Have you ever experienced a dream that felt remarkably vivid and under your control? Where you could shape your surroundings and choose your actions with intention?
In this article, we’ll delve into the world of this extraordinary dream state, lucid dreaming, exploring its limitless possibilities and the transformative potential it holds.
From mastering incredible feats to confronting your deepest fears, this dream state opens the door to an entirely new realm of experiences.
We’ll also discuss the methods for entering into a lucid dream state and how to navigate it safely.
Whether you’re a seasoned dream explorer or just curious about the possibilities of the dream world, this article will guide you through the enchanting journey of discovering a dream state like no other.
What is a lucid dreaming?
Lucid dreaming simply means you are aware that you are dreaming while you are in the dream.
A lucid dream is a mental construct inside your own mind. The characters you meet inside your lucid dream are under your control; they are not conscious beings visiting you (with few exceptions).
When you realize you are dreaming, the dream flow and content usually stop, and suddenly you are in control of the entire scene.
Inside a lucid dream you are a god. You can snap your fingers and bend the dream content to your will.
Imagine if you were watching a movie (i.e. normal dreaming) and suddenly the characters turned to you and said, “What do you want us to do next?” (i.e. lucid dreaming). Suddenly you are in control of what happens in the dream, and you use your conscious thoughts to direct the action.
What can you do in a lucid dream?
Believe you can do it, and you can do it. In a lucid dream anything is possible. Anything!
This means that if you want to pretend you are a super hero you can absolutely have that experience. Just snap your fingers or use your will and you’re shooting lasers from your hands in no time.
With lucid dreaming, if you want to experience sexual activity you can conjure anyone you’d like and do whatever you’d like with them.
One of my favorite things to do in a lucid dream is solve supernatural crimes with Sam and Dean Winchester from the TV show Supernatural. (LINK)
If you want to spend the day on a beach sipping a drink and listening to the waves, you can.
You can also connect with other beings, and communicate with deceased loved ones.
The sky is the limit with lucid dreaming. Anything you can conjure in your mind, you can experience in your dream. So be careful what you imagine as you will make it the truth.
Are there any risks?
I was asked this by a reader in the past. Is there a risk of losing interest in waking life?
My response was that when I first learned how to induce lucid dreams as a teenager, and then program the dream I wanted to have, it was intoxicating! I was practically living a double life because my night life was vastly different than my waking life. I was becoming addicted to the pleasures of lucid dreaming and I began losing interest in my waking life because it simply wasn’t as exciting as my dream life.
The more I explored the dream world and different planes of existence, the less connected I was to my waking life. This was not at all healthy. So yes, this is a risk.
How do you mitigate this risk? Don’t seek the dream world to escape. Enjoy your waking life! Totally separate day and night time and make sure you are grounded in the real world before you go out so far you can’t get back. But enjoy yourself!
How to Lucid Dream
Here are my best tips to increase your chances at lucid dreaming:
Believe it’s possible – If you don’t believe it will happen, it won’t.
Learn to remember your dreams– If you can’t remember your dreams normally, it’s going to be even harder to wake up during a dream and stay lucid. So become more aware of your non-lucid dreams. When you are lucid dreaming, you are basically waking up your mind but not your body.
Decide your dream content in advance – Before you go to sleep, think about what you want to dream about. Play it in your mind like a daydream or fantasy.
Wake up, stay up, then go back to sleep – I talk about this method in my book, The Astral Projection Guidebook and the same technique works for lucid dreaming. Set an alarm to wake yourself up in the middle of your night. Stay up for 30 to 90 minutes and then go back to sleep. Your odds of having a lucid dream are vastly increased when you do this.
Take a nap – Lucid dreams often occur while you are napping. I’m not sure why and I’m not a sleep scientist, but naps are different than regular 7-8 hour sleep stints. If you feel tired during the day, lay down and succumb to sleep.
Practice staying calm inside your lucid dream – Be an observer at first until you get the hang of staying in the lucid dream longer. If you get excited, it will wake you up.
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Can you lucid dream with other people?
I used to think that sharing lucid dreaming with friends was possible. Difficult, but possible.
