Lucid Dreams – How to Experience the Ultimate Virtual Reality
By Casey Douglass
The other day I
realised that the subject of lucid dreaming is something that I’ve
not written about for almost two decades. When I was at high school,
and later college, it was something I was truly fascinated by, but
not really having any kind of platform to write on back then, those
scribblings have likely been lost to the winds of time.
Here is a lucid dream
related how-to post, drawing on techniques and tips that I can remember as
being useful in helping me experience the lucid dream state. Others
will likely have different techniques, but as with many things, it’s
a matter of finding what works for you. If these techniques don’t
produce results, a quick web search will likely bring up many more
for you to try.
First a warning though.
Anyone that has trouble with differentiating reality from
non-reality, maybe due to mental illness for example, would probably
be wise to not venture too far into the idea of lucid dreaming. Only
you can decide if it’s right or wise for you to try, but it can be
pretty head bending at times.
If you do decide to
push ahead, you will find a wonderful, quirky world inside your
sleeping mind, one in which you can be a superhero, a supervillain,
or anything that you can conceive of. You own imagination is
literally the limit. Without further ado, let’s get started.
What is a lucid dream?
A lucid dream is a
dream in which the dreamer knows that they are dreaming. A bit like
Neo knowing that he is in The Matrix. It’s a moment of realisation
that often comes with a “Holy shit I’m dreaming!” excitement,
only for said excitement to wake you up and leave you feeling
annoyed, like someone who’s just been locked out of paradise. There
are ways to get around that however, but I'll get to those later.
What is a lucid dream like?
Knowing that you are
dreaming is a pretty intoxicating feeling, marvelling that your mind
has created this whole seemingly real world for you to play in. I
once wasted an entire lucid dream running my fingers over a leaf on a
tree, and I’m not even a hippy-type guy. The “realness” just
felt so uncanny, my mind kind of got lost in the novelty. I would add
that it was only a 30 second or so dream, I didn’t spend ages doing
it. I’m not weird. Honest.
Lucid dreams are like
the ultimate VR, one which has a very low financial cost to enter,
but that takes its payment in the form of the effort and patience in
trying to get inside. Some will likely experience lucid dreams
without trying, but others might go their whole lives and not really
experience a single one. I remember a good friend at high-school who
could never remember having had one. He was ecstatic when he came in
one day beaming that it had finally happened! It’s one thing to
know something is possible, it’s another to know it because you’ve
experienced it!
How do you trigger a lucid dream?
In the years that I’ve
been reading and studying the subject, a wide variety of methods have
emerged. I will describe just two for now, two of the most
straightforward, and to me, the two most successful.
Keep a dream journal
If you are going to be
doing anything with dreams, it is very worthwhile to note them down
upon awakening, whatever the time of day or night. Even if it’s
just a few keywords, getting something down on paper creates an
anchor that can unlock other memories when you mull it over at a
later time.
Keeping a dream journal
with any kind of regularity will boost your dream recall. Those
initial handfuls of keywords upon starting will soon expand to fill
pages in your notebook. You are basically signalling to your mind
that you are interested in these things, and so it puts more effort
into remembering them. As a handy side-effect, just keeping a dream
journal often seems to cause a higher occurrence of lucid dreams in
and of itself, maybe due to said heightened interest, so it’s a
win-win.
Test your reality
The second method for
having a lucid dream is to periodically check or test the environment
around you as you go about your day. The dream world is strange at
the best of times, and even in seemingly hum-drum dreams, our usual
mindset of blank acceptance makes everything seem normal. How many
times have you seen things in dreams that in waking life would have
left you incredulous? It is in their strangeness however, that dreams
offer up the key to picking up on the fact that you are dreaming.
There are a number of
clues that you can look for to see if you are dreaming. I mean, after
all, how do you know you aren’t dreaming now? It’s possible. This
is where keeping a dream journal comes in handy, as you can pick up
on the behaviour of your own personal dream world and note down its
tricksy ways.
Firstly, settle on a
trigger that will prompt you to do your reality check. Maybe whenever
you check the time? Every time you open a door? It could be anything
really, as long as it happens quite frequently during your day. It
will also help if it’s something that you know you do in your
dreams too. The idea is that you will perform your trigger enough that the habit will carry over into your dreams. Personally, I like the time checking one, as it kind of
comes with its own built-in reality check.
Writing and numbers
tend to change in dreams. They certainly do in mine. If I read
something, even a simple sign, turn away, and then turn back, there
will be some kind of change if I am dreaming. The same goes with
digital clocks. This makes reality testing when I look at the time a
big no-brainer. I simply see my clock, remember the reality check,
and then look away and appraise my environment for any weirdness that
doesn’t make sense. Then I look back at the time to see if it has
changed beyond the few seconds it should have. If it has, there is a
strong chance that I am dreaming. If it hasn’t, chances are that
I’m not. I should also add that if the time has changed in a
strange way, one more look at what is going on around me will usually
give a blatant clue that I am dreaming, such as seeing someone who I
know to be dead, walking and laughing across the street. The checking sometimes makes the weirdness come out of the woodwork, so to speak.
I should probably add
that it’s important to do more than one reality test if you suspect
that you are dreaming. I tend to try to levitate on the spot as if
that works, it’s game time, and it’s something I’ve yet to
achieve in waking life. Another test is trying to remember my day or
night up until that point, as dreams often have a pretty broken
narrative. Can I remember getting here? What did I do before that?
and that, and that etc. If I’m at a loss, it’s another sign that
I am likely dreaming.
Another great exercise
that aids in this narrative-based test is, before going to sleep at
night, try to remember your day, but backwards, as far as you can.
So, starting from the act of getting into bed, and then getting ready
for bed, having that biscuit, watching Netflix... until you get all
of the way back to the morning and when you first woke up. It doesn’t
matter how far back you can actually remember, but the act of trying
will see you get better and better. This will help a great deal with
the “narrative” questioning reality test, and also help your
memory in general, even helping you remember your dreams more easily.
A virtuous circle if ever I saw one.
Be sensible with your
tests. No trying to see if you can fly by jumping off something
dangerous, or assuming you’re dreaming and going on some kind of
bender. You need to use your common sense and with practice, you’ll
soon know with more certainty. The first time you think you are
dreaming, a good bet is to just go along with the dream but doing so
while trying to hold onto your knowledge of the fact. It’s quite
easy to forget you are dreaming again. If you can hold onto the
notion, you’ll remember things more easily, and you can explore
your mental landscape in a more considered way.
I think that about
wraps up this first post on lucid dreaming. You have a few techniques
and tips above that will, over time, help you to experience a lucid
dream, but persistence and patience is what is needed. My
aforementioned high-school friend tried for months before it
happened. It might happen on the first night for you. Who knows.
If this article does
well, I will write more. The next ones will feature ways to prolong
the dream state, techniques to manifest the things in your dreams
that you like (maybe that celeb you’d like to do naughty things
with), and other fun things you might like to try, such as causing
false awakenings and going recursively deeper into the dream state.
Thank you for reading,
and if you’d like to chat more about lucid dreams, leave a comment
or send me a message on social media.
