Source: What is lucid dreaming—and how can you learn to do it?
The following is part of the overall article – specifically the bit on learning to have lucid dreams.
If you don’t have lucid dreams naturally (most people don’t), you can learn to induce them through a variety of techniques—but there can be drawbacks.
In a study published in the journal Sleep Advances, researchers examined and analyzed 400 posts on a lucid-dreaming discussion forum and discovered both positive effects and negative experiences. On the upside, many people reported dream enhancement, waking up in a positive mood, and fewer nightmares.
On the negative side, people reported feeling paralyzed—unable to yell or move—or having trouble distinguishing whether they were asleep or really awake, and less restorative sleep.
“Some people don’t want to have lucid dreams—they just want to sleep,” says Remington Mallett, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine at the University of Montreal.
If you decide to try lucid dreaming, a prerequisite is to have fairly good dream recall, experts say. “If you keep a dream journal, you will start to have better dream recall,” Mallett says.
The techniques used to induce lucid dreams have varying degrees of success and there isn’t one that works for everyone. “It’s a learnable skill but people make it sound much easier than it really is,” Zadra says.
Among the more proven techniques are cognitive ones that are performed during the day, or while you’re falling asleep.
With the reality testing technique, you stop what you’re doing at regular intervals throughout the day, and ask yourself whether you’re in a dream or reality then go back to your usual activities, Zadra explains. The idea is that these “reality checks” eventually can become incorporated into “a person’s dream, enabling them to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness realities, which in turn induces dream lucidity,” according to research published this year.
A technique called the Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams involves rehearsing a dream during the day and visualizing becoming lucid while telling yourself, the next time I’m dreaming, I’ll recognize that I’m dreaming.
With the Wake-Up-Back-to-Bed technique, the person sets an alarm clock to go off after about six hours of sleep, stays awake for approximately 30 minutes, then goes back to bed with the intention to become lucid if they start dreaming. Another one, called the Senses Initiated Lucid Dream technique, involves waking up after about five hours of sleep and repeatedly shifting your attention between visual, auditory, and physical sensations before going back to sleep.
Of these three techniques, a 2023 study found that rehearsing a dream during the day was the most effective.
Through a process of trial and error, you could see which one works for you. Or, “you can stack them up and use them all,” Baird says, because they can work together.
Regardless of the frequency, lucid dreaming can help people gain a sense of “agency or control over their dream content,” Mallett says. Which is helpful, he adds, “because the effects of dreams can carry over into waking life.”