How to lucid dream: a practical guide

What is a lucid dream?

In a lucid dream you know that you are dreaming while the dream goes on. The dream feels as real as any other, but you remember your waking life and can think clearly. Often you can stay in the dream, look around and steer what happens.

Most people have a lucid dream now and then without trying. With practice, many have them far more often. Lucidity is not all or nothing: sometimes you only suspect that you are dreaming, sometimes you are fully aware. Both count as progress.

Why REM sleep matters

You dream throughout the night, but the long, vivid dreams that can become lucid happen mostly in REM sleep. Sleep runs in cycles of about 90 minutes. The early cycles are mostly deep sleep; towards morning they shift to REM, and the last REM phase before you wake up can last 30 to 60 minutes.

That is why the techniques below focus on the second half of the night. A lucid dream is most likely in the last few hours before you wake up.

Start with good sleep

Lucid dreams grow out of good sleep. When you sleep well, you have more REM sleep, remember more of your dreams and think more clearly in them. These habits are worth more than any technique:

• Keep a steady rhythm. Go to bed and get up at the same times every day, at the weekend too. Your body then knows when to sleep, and your REM phases come at more predictable times.
• Take one nap a day. A short nap in the early afternoon, of about 20 minutes, keeps you rested without taking away from your night. Longer naps can leave you groggy, because you wake up from deep sleep.
• No screens in the last 2 to 3 hours before bed. The light and the stream of messages keep your mind awake. Dim the lights in the evening as well.
• Stop eating after dinner. Nothing more after dessert: digesting a late snack makes for restless sleep.
• Wind down. Use the screen-free evening for something calm: meditate, do a breathing exercise, stretch, read, or go over your dream journal and your intention for the night.

The DreamCue watch app helps with two of these. Start a nap from the home page and pick a length: from 30 minutes the watch warns about grogginess. The nap alarm starts very gently and gets a little stronger every minute. The Naps page on dreamcue.app shows the strength you usually wake up at, which also helps you set the REM cue so that it does not wake you. Meditate guides your breathing, with a circle that follows your own breath.

Step 1: Remember your dreams

You cannot become lucid in a dream you forget. Dream recall is the foundation, and it improves quickly once you pay attention to it.

• Lie still when you wake up. Keep your eyes closed and ask yourself what you were just dreaming. Moving and thinking about your day make a dream fade within seconds.
• Write it down or speak it in. Even a few words or a single image will do. More details come back while you record it.
• Tell yourself at bedtime that you will remember your dreams. It sounds too simple, but the intention helps.
• Read your journal back once a week. You will notice dream signs: people, places and odd things that keep coming back. They become useful in the next steps.

DreamCue asks Did you dream? on your watch in the morning. Answer yes, and you can speak or type your dream into your dream journal, which is encrypted so that only you can read it.

Step 2: Reality checks

A reality check is a moment in which you seriously ask yourself: am I dreaming right now? Do this often enough during the day and the habit carries over into your dreams. In a dream the answer is different, and that is the moment you become lucid.

Pair the question with a test that gives a different result in a dream:

• Pinch your nose and try to breathe through it. In a dream you often still can.
• Look at your hands. Count your fingers: in dreams hands often look strange, or the count is off.
• Read some text, look away and read it again. In a dream, text tends to change.
• Look at a clock twice. In a dream it rarely shows the same time, or a sensible one.

The test matters less than the attitude. Do not go through the motions: really look around, and allow for a moment that you might be dreaming. A few thoughtful checks a day work better than many hasty ones. Do an extra one whenever something strange happens, or when you come across one of your dream signs.

The hard part is remembering to check. The DreamCue watch app gives you reality checks at random moments during the day, by default every 30 to 60 minutes, so you do not have to remember them yourself.

Step 3: MILD, an intention before you fall asleep

MILD stands for Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams, a technique developed by the lucid dreaming researcher Stephen LaBerge. It trains you to remember, while you are dreaming, that you meant to notice it. It works best right after you wake up from a dream, during the night or early in the morning.

1. When you wake up from a dream, go over it in your mind.
2. Pick a moment in it where you could have noticed that you were dreaming: something impossible, or one of your dream signs.
3. Imagine yourself back in that dream, noticing that moment and realising: this is a dream.
4. As you fall asleep, repeat a simple intention, such as: next time I am dreaming, I will notice that I am dreaming.
5. Keep the intention in mind until you fall asleep. When your thoughts wander, gently bring them back.

