Imagine being able to control a world that feels and looks the same as our own, where you can use your imagination to do anything you desire. This is what our brains are capable of, with LUCID DREAMING
So what is a lucid dream? A lucid dream is where you realize you’re dreaming while in one, which gives you the opportunity to influence or even fully control the dream.
Now you may be asking yourself, why the hell would anybody want to do that? Well there are plenty of reasons!
Dreams aren’t always those blurry fuzzy images like you think they are. In dreams all your 5 senses can be engaged, and can be hyper-realistic aswell! Meaning dreams can look as vivid as real life, things can feel like real life, dream food tastes like real life, sound and smell can be identical to real life aswell. Now imagine exploring fantasy worlds that are more real than any video game out today and as real as this world. Imagine talking to dream people that are as realistic as real people in real life. That’s how crazy lucid dreaming can get.
Infact, alot of famous people today or even historical figures used lucid dreaming for their work, or something extremely similar to it that can be replicated with lucid dreaming. People like Stephen King utilized dreams for best selling novel ideas, or Einstein who used vivid visualization techniques to create his theories (I’ll get into how that’s similar to lucid dreaming later.)
Some of you reading this are probably thinking: “That’s cool and sounds amazing! But I don’t even dream that often…” well, good news! You dream multiple times every night, you just have trouble remembering them. Which can be improved and I’ll tackle that later on in this guide.
When lucid dreaming, the only real limit I can think of is your imagination. Any childish fantasy you had as a kid you would be able to finally achieve within your dreams. I’ll get a few things across:
Lucid dreaming is a lot more common than you would think, it isn’t some weird cult practice or witchcraft, it’s a phenomenon many people have gone through in their life.
Infact, a survey done by the Sleep Foundation had shown that roughly 55% of adults have experienced at least one lucid dream during their lifetime, alongside 23% experiencing lucid dreams at least once per month! Survey
Now you may be asking yourself, “Okay, this sounds interesting and all but how do I even practice this, and is it easy?”. Well that’s why I made this guide in the first place! For all the newbies out there who want to get into the subject as quickly and efficiently as possible, while trying to minimize as much misinformation they could consume as much as possible.
If you don’t have the drive to learn lucid dreaming, or still don’t think it’s appealing to you, then I’ll ask you these questions to try to kick you into gear, and if you still aren’t interested, you’re free to leave. However at least answer these questions before you do, and fully with honesty and truth:
If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, then cherish and use that desire to move forward with lucid dreaming in order to make it a reality. Envision how awesome it would be to have these experiences as if it was just like doing it in real life. Having a key motivation to lucid dream is what keeps you going for a long time.
Before we fully get started, I want you to read through this section carefully, as it’s equally important as getting started in the first place. To ensure you have a nice clean efficient start, I’ll need to get rid of all the misinformation you’ve been brainwashed to believe or will come across in the near future. I’ll start by listing things that are normal in lucid dreaming:
If anybody says you something that is AGAINST this above text, DON’T believe them. Here's an eye-opening question:
What if your brain makes things happen depending on what you believe? It itself isn’t aware of how a dream works or operates, meaning it can create its own rules if it believes thats how a dream works. You could believe excitement always wakes you up, and your brain is responsible on waking you up, so it will. Why wouldn’t it? It already believes it to be true. Have you tested not believing this would happen and seeing if you’ll stay put in the dream, because most people have not.
People are gullible to believe anything that the majority say, especially in a subject they’re new to. You need to realize this one thing: Nobody in the lucid dreaming community has flawless information. We ALL have misinformation atleast in one aspect on lucid dreaming, sometimes we don’t even realize it. Most of lucid dreaming knowledge is theorizing, and we theorize nearly all the time on what we do not yet understand and we run with it. However with each theory, we can easily be wrong, and we probably are most of the time.
There is nobody without lucid dreaming misinformation anywhere, not me, not you, not that big YouTuber you watch, and not Stephen Laberge. Learn to humble yourself and realize you can always be wrong no matter what, but always be skeptical to some extent including even towards me.
You should remember this well, your experience within a dream is NEVER invalid or wrong, however it can easily be misunderstood by you or by other people for what it truly was. But don’t worry, having misinformation isn’t going to kill you and infact you don’t need to get rid of 100% of it immediately. Overtime if you’re open minded and learn more and more you get rid of this misinformation.
