Edited by Tyler J. Jensen

How to Lucid Dream & The Importance of Dreams

Nearly everyone has dreamed at some point in their life; however, how would you like to participate in them more actively? Perhaps you have had a dream where you realized you were dreaming, felt like you were fully there, and as if you had direct control during it. This would be called a lucid dream and they don’t have to be a rare occurrence.

You can actually directly induce them using a few key strategies. There are many reasons to do this. For one, it can be highly entertaining to do so. Lucid dreaming can also be a way to stop nightmares from occurring by better-taking control of your dreams. Some people even do spiritual practices during lucid dreaming, like meditation. Also, the more you increase your ability to lucid dream and remember your dreams the more you effectively increase your experienced life span.

Furthermore, dreams can be a great place to come up with great new ideas and confront important topics. The chemical structure of Benzene came to someone from a dream, Frankenstein was heavily inspired by Mary Shelley’s dreams, and the melody of the song “Yesterday” came to Paul McCartney in a dream.

Many psychologists, like Freud and Jung, thought that dreams carried great subconscious symbolism within them. They thought the deeper parts of your mind were trying to tell you something important through your dreams using the potential symbolism within them. This can be taken to a whole new level when you start lucid dreaming as you can begin to have full-blown conscious conversations with dream characters, which are people in your dreams who are thought to be directly tied to your subconscious. Therefore, it is as if you are directly talking to the deepest parts of your mind when talking to dream characters.

Whether or not this is true, dreams still can be a great starting off point to get you to think about important things going on in your life. If this all sounds well and good to you, one of your first questions might be, “How do I start to remember my dreams better and even start lucid dreaming.” Well, the first step is to keep a journal.

Starting a Dream Journal

You’ll want to make a regular habit of writing everything down that you dreamed about in as much detail as possible as soon as you wake up so you can remember as much as possible. This will likely require putting aside 5-10 mins or so each morning for journaling, but this is a really important step.

This is because it will help develop your ability to remember better all the dreams you have had. It will also make it more likely you will be able to know when you are dreaming, which is how you start to lucid dream. Along side journaling, another thing that can help is continually through the day checking if you are dreaming or not.

This can be done through a variety of methods. One way is to check a clock or book, look away, and check again to see if it is the same. Words on a page or the time on a clock will often be random and different each time you look at it in a dream. So, if there is consistency, you are likely not dreaming, but if there isn’t, and the time or words on the page are different when you look back again, then you know you are dreaming. Another common dream test is to plug your nose while holding your breath and see if you can still breathe. In real life, you won’t be able to, but in a dream, you should continue to be able to breathe just fine.

By doing these dream tests while awake, the hope is you will do them out of habit while dreaming. This will cause you to realize you are dreaming when things turn out differently than how you are used to them turning out. However, the ways to help ensure you lucid dream don’t stop here.

Dream Mantras & Waking Up To Go Back To Bed

Another common method to help you lucid dream is to repeat a phrase to yourself as you fall asleep, which is something along the lines of, “Tonight, I will know that I am dreaming.” Alternatively, you could say something like, “Mind awake, body asleep.” Whatever your mantra is, you want to repeat this multiple times while falling asleep. This hopefully will trigger something in your brain and cause you to actually lucid dream that night.

A way to really increase the likelihood you will lucid dream that night, in combination with this mantra, if you really badly want to, is to actually wake up after only sleeping six hours. After waking up, you want to get up for a bit, use the bathroom if you have to, and go immediately right back to sleep.

You’ll want to lie back down to sleep while repeating the earlier mantra again to make the likelihood of lucid dreaming as high as possible. This helps ensure that the right parts of your brain become simultaneously active to cause you to have a lucid dream that night. Which, as we mentioned, can have a variety of benefits.

Lucid dreams can be a great source of entertainment and increase your experienced life span by increasing the amount of experiences you have. It can be a great way to deal with constant nightmares. Also, it might be an opportunity to better get to know yourself by seeing what your subconscious has to say to you. Or, at the very least, it can provide a good opportunity to think about important topics in your life.

It can also maybe help provide some inspiration in your life as it has for people like Paul McCartney or Mary Shelley. Hopefully, these aforementioned techniques can be of some use if you so decide to start lucid dreaming and if you do, I hope it gives you some wonderful dreaming experiences.