MILD works best when you fall asleep again soon. If you lie awake for a long time, let it go: relax and try again another night. Your daily nap is a good moment to practise falling asleep with an intention.

Step 4: Cues during REM sleep

A cue during REM sleep is a light signal, such as a sound, a flash of light or a gentle vibration. Ideally it is too soft to wake you, but reaches you in your dream, where it reminds you to check whether you are dreaming. Sleep researchers have used sounds and lights this way for decades, and lucid dreaming masks are built on the same idea.

A cue works best when you have learned to answer it while you are awake. That is why it pays to take every daytime reality check seriously: the vibration on your wrist becomes the signal to stop and ask whether you are dreaming, and that habit is what you take into your sleep.

The DreamCue watch app estimates when you are in REM sleep from the time of night and your watch's sensors, such as your heart rate and movement, and gives a gentle vibration then. Keep in mind that a watch on your wrist cannot measure sleep as precisely as a sleep lab: during the beta, cues will often come outside REM. If cues keep waking you, lower their strength, as explained in How strong should the REM cue be?

Step 5: When a cue wakes you

Sometimes a cue does wake you up. That is not a failure: it is one of the best moments for a lucid dream. You have just come out of a dream, in the REM-rich part of the night, and your mind is clear enough to set an intention.

• Stay in bed and keep your eyes closed. Do not reach for your phone or switch on the light.
• Go over the dream you were just having, and briefly fix it in your memory.
• Do MILD as you fall asleep again: picture yourself back in that dream, noticing that you are dreaming.

The same goes for any moment you wake up by yourself in the second half of the night. Many guides advise a technique called wake back to bed: an alarm after 4.5 to 6 hours of sleep, then getting up for a while. With DreamCue you do not need that alarm. It breaks up the night your watch is following and estimating REM from, and the moments you wake up from a cue or by yourself give you the same chance.

When you become lucid

First lucid dreams are often short, because the excitement wakes you up. This helps you stay in the dream:

• Stay calm. Notice that you are dreaming, then carry on as if it is the most normal thing in the world.
• Use your senses. Rub your hands together, touch the ground, look closely at something nearby. Paying attention to details makes the dream steadier.
• Remind yourself now and then that you are dreaming, or you may slip back into an ordinary dream.
• Start small. Walk around and explore before you try to fly or change the scene.

When you wake up, record the dream straight away. Lucid dreams are easier to remember than most, but they still fade.

A four-week plan

• Week 1: work on your sleep: a steady rhythm, a daily nap and screen-free evenings. Keep a dream journal every morning, and do reality checks during the day.
• Week 2: keep these habits, and do MILD whenever you wake up from a dream. Start looking for dream signs in your journal.
• Week 3: add cues during REM sleep at night. Keep taking every daytime reality check seriously: that is what makes the night cue work.
• Week 4: make the most of every time you wake up in the night: stay in bed, recall the dream and fall asleep again with MILD.

Some people have their first lucid dream in the first week, others take a month or longer. Keep the journal going either way: better dream recall alone makes lucid dreams more likely, and it shows you how far you have come.

Older traditions

Lucid dreaming was not discovered in a sleep lab. People have practised it for centuries, often as part of a wider path of awareness.

• Tibetan Buddhism has dream yoga, in which practitioners learn to stay aware in their dreams as a way of seeing through the dreamlike nature of waking life as well.
• Taoism has asked the question for more than two thousand years. In a famous passage, the philosopher Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly and, on waking, wonders whether he is a man who dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man.
• Toltec teachings, as passed on by writers such as Carlos Castaneda and Miguel Ruiz, treat the art of dreaming as part of a path towards greater awareness, by day and by night.

This guide sticks to techniques that sleep researchers have studied, but these traditions have much more to offer anyone who wants to go deeper. Many of their practices, such as meditation and paying attention to the present moment, fit well alongside the steps above.

Take care

Lucid dreaming is safe for most people, but a good night's sleep always comes first. Do not cut your sleep short for a dream, and take a break if you feel tired during the day.

Some people experience sleep paralysis while practising, especially when they wake up in the night and fall asleep again: you wake up but cannot move for a moment, sometimes with the feeling that someone is in the room. It is harmless and passes within a minute or two. Stay calm, breathe slowly and try to move a finger or your toes.

If you have a sleep disorder, or a mental health condition that vivid dreams or less sleep could make worse, talk to your doctor before you start. DreamCue is a training tool, not a medical device.