Before we get into how lucidity works and how to lucid dream, we need to learn how dreams are made and operate. Knowing this stuff will come in very handy in your journey as it’s easier to create valid methods on how you can influence them. Let’s get started on what visualizations, dreams and sleeping is:
Visualization:
Dreaming:
Sleeping:
I’ll let you in on a little secret, dreams are visualizations. Gasp, that’s mindblowing! Only major difference between dreams and visualizations is that dreams occur during sleep while the nervous system is off aswell. Fun fact, there are people in this world (although rare) that are able to form visualizations that are just as realistic as a dream or real life while awake. These are people with what is called “hyperphantasia”. However this is deriving from the topic so I’ll get back on track.
Now I’ll explain the main theory on how dreams are formed, started by Stephen Laberge and then went on to become the most agreed upon conclusion. I’ll copy and paste BillyBob’s explanation on it while giving credit to where it’s due.
“Basically, what happens is that as you’re lying there sleeping an image will come up in your mind. Lets say this is an image of a pencil. Your mind will begin to build a scene around this image of a pencil using your subconscious set of schemata. Lets say that when you think of a pencil you think that it should be sitting on a desk. When you think of a desk you think of school. When you think of school you think of that one hot teacher you used to have. When you think of that teacher you think of how you used to always worry about getting an erection in her class. Using these schemata, your mind has built a nightmare wherein your standing in that hot teachers classroom with an erection and everyone is laughing at you. This is how all dreams are born and perpetuated. They use your deepest expectations of what “should be”, then build a vivid scene and storyline around it.” – BillyBob
See what I mean? Makes sense right? Knowing this can come in handy during your journey as you can use these schematic associations to help you remember your dreams, help you become lucid in them, help you control them etc. Some have even used this knowledge to do what’s called “dream incubation”, in other words being able to influence their dreams so much in real life to the point to where they get to make themselves dream of certain things of their choice. This can be done with or without lucidity.
Now, let’s get into lucid dreaming and the fundamentals of it. We’ll break it down in 4 fundamentals:
Criticality
Awareness
Memory
Presence
We can shorten these into an abbreviation like C-A-M-P. CAMP alone can be used to create your own unique way of practicing lucid dreaming, as every technique utilizes atleast one of these fundamentals and improves them. That’s how lucid dreaming techniques work at a basic level, the technique improves one or more of these fundamentals in real life to where you can be more critical, self-aware, present or improve your memory on what a dream is like in order to become lucid.
Though even though there are many traditional methods on lucid dreaming, the fundamentals are enough alone to get lucid if you improve them in real life. Certain habits transfer over to your dreams. Start seeing your dreams as a separate life, you have habits that you transfer from real life into your dream life that your dream self does habitually, and in some rare occasions people also have habits from their dream life transfer to their real life. Dreams and reality don’t have a magical barrier between them like people think, they can both influence each other to an extent.
For example, have you ever had nightmares that made your heart beat rapidly? Or had a dream that made you tear up upon waking up from it due to sadness within the dream? Or even felt pain within the dream and felt a slight burning sensation upon waking up? If not then just know many people go through this often, proving that dreams hold some power over the mind and body and can influence them just like that.
This can go vice-versa aswell, you can influence your dreams by changing the way you act or by creating habits within real life. If you’re more self-aware or critical in real life, you will be more self-aware and critical within your dreams. If you think about something so much in real life, you’ll think about it in the dream. Knowing this, you can practice smarter by influencing your dreams directly while awake. As easypeasy as that!
The very next important thing with lucid dreaming is dream recall. Dream recall is exactly what it sounds, recalling your dreams. You need to remember your dreams well if you want to be good at lucid dreaming. The most common method on improving dream recall is dream journaling as I mentioned before. Dream journaling is pretty simple to do, aswell as extremely effective. All you need is a journal in real life or an app, and you write down as much as you can remember from your dream in as much detail as possible.
However, don’t get it mixed up. Dream journaling can be extremely effective on getting you lucid as well. It all depends on how you format it and use it to gain information on your dreaming habits and patterns. Here’s a very effective format that Brandon/Sensei uses, which I’ll link the full guide to shortly.
Here is the link to the full guide!
As you can see, this is an example of a extremely effective way of dream journaling. Now, it may seem overwhelming but it gets really simple to understand overtime when putting it into practice. You can use the information of your dream that you journal by analyzing them for frequent dream signs, basically signs that you’re dreaming which can be entirely unique to you and your dreaming pattern. For example if you keep dreaming about your old friend from middle school, then that’s a frequent dream sign, and you can attempt to use this fact to get lucid. Which I’m diving into shortly in the next section.
