If you’ve been looking into upping the ante on your lucid dreaming practice then you may wish to evaluate your lucid dreaming IQ by checking out the points on the following list. Each item listed is very important for getting better at lucid dreaming!
Oh by the way, you might want to check out this very effective lucid dreaming course, if you’re a beginner or don’t know where to start with lucid dreaming! (Opens in a new tab)
Wait, lucid what?
Lucid dreaming is a unique and incredible ability that millions of people have. It’s the ability to control your dreams, and decide what you dream about, WHILE you’re dreaming. This lets you do whatever you want, feel anything you want, and explore your mind as if it were an alien planet, and you were it’s God.
How to lucid dream easily!
1: Improve your Dream Recall
It is no exaggeration to say that being able to recall your dreams underlies your entire lucid dreaming practice and is the foundation upon which all successful lucid dreaming occurs. After all, if you can’t recall a simple dream, what material do you have to work with?
Good, consistent dream recall increases your chance of lucidity and helps you build up a repertoire of dream symbols that you can work with. Many people ask how they can become better at becoming lucid in their dreams and the first step to achieving this is being able to consistently remember their “regular dreams.”
You become better at this by keeping a dream journal.
Why?
Because after a while of keeping a dream journal your subconscious and unconscious become “programmed” into remembering your dreams.
How does this work?
When you do something enough times and it becomes a habit, you don’t need to make any conscious effort to do something. It just happens. By continually recording your dreams in a dream journal you’ve told your subconscious that it has no choice but to remember your dreams every night.
So it’s important to make dream journalling a habit that will force you to remember your dreams.
After about a month or more you will probably find that you remember at least one dream every night. If this isn’t the case, then you should continue journalling until you have no problem recalling at least one dream a night. If it doesn’t take you long to achieve this, you should still continue keeping a dream journal regardless.
2: Use different Dream Journal Apps
If you can’t see yourself writing in a paper journal, there are apps that you can download to help you on your path to lucidity. One of the best ones on the market is the app Lucidity because you can use the voice to text function to record your dreams –no writing required!
Not only is this a great app to use if you do not like writing, you can also create your own unique tags so that you can reference and cross reference your dreams by symbol and/or subject.
3: Improve your overall memory
Lucid dreaming expert Stephen LaBerge (check out his book) believes that memory is the single most important function for inducing a lucid dream.
One of his most popular and effective techniques is called the MILD technique, i.e. “I will remember that I am dreaming.”
According to LaBerge, memory can be broken down into two parts.
- Retrospective Memory: This is the skill of recalling information you have learned in the past. It is useful for calling on certain techniques that you can use while you are actually inside a lucid dream.
- Prospective Memory: Telling yourself that you will remember to do something in the future is the most important part of memory for prospective lucid dreamers
Being able to draw on these different ways of recalling information will help you induce lucid dreams.
4: Improve your waking life awareness
How many people go through their lives awake but totally asleep and unconscious?
A lot of us aren’t living our lives to their fullest potential so it’s fair to say that a lot of us are sleeping while we’re awake. Lucid dreaming turns this on its head as it is the practice where we are awake while we are sleeping.
Because there is an unlimited capacity for expression, we can experience heightened awareness in the dream world as well as in waking reality. If we start teaching ourselves how to become hyper aware of our waking realities, this will automatically translate into heightened awareness in the dream world.
This means that if you are aware of all the sensations in your immediate environment while you are awake, this will naturally transition over into your lucid dreaming life.
So make it a point to start paying extra attention to your surroundings while you are awake. In conclusion, being hyper-aware while you are awake means that you are more likely to carry this practice over into your dream life.
This practice is called ADA (All Day Awareness) and it is a powerful lucid dreaming technique that forces you to switch from autopilot mode to hyper awareness mode. It won’t be long before your perceptiveness and your ability to live in the moment translates itself into super vivid lucid dreams.
5: Use powerful visualisation techniques
Being able to effectively visualise things is extremely beneficial for people wishing to induce lucid dreams.
Visualisation is a key component in dream yoga, a form of lucid dreaming practiced by Tibetan monks. For the dream yogi to be successful they must be able to visualise whatever they focus their attention on.
Visualisation is also important for people who practice yoga nidra, which is a yogic form of lucid dreaming that requires an ability to focus our attention on verbal cues. The ability to follow these verbal cues by creating a visually rich inner world is the key to success in yoga nidra and can be adopted by people who wish to induce lucid dreams.
6: Practice daily Mindfulness/Meditation
This point can be seen as a bridge between visualisation and awareness, however, the difference is that with meditation you make it a point to set up a daily meditation practice (even just 15 minutes a day is enough to reap enormous lucid dreaming success).
There are many different types of meditation out there so you can choose a practice that best suits your personality type.
Mindfulness is a lot like awareness except that it goes the extra distance by acknowledging and accepting any negative or uncomfortable feelings that may arise as a result of the process.
Mindfulness is also about casting no judgment on whatever arises with neutrality being the goal. Since lucid dreaming is about finding the perfect balance between the conscious and the unconscious, practicing the art of mindfulness will help induce lucid dreams.
Also note that mindfulness is often used as a therapeutic technique to help people with health complaints and psychological issues.
7: Start learning actual dream control
It is pretty common amongst newbie and seasoned lucid dreamers alike to experience “blackness” only moments after they have awakened in a dream.
This can be extremely frustrating however, fear not, there are ways to prevent this from happening or recovering the situation a few seconds after you have experienced a black out. To recap:
- Use your Senses: You can gain control of your dream again by trying to feel the ground around you and anchoring yourself into your surroundings. You can also try and use all your senses to regain control of your dream.
- Set an Intention: Having an intention before you sleep (something simple like “I will remember and have complete control of my dreams tonight”) will help you anchor it into the subconscious. The more you repeat your intentions to yourself, the more success you’ll have in controlling your dreams from start to finish.
- Get Creative! Lastly, you will need to draw upon your creativity to stay lucid in a dream. Since dreams are an endless source of creativity, you can draw upon that same creativity to solve any obstacle you encounter that stops you from being totally lucid and in control.
Lucid dream tonight
You can quickly and easily start lucid dreaming by learning a lucid dreaming technique, but here are some useful links for getting started:
- Take a course: Try this lucid dreaming course and take notes as you progress through it. It’s set to last 30 days, so tell yourself that you’ll lucid dream within a month
- Listen to binaural beats: These are special soundwaves which help you induce lucid dreams and relax, and they work very quickly
- Try a lucid dreaming supplement: There are several to choose from, but Dreamleaf seems to be one of the most effective.