Then as I thought about every one of my experiences where I shared a dream experience with someone else and I realized that we were not in a lucid state, we were in an astral state, or some other altered state of consciousness.
Now my response is that I believe that if you are having a shared dream, you are actually having a conscious astral experience with those people and not a true lucid dream.
To read more about astral projection, including about connecting with others on the astral plane, read my article Astral Projection 101.
Practicing Your Lucid Dream Skills
Consciously change or alter your dream landscape so you can practice dream creation and using your will.
First try some basic skills like changing the color of your shirt.
Then try some of these other things:
- Talk to a dream character and tell them you know you’re dreaming and see how they react
- Snap your fingers and teleport to a whole new dream location
- Create new dream characters
- Experiment with becoming or doing something you cannot in your waking life
- Have an adventure! Have fun!
Once you master some basic skills, it’s time to move onto learning how to fly and mastering lucid dreaming battle skills!
Learning To Fly
One of my absolute favorite things to do in lucid dreams is fly around. It’s a lucid dreaming skill you can practice, and I’m going to give you some pointers. While in the dream state…
- Practice running off a tall building to gain momentum.
- Focus on believing you can fly fast and high—your belief shapes your experience.
Start with gentle flights to build confidence and control. - As you grow more comfortable with flying, push your boundaries by aiming for higher altitudes and faster speeds.
- Experiment with different speeds, heights, and techniques such as barrel rolls and tricks.
If you experience a lack of control, focus on your belief in your ability to fly and adjust your thoughts. - If you encounter a fall or struggle, take a break and attempt flying again with renewed confidence.
f you’re scared of falling, don’t worry, it’s a dream 😉
Read about the class I attended within a lucid dream where the instructor had us mastering lucid dream flying.
If I find myself falling, I’ve also learned how to pause my dreams, plan out what I’m going to do, and then restart the dream (I explain this technique later in the article).
Mastering Battle Skills
I once had a lucid dream where I was giving a class on lucid dreaming battle skills, and I’ll summarize these skills here.
You can always wake up from a dream so there isn’t any risk of doing battle in a dream, like there may be in astral projection. Therefore lucid dreaming is a good environment to practice your battle skills so you’re ready for not-so-pleasant astral encounters if you want to master astral projection too.
Mastering Flight: Practice flying slowly, deliberately, and maintaining control. Learn to hover and maneuver quickly.
Deciding Your Powers: Choose your desired powers and practice them until they become second nature.
Distance Attacks: Use distance attacks such as with a bow and arrow to keep enemies at bay. This gives you more time to react and strategize.
Hand-to-Hand Combat: Practice close combat techniques, such as martial arts or weapon skills (like an energy sword), for when enemies close in.
Defensive Skills: Develop skills like shielding, invisibility, and insubstantiality to avoid unwanted fights or defend against attacks.
Calling for Help: Reach out to higher vibrational beings or allies for assistance in tough situations.
Connecting with Other Conscious Beings in a Lucid Dream
I already mentioned who you most likely cannot connect with in a dream (unless it’s an astral experience), so is there any conscious being you can connect with?
Through lucid dreaming, I have been able to connect with deceased relatives, spirit guides, celestial beings, and even low vibrational beings.
It’s actually even a better idea to connect with your spirit guides in a lucid dream rather than in an astral projection. So if you want to get some guidance, this is the place to do it!
Although I can’t explain the quantum mechanics of this ability, I know that it is possible to consciously connect with other beings while in a lucid dream state because I have done it hundreds of times.
The trick here is to be careful who you open up to. I have been chased around by some dark entities while in a lucid dream state. It’s not fun, but they are easily avoided by waking yourself up.
Can You Learn New Things?
When you dream, you’re entering your own mind’s subconscious construct. As such, all the people, places, and things you see in a dream are created by your own subconscious mind.
So to use some examples, if you lucidly created a Japanese teacher to come teach you Japanese, you would get what sounds like Japanese to you, but which would probably not be real Japanese since your subconscious and conscious minds don’t know Japanese. If you flew to another country you would see what you think would be there and not what actually is.
