How to Have Lucid Dreams
Part III in a series on dreamwork
Since I’ve written about how to remember your dreams and how to get started with dreamwork, a few readers have asked me how they can have lucid dreams.
Lucid dreams are dreams where you know that you’re dreaming, and have some degree of control over what you do and experience in the dream. Lucid dreaming can be a pretty wild experience: you can fly, travel to other countries (or planets!), have sex with celebrities, or consult the Akashic records. But while most people who hear about lucid dreaming get excited to try it, they struggle to actually get started.
Well, I’m here to tell you that having lucid dreams can be easier than you think.
In fact, after learning the basics, I believe most people could achieve lucidity within a couple weeks of consistent practice.
How I Got Into Lucid Dreaming
I first learned about lucid dreaming as a freshman in college. I was a Religious Studies major, and all my friends were into yoga, meditation, and all kinds of mysticism. One night, some friends invited me over to their house to watch the movie Waking Life.
Waking Life is a weird animated film by Richard Linklater that developed a bit of a cult following in the 2000s.
It follows the main character through a series of dream experiences where he has conversations with different people about the philosophy of consciousness, free will, and other existential questions. It also teaches the viewer some basics about lucid dreaming.
A lot of people in the 2000s probably had their first lucid dream experiences after watching Waking Life, merely from the power of suggestion—and I do recommend watching it.
But for me, it took a little more work to get off the ground.
The Best Way to Get Started With Lucid Dreaming
After watching Waking Life, I read Stephen Laberge’s now-classic book, Exploring The World of Lucid Dreaming.
LaBerge, a researcher at Stanford, was one of the first scientists to prove that lucid dreaming was a real phenomenon. His book teaches a number of methods for having lucid dreams, but for beginners, by far the most reliable is MILD, or Mnemonic-Induced Lucid Dreaming. MILD essentially uses your memory of your dreams (“dream recall”) to hack your way into the lucid state.
If you’ve read my previous articles on dreamwork, it should come as no surprise that the first step in MILD is keeping a dream journal: after all, there’s no point in having lucid dreams if you can’t remember them!
But keeping a dream journal will also allow you to start noticing patterns in your dreams. In particular, you want to be on the lookout for “dream signs,” or clues that you might be dreaming. Dream signs can be very personal, but some examples could be trying to run but moving really slowly, flipping a light switch and noticing that it doesn’t work, or even finding yourself on your old high school campus.
Dream signs tend to recur, so once you’ve noticed one of these patterns, when you experience it in the future you can remember that you might just be dreaming!
The Power of Intention
Dreams are incredibly responsive to intention.
A good first step to lucid dreaming is to repeat an intention before going to bed, for example:
“Tonight, I will remember my dreams. I will write them down as soon as I wake up.”
“Tonight, I will remember that I’m dreaming and become lucid.”
“Tonight, when I remember I’m dreaming and become lucid, I will fly to Hawaii.” (Intending to have a specific experience in your dreams is sometimes called dream incubation).
Try repeating an intention like this three times before going to bed and see what happens.
Combined with keeping a dream journal and tracking your dream signs, this will be enough for many people to start having lucid dreams.
What To Do In Your Lucid Dreams
The first problem many people encounter, once they become lucid, is that they get so excited they immediately wake up.
This has happened to me many times. If you experience it, don’t worry—you’ll eventually get used to lucidity. Anecdotally, turning your body around in a circle can help to stabilize the dream state.
Once you have achieved lucidity, a whole universe of possibilities is open to you.
Initially, most people use lucid dreams to fly around and have sex. For the record, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But lucid dreams can offer so much more, from skill development to therapeutic experiences to insights into the nature of reality and consciousness.
Tim Ferriss has spoken many times about using lucid dreams to train with a famous wrestling coach—whom he had never met in real life—night after night when he was in high school, and credits that practice for helping him achieve his best career season, with a 20-0 record before the national championships.
Several researchers and therapists have written about using lucid dreams to overcome phobias or other psychological problems. Charlie Morley, an author and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, recently teamed up with the Institute of Noetic Sciences to lead a study using lucid dreaming to heal PTSD symptoms in veterans. 85% of the veterans reported a significant reduction in symptoms.
When I’m asked about my own favorite lucid dream experience, I always give the same answer:
I’m at some kind of high school reunion. It’s night time, and we’re in a lovely garden-like setting. When I realize that I’m dreaming, I drift away from my companions and walk out into the garden toward a tree. I examine the bark of the tree as closely as I can, running my hand over it, feeling its texture, and noticing the intricate patterns in the bark. I realize that this tree, in all its photorealistic, 3D-rendered detail, is created by my mind. I think about how if my mind can create a virtual reality this realistic, how much of my waking reality could also be generated by my mind and brain. My mind is kind of blown and I wake up.
Granted, I had been reading a lot of Buddhist philosophy at the time.
Tibetan Dream Yoga
In Tibetan Buddhism, there’s a discipline known as dream yoga.
Despite what it may sound like, dream yoga is not about doing yoga postures in your dreams, although you can certainly try that. Instead, dream yoga is about using the lucid dream state in pursuit of spiritual awakening. In many ways, dream yoga is the ultimate form of lucid dreaming—while the Western science of lucid dreams is still young, Tibetan yogis have been exploring the dream state for thousands of years.
While dream yoga is beyond the scope of this article, I highly recommend the books The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Dream Yoga by Andrew Holecek if you’re interested in learning more.
Exploring The Dream World
Once you’ve mastered the basics of lucid dreaming, what you do with it is up to you. Whether you decide to practice skills like sports or music, travel to exotic lands, or work on your psychospiritual growth, I trust you’ll enjoy the journey. We spend one third of our lives asleep, so we might as well make the most of the time we spend dreaming.
Ultimately, as with the other practices I share in Mindful Mondays, the purpose of lucid dreaming is to have a richer, more meaningful experience of life. Enjoy!
As always, I appreciate your feedback on my Mindful Mondays. Please feel free to share your questions or comments by replying to this email or leaving a comment on Substack.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
PS: If you’d like personal coaching on dreamwork or lucid dreaming, or if you’d be interested in an online dream group or course, let me know by replying to this email or dropping a comment below.
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This is such interesting stuff, Chris. Thanks for sharing. I can't wait to implement it.
thank you for this, i am now able to lucid dream on my own i really apreciate your help