Before we fully get into the techniques, let’s get into how they are categorized.
DILD:
WILD:
EILD:
Hybrid:
Those are all the categories, I’ll list techniques below in their respected categories aswell as links to guides on them.
DILD:
WILD:
EILD:
Hybrids:
You can choose one of these methods, however make sure you stick with it for a month at minimum to get the best results and actually improve it, don’t be one of those numbskulls who practice it for a few days or under 3 weeks and claims it doesn’t work.
All techniques I would say are equal and that it depends on the person, their level of effort, and their consistency with practicing the technique. For example, think of them like fantasy world classes like a mage, rogue, warrior, etc. All have their benefits and downsides, but none of them suck on their own at a general level unless the person sucks with the class/technique! Either way always remember, techniques are about improving one of the 4 fundamentals!
Add-ons, something I really recommend people to have in their lucid dreaming practice. What are they? Add-ons are basically extra things you can do in order to boost the effectiveness of your practice. For example, a common one is WBTB. Standing for WAKE BACK TO BED it simply means waking up later in the night to disrupt your sleep cycle so you can go back to bed more aware, critical, etc. This also is highly recommended to be done alongside any WILD technique as it boosts the effectiveness of one in RIDICULOUS amounts. All add-ons can be paired to boost the effectiveness of ANY technique or practice, however I would say in certain categories like WILD and WBTB is where it boosts those the most to the extreme and its like, why not use it? You’re doing yourself a disfavor when not doing it…
Another add-on I would recommend for DILD techniques is called WRILD or WRITING INDUCED LUCID DREAMING, basically its about writing on a app or piece of paper “I will lucid dream tonight.” 50x or more. This helps with setting intention that you will lucid dream tonight and is EXTREMELY effective when done alongside MILD. Many people see this as a standalone method but in my opinion I think it fits in the same boat as WBTB, as it’s more effective as a add-on to use alongisde methods rather than its own technique.
Lucid sleep masks are another add-on that go extremely well with any practice if you can afford them and decide to use them. One hack I would say is to use the audio, visual and tactile cues as mnemonic devices for MILD! It’ll be an unstoppable practice routine.
Alongside WBTB, I would like to address another VERY effective add-on which is reality checking! A reality check is where you logically question/test reality by trying to do things you can only do within dreams. Some popular ones are counting your fingers to see if you have more than 5, looking away and then looking back at text or numbers to see if the sentences changed, and some even pinch their nose and see if they can breathe through it within dreams. A very important thing to keep in mind, not every reality check will work well for YOU. Form a reality check yourself through dream signs or abnormal things that happen within your dreams. You should also focus on doing them at the best moments where you’re skeptical of reality, not just to do them as often as you can. Don’t be that guy who does a reality check very 5 minutes without much thought.
Another thing to keep in mind, you are not special. Don’t think you’re one of those people who won’t ever need these add-ons, because you’ll fall behind those who use them wisely alongside their practice. If you want the most effective and fastest results, use add-ons!
Lets get this out the way, generally lucid dreaming isn’t extremely easy, and nor is it extremely difficult. For some it is extremely easy for them now yet in the past they needed to work to get to the level they are now (which in fact can be you in the future!). As for some they see it as extremely difficult, however most of the time it isn’t like that. A lot of people that struggle with lucid dreaming usually fo these things and it’s the reason why its “difficult” for them:
Be confident in your abilities to lucid dream and to remember your dreams. It’s like magic, the more you believe in yourself the better you’ll do and the funner it gets. Just because you’ve been practicing for days, weeks, months, does not mean that you suck at lucid dreaming, it’s how it goes. There is also no rush, you’ll generally have over 50000 dreams within your lifetime, so why stress? You’re not missing out on anything, because you’ll get that lucid dream you’ve always wanted. The people who aren’t even practicing lucid dreaming ARE the ones missing out, not you. So be glad and proud that you’re practicing, because you’re making progress everyday.
Another thing that’s important to address which is a motivation killer for many people, dry spells. Dry spells are basically periods of time where you aren’t lucid dreaming even while practicing hard, or not remembering any dreams despite trying to do so. Dry spells are the real nightmare for many lucid dreamers, however not for you. I want you to stop looking at dry spells as a negative, instead look at it as a positive. Use those times to analyze why you’re failing at getting lucid/lacking dream recall so you can better understand your flaws.
