• Note type: 🍂Fleeting Note

In typical dreams, people judge their experience with a high degree of acceptance and a lack of critical evaluation; they fail to realize that their experience is merely a dream. On the other hand, a “lucid dream” differs in that the dreamer gains the elusive insight of being in a dream. Lucid dreams occur predominantly during REM sleep and can be accompanied by eye-movement signals used to indicate that dreamers recognize that they are dreaming, or to transmit other information such as time-stamping dream events. However, lucid dreaming is a notoriously rare phenomenon and lucid dreams can seldom be summoned at will, which has made it difficult for researchers to capture them in the lab in a reliable manner.

–Konkoly et al. (2021)

Being in a state of lucid dreaming, does not only change my 💀consciousness of it, but also the vividness of the dream: it's almost like going from a blurry potato quality to a 4K video. The interesting thing is that everything "feels" so real, that it almost becomes a bit scary: "Am I really dreaming? Is it safe to jump out this window to go flying?"

I have mostly used lucid dreaming as a fun arena of exploration. But some people claim to have used it for 💀creative problem solving and getting in touch with their 💀subconsciousness. I have also learnt that it requires some real skill of dream control, of which I had not that much — but there are different levels of lucidity of the dream (since flying is so unnatural to us human beings, it's not easy to imagine for me).

Some people are natural lucid dreamers, sometimes learnt in early youth to escape nightmares. Others really need to put in a lot of effort and training to reach it, me included. The time and sleep commitment it requires of me is the main reason I am not actively pursuing anymore. And I don't think I have had more than a couple of lucid dreams since. (Though it is very much possible that I just don't remember my lucid dreams, but do have them! An important reason why dream recall is so important.)

When I started becoming interested in lucid dreaming, Stephen LaBerge was refered to as the go-to expert on the topic. He developed the MILD (mnemonic induction of lucid dreams) technique for entering such a dream state: it relies on dream recall, reality checks, lucid affirmations, and visualizing your dreams. Another technique is the wake induced lucid dream (WILD).

Personally, I have found most success with keeping a dream diary and performing regular reality checks. The reality check I used most was counting my fingers (I often count more than 10 in my dreams!), but other examples are reading texts, pushing your hand through your palm, and pinching your nose while trying to breath. For a higher success-rate, I paired this approach with the wake back to bed technique (WBTB), where you time your alarm clock to go off during your REM sleep, waking up, and then falling back to sleep again back into your dream.