For the vast majority of people, everything experienced in a dream, lucid or not, is going to contain a subset of what the dreamer already knows or believes. There’s nothing new under the sun.
You can read more about learning new things in a lucid dream in another article I wrote.
Programming a Dream
Don’t waste time when you find yourself lucid.
Set intentions and visualize specific dream scenarios before you fall asleep. By doing so, you can guide your dream content and increase the likelihood of having a lucid dream that aligns with your desired experience.
Start by thinking carefully about what you want your next dream to feature.
Remember, if you don’t know what to do, the original dream you were supposed to have will assert itself and take over.
When you go to sleep with a clear intention in mind, your subconscious can incorporate these ideas into your dream narrative.
This can include deciding on the people, places, and activities you want to experience during your dream.
Visualize the desired scenario in detail, almost like a daydream, before going to sleep. Imagine the sights, sounds, and emotions you want to experience in your dream. This mental rehearsal can help you maintain focus and recall your intentions once you become lucid.
If you don’t practice, you won’t improve. Every time you have a lucid dream have something pre-planned to work on so you can get right to it.
False Awakenings
Sometimes you may experience a lucid dream from which you cannot not wake up.
This is called a false awakening. You dream that you wake up, or you dream that you get up out of bed and go on about your normal routine, only to find that nothing works like it’s supposed to. You then realize you’re dreaming and try to wake up. Sometimes you’re successful but often you are trapped in the dream.
I believe one of the reasons it’s difficult to wake up in this situation is because your mind is already awake, but your body is still in the sleep state.
One way people are able to wake themselves up when they need to is to fall backwards. Like you’re falling backwards into a swimming pool. Most people will jerk awake when they hit the dream floor, or you might even go through it. But the sensation of falling is often enough to trigger a true awakening.
If I’m ever truly trapped and can’t wake myself up, I start changing the nature of the dreamscape so it’s not as terrifying. If I need to battle something, I make short work of it.
Often something in our real environment can wake us up, thankfully!
Hopping Back in to Continue a Dream Where it Left Off
Have you ever had a dream you wouldn’t mind getting back to? Have you ever had a dream that left you feeling angry or upset and you wish you could change the dream’s outcome? Have you ever been in the middle of dreaming something really pleasant that you would love to get a chance to finish?
Early on in my lucid dreaming days, I had a nightmare and woke up. I decided I wanted to go back into the nightmare to see if I could transform it from within, so I could overcome the fear.
I learned to become very proficient in the art of continuing a dream…even years later if I wanted to.
Here is how you can do this too:
Lie down in your bed on your back with your eyes closed and replay the previous night’s dream in your head, concentrating on every detail you can remember and how you felt in the dream. Let yourself fall asleep when you get near to the point where your dream left off.
If you keep doing this I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to return to a dream you’ve had previously. It’s not a sure thing, but your success rate will increase with practice.
You’ve got to remember the details of the dream and especially how you felt in the dream (fear, anger, panic, excitement, etc.) For some reason, the emotional aspect of the dream is important for getting back to it.
Another method to continue a dream you just had, is to try not to open your eyes after you wake up. If you do open your eyes, close them again quickly because stimuli in your bedroom will dissipate the dream. Next, quickly think how you will handle the dream if you can get back into it, then let yourself fall back to sleep. If you do it right and don’t get too excited, you’ll end up with a lucid dream and the memory of how you wanted to handle the situation.
You can even develop the skill to the point where you don’t even need to wake up. You can become lucid and just pause the dream. I recall a dream where I fell off a cliff. I paused the dream and decided when it picked up again I would simply fly instead of fall.
In Conclusion
Lucid dreaming offers a gateway to an extraordinary and immersive dream world where your imagination knows no bounds.
By following the tips and techniques outlined in this article, you can increase your chances of entering this extraordinary state and make the most of your dream adventures.
Whether you use lucid dreaming to explore new skills, connect with loved ones, or simply enjoy thrilling escapades, the possibilities are endless.
As you continue your journey into the realm of lucid dreaming, remember to approach it with curiosity and respect, and you may find yourself unlocking new dimensions of creativity, insight, and self-discovery.
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