A lot of times dry spells come for no reason out of the blue, but for some reason so many people think it’s their fault. If you were getting lucid just fine before with the same practice you’re doing during the dry spell, then why the hell is it suddenly not working well? Doesn’t make sense now does it? A lot of lucid dreamers quickly change their way of practicing out of fear and panic, which is even worse than letting the dry spell pass. Do NOT let a dry spell decieve you.
A good way to look at dry spells is that random sickness you sometimes get. A lot of times it isn’t your fault, and if you do the right things it’ll go away quickly. However if you’re just doing nasty things or you’re doing things that’ll get you sick then of course it’s your fault! Same with not being consistent with practice or not taking it seriously. If you still have trouble with dry spells then check out this guide on how to get rid of them. Click me!
Ah yes, the fun part of lucid dreaming. Dream control has a whole bunch of theories of how it works and approahes to it. I’m going to go with the schema approach. Remember how I talked about how dreams were made earlier? Well we will be using that knowledge on dream control! If you ever want something to appear, you can use schemas in a way to make it happen easier.
For example when you think of flying you probably think of wings or Superman. So in the dream think that you’re Superman. Hold your arms out like he would and fly. I mean why wouldn’t you be able to, you’re Superman. However this approach isn’t the only one, and even I don’t use it that often. I prefer expecting and believing things will appear. If I wanted to fly, I would just… fly. It’s all in my head and I’m imagining the entire thing, so I can surely imagine myself flying. That logical thinking worked a bunch for me atleast.
Dream control can be easy for anybody, screw what anybody tells you. When visualizing while awake you can imagine and visualize things perfectly fine and control them the way you want, why not dreams? Only difference is your subconscious is forming the world, however you ARE your subconscious. So go crazy, control the dream in any way you want.
I don’t believe in “practicing dream control”. To me it just doesn’t work like that, it’s your dream. You should always have full control, believing you don’t is just you setting up a rule in your dream like how I said above earlier. Whatever rule you come up with that your brain believes it’ll just make it happen because it doesn’t know better. It trusts your word over mine and others, so change it into something else. Believe and know that you have full dream control, because you do. Everybody does, they just need to find a way on how they personally will tap into it.
Now, I’ll get into something extremely fun that you can do with dream control. Something so amazing and breath taking it’ll blow any video game you’ve seen out the park by comparison.
Persistence:
Dreams are capable of having persistence. As in persistent realms, persistent dream characters, persistent items, etc. What do I mean when it comes to persistence in dreams? I mean being able to make things in dream stay the same from where you left off in a dream, even when you’re in a new dream. For example, you can turn a entire world or reality persistent, and it’ll stay the same from where you left off, like a save file in a video game. You can go back to that world and continue the story you had before you woke up. Same with persistent dream characters, you can make a dream character persistent and they’ll be able to have their own memories, personality, ideology, look, etc that stays the same and you can revisit them in another dream. They’ll be able to remember EVERYTHING you’ve done in the past, because now they’re persistent.
Persistent realms are one of the most favourite things lucid dreamers like to do, as you can create a reality with its own persistent laws and physics and story and characters, and you can live in it as a separate life and continue from where you left off from. Yes, no bullshit, this is ALL possible. It’s pretty simple to explain how it’s all possible with just one simple visualization exercise. Imagine your house from the front door to the entire layout, and now imagine you doing something like throwing a plate on the ground, breaking it. Now leave the visualization and redo it, but this time imagine the shattered plate staying in the same place. Bam, thats exactly how your subconscious mind makes things persistent.
Anything in your dream can be turned persistent, so if you missed a certain dream person or world or even story you were in within a previous dream, you can bring it back. Here is a very useful guide to persistence in dreams: Click me!
Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of this guide and now know basic information on lucid dreaming. Yes, basic. Did you expect this guide to have information for everything? Bummer but sorry to tell you I just don’t have the amount of time for that, however I can do something just as good for you all! In the next section there will be a TON of credible guides listed that can help you learn more, aswell as website forums, YouTube channels, Discord servers, etc on the subject and will be very helpful. I will try to update this website frequently, so it is NOT fully finished.
Websites
Techniques
DILD:
WILD:
EILD:
HYBRID:
ADD-ONS: