Lucid Dreaming Tips Thread
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Personally, I have a lot of luck when I intentionally daydream before sleep, and then continually staying aware of the day dream as I drift into sleep. As I start to fully enter sleep I typically lose track that I'm daydreaming and get swept away. However, sometimes I will snap back into the realization of being in a dream after my body has fallen asleep, thus making me lucid. This only works occasionally but has by far been my most consistent method.
What else you guys got?
Especially interested if anyone has had any better luck with supplements or medications.
I typically have more vivid dreams with Glycine for instance, but it doesn't seem to help with becoming lucid. -
@Master P5P gives intense dreams. Doxycycline is also known for it.
In terms of practice, you should remain try to remain aware with your consciousness as you fall asleep each night. Hypnagogic imagery and sleep paralysis sets in and then comes early dream imagery. At that point memory stops recording for a while and our imagination begins intermixing with sub-conscious emotionally-tinted memories and observations from during the day. These are intermittent and chaotic, and are greatly influenced by physical conditions like what you've eaten, tacticle bodily sensation received by your sleeping body, and noises in the room, all of which combine to determine the content of the dream-imagery. You can learn to trace dream content to their originary inluences by contemplating on them.
Lucid dreaming can accompany nightmares, as well. I've had lucid nightmares where I was 100% awake that I was dreaming yet experiencing the horror of being unable to wake up and was stuck experiencing the terror content of the dream. I was even self-aware that the terror in the nightmare was unreal yet the physical symptoms, like heart palpitation, was present regardless of my awareness that the manifest dream content was illusory.
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Once in a dream, if you sense that it’s fading spin your body in place and you will refresh the dream.
Using a very simple mantra throughout the day will allow you to remember a question from your waking life to ask in your dream. In your dream you can speak directly to your subconscious by asking to speak to it. For me, a typically humanoid representative appears and then I ask questions that I’ve had on my mind. I find that the subconscious speaks in riddle to a degree so you may have to interpret the message. Once I asked what was holding back my health and it replied “fear” this was somewhat confusing to me until I realize that fear is related to cortisol. I went to work lowering cortisol and leveled up my health considerably.
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I haven’t done this in a while but when I was a kid I heard that your brain has trouble processing hands in dreams, so in waking life I made a habit of frequently looking at my hands and verifying the correct number and length of digits. Eventually, the habit carried into dreams and I looked at my hands, I would see the fingers getting longer and shorter and say something like “whoa I’m dreaming”. The first time the realization woke me up almost immediately but it worked a few times before I lost the habit.
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@VirtueAgonist Yes this is a common tactic and one that has worked for me previously. But I find it's hard to get recurring lucid dreams with that method. Usually works once or twice then stops for me.
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@VirtueAgonist another similar technique is looking at text twice. In dreams text will often change and even appear as pictographs vs letters. A practice can be built around this to recognize dreams. Set five alarms for yourself at random times each day and when they go off, read something within eyeshot, close your eyes, open them, and read it again. The practice will carry over to dreams and you will notice that text will change the second time you read it, (and now you know you’re dreaming).
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@evan-hinkle There are many differences in dreams:
- Books don't have coherent text or are empty
- Clocks and watches don't move
- Mirrors don't reflect properly
- There isn't a sense of smell
- Electronics, TV, music, computers don't function
You can try to remind yourself during the day to be self-aware and then have that carry over into the dream. Look for these objects and then 'wake yourself up' in the dream upon seeing their unreality.
I've had lucid dreams where I was trying to test myself to jump down a flight of stairs. Because I knew it was a dream. But I chickened out because in my mind there was still a small doubt that it wasn't really a dream.
