When reality checks like asking yourself: ‘Am I dreaming?’ are carried out in a spirit of adventure and curiosity, they can be a great lucid dream induction technique, and a great lucid living practice. When reality checks are carried out with a sense of bored duty, they are useless. What you don’t want is that nagging feeling of ‘I’m supposed to do 10 reality checks a day, what a drag this is!’ Boredom is the least useful emotion for inducing lucid dreams.One of the many benefits of lucid dreaming is that it wakes us up so brightly that boredom has no place to grow.
This is why lucid dreaming is excellent for creative thinking and skill rehearsal. So rather than setting your watch to the hourly beep function and going for mechanically prompted reality tests, why not try something more natural?
The best, most effective reality checks will arise spontaneously in response to things you encounter as you go about your day.
Look for the strange, the ugly, the surprising and the beautiful, and let them be your triggers for asking yourself: ‘Am I dreaming this?’ This way, you are connecting consciously with the world around you and becoming more lucid as a result. When the next strange thing happens, you may well discover that you are in fact dreaming, as in this recent lucid dream of mine:
I’m jumping astonishingly high and feel the very air pulling me up like a force field. I must be dreaming.
It’s useful to add a ‘test action’ to reality checks, like trying to put your finger through the palm of your hand, holding your nose and seeing whether you can still breathe through your nostrils (in a dream, you can).
Once an enquiring, noticing state of awareness becomes part of your everyday life, getting lucid in a dream becomes so much easier.
Top tips for getting lucid
- Identify your state of consciousness at random moments during the day and you’ll see how complex and interesting consciousness is. You’ll also get into the excellent habit of questioning your reality.
- Am I wide awake and alert? Am I day-dreaming? Are my thoughts scattered and unfocused? Am I in a creative trance? Am I on the verge of falling asleep? Soon enough this questioning and identifying becomes a habit that will carry over into your dreams. You’ll find yourself asking, ‘Am I dreaming?’ and realising that the answer is: Yes, I am!
- The other benefit of this practice is that you will become more awake and aware in your daily life, more attuned to the here and now, more aware of beauty and the surreal or synchronistic moments in life.
- Keep a dream diary
- Learn to recognise your personal dream symbols
- Focus on hypnagogic (pre-sleep) imagery
- Visualise yourself becoming lucid
- Meditate
- Set a firm intention to get lucid and think up a ‘dream goal’
My free ebook gives tips for:
- How to stay lucid
- How to improve skills in lucid dreams
- How to solve problems
- From nightmares to healing
- Creative blocks
What does it mean when you wake up in a dream and you are fighting with a giant back spider.
That depends what black spiders signify for you personally, and on the emotions you experienced in the dream. In my book Mindful Dreaming I give lots of practical techniques for unwrapping the meaning of dreams.
Hello Clare!
Having a child (age6) who suffers from night terror, can teaching them about LD help them?
Also, what age is a good age to start learning about LD.
If you could guide me to books or links about night terror and LD that are for children, that would be amazing. I will look more into this website as well.
Thank you,
A
Hi Andre,
lucid dreaming will not necessarily help with night terrors, as these happen in deep stages of sleep and the child usually has zero recollection of what triggered them.
Are you sure these are night terrors (child screams and screams and can’t be comforted, then falls back to sleep and recalls nothing of the incident in the morning) and not nightmares? Lucid dreaming can be instrumental in helping with nightmares.
I started teaching my child about lucid dreaming when she was 2.5 so the earlier the better – of course the concept is hard to explain at that age but just letting them know they can change nightmares and make friends with scary dream figures so they are not scary any more can all be extremely helpful.
My book Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Lucid Dreaming has many tips and tricks on how lucid dreaming and waking dreamwork can help with nightmares and a chapter on children’s dreams. I also explain how to eliminate night terrors in that book.
Also a book I co-edited, Sleep Monsters & Superheroes, has many dream experts from around the world writing on children’s dreams and nightmares.
I wish you the best of luck helping your child, do feel free to contact me again with further questions, I would love to help. I was on holiday which is why I didn’t answer your post much sooner, sorry about that.
Clare
When I got to know about lucid dreaming I was very fascinated and became very obsessive towards it ,but when I did my research I came to know regarding sleep paralysis and now somehow when I even try to sleep this very thought is disturbing me and I cant even sleep. What should I do mam? I don’t want to give up my dream of lucid dreaming.
Everyday I do reality checks and at night I wake up at 5:04 and try to fall asleep awake, but it feels like no matter what I do I am never able to get lucid. The only type of success I have every had is when I first learned about lucid dreaming; my first thought was that because it was still so fresh on my mind, but the excitement for it has never left me also does dream journaling only help with recall or does it help to acually get lucid? Do you have any idea’s for a technique that would work for me?