.

Lastly, don’t take it too seriously. Seriously, just relax. Being too anxious about it is counterproductive. If you force it, it will just take longer. Do the things described above on a daily basis, but make this a side project, not your main occupation. This worked well for me because I was busy back then, so I couldn’t focus my entire attention on it. That doesn’t mean I slacked off, it just means that I integrated the exercises and journal into my daily routine. That is the keyword: routine. If you can make these activities part of your routine, you are bound to do them in your dream because you are used to doing them in real life, and that’s when the magic happens!

My first lucid dream was a fluke. I was 5 or 6 years old and that morning I almost fell out of bed. I got the feeling that my center of gravity was going over the side of the bed so my body instinctively tensed up and brought me back over the edge and into safety. Everything happened fast, so I kind of opened my eyes to see this weird world that was anything other than my grandma’s living room, so I immediately freaked out. I realized it was a dream because I could feel my body lying on the bed but in the dream, I was standing upright. I panicked and started screaming that I wanted to wake up. I immediately felt like I was being lifted into the air faster and faster until I sprung out of bed screaming. The experience itself wasn’t bad but I got scared at the sudden change of scenery and all the unknown elements it contained.

Later in life, after doing the exercises, keeping the dream journal and building the routine, I kind of knew, or at least hoped, that it would happen again; that I would get to revisit that place in my head I rejected all those years ago. I realized that conscious control over a world made up of imagination can greatly benefit me in a variety of ways. I got the first lucid dream after 5 days of sticking to the routine. What happened was that I decided to look at my hands while I was dreaming. They looked like an image on an old computer with serious frame rate drops, moving in slow-motion, although I was moving my hands at a normal speed. That’s when I realized something was off. My routine worked! I wasn’t really awake but I had partial control over my dream body. All I did was look around in awe at the room I was standing in. I immediately started getting excited and feeling more and more awake until I started feeling my body lying on the bed and I finally opened my eyes. I was ecstatic, I quickly wrote the event in my dream journal and then went back to sleep satisfied with my achievement. I had another one immediately after that! I couldn’t believe it! In it, I decided to fly because that’s one of the things that fascinate me. I wanted to take off in a Superman fashion but all I managed was to slowly wobble my way into the air. I felt like a kid learning to ride a bike: I wasn’t used to the controls so my body was being elevated in a strange, clumsy way. It was still awesome, I was floating for crying out loud! After that, I had lucid dreams every other night. I was a horseback rider in a Mongol horde, I was in a town made up of nothing but streets and skyscrapers and I could instantly teleport in any room, on any floor, I had sex with a woman whose face I couldn’t make out. I became able to deconstruct the world around me and rebuild it in a way that was relatively close to what I had intended. Doing that seemed to wake me up faster though.

I had a weird dream as well: I woke up inside the dream like usual and decided to give flying another try. I was in a large dark space lit by a row of street lanterns in front of me. I decided to take off and started my slow ascension past one of the street lights. Just as I was clearing it, a metal hand burst out of the pole, grabbed my ankle and held tight. The funny thing is, I felt the hand as being my own hand. I’ll let you elaborate on what that means.

You shouldn’t set your expectations too high in the beginning, because you will have limited control over the world around you and the situations you end up in can be very different from what you had in mind. The trip is awesome though, definitely worth making! With practice comes mastery and the more you do it, the more the world around you starts to listen and bend to your will. Treat lucid dreams like you would treat a wild animal: you have to gain its trust, tame it and then it will listen to you (as much as you can expect a wild animal to listen). We are talking about the subconscious here; the part of our psyche that we don’t have any conscious control over, so you might encounter resistance in some areas. The upside is that you get to see parts of yourself that you might not be aware of and learn something new in the process. Forcing things tends to end with you waking up, so a different approach may be better suited for lucid dreaming. Good luck, and may your nights be peaceful and your dreams long!

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