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Learn to Lucid Dream

Introduction
PART 1GETTING INTO THE DREAM
Understanding Brain Chemistry during
Sleep
Brainwaves
NREM/REM Sleep
Brain Chemistry
Terminology
Method vs. Technique
Dream Recall and Vividness
Dream Journal
How to Do It
If You Cant Remember
If You Wake Up in the Night
Affirmations
Get to Sleep Quicker
Relaxing before Bed
Rearranging your Sleep Cycle
DILD
Reality Checks
Dream Signs
If You Cant Find Any Dream
Signs
Paying Attention to Details
MILD
Suggestion/Auto-Suggestion
VILD
CAT
HILD
Dream Characters and CHILD
EILD, LILD, and SILD
ADA
WBTB and NILD
UILD
TILD
Waking Up After the REM Cycle
RILD and PILD
WILD
Sleep Paralysis

Stages
Prevention and Practice
Rollover Signal
WILD
HIT
FILD
White Noise Technique
DEILD
SSILD
The Cycle
What to Do
What Will Happen
WILD with DILD and Comparison
Meditation, Music, and Mental Exercises
Meditation
Music and Sound
Mental Exercises
Lifestyle for Lucidity
Drugs, Food, and Supplements
Habits and Perspective
PART 2IN THE DREAM
Understanding the Dream
The Function of Sleep
What Causes Dreams
The Subconscious Mind
Layers of Lucidity
Variations of Non-Lucidity
Dream Interpretation
Becoming Lucid and Stabilizing the
Dream
Stabilization
False Awakenings
Controlling the Dream
Transformation
Teleportation
Flying
Creation/Manifestation
Controlling Time
Experimentation

Nightmares
Escape
Prevention
PART 3IN SUMMARY
Negative Effects
Nightmares
Sleep Paralysis
False Memories
Positive Effects and Usage
Overcome Fear and Anxiety
Practice and Rehearsal
Learning

The Arts and Lucid Dreaming

Final Notes
Lucid Dreaming in the Future
If You Need Motivation
If You Still Cant Lucid Dream
Are Dreams Real?
Extended Learning and Practice
Books
YouTube Channels
Websites, Blogs, and Forums
Apps

Introduction
A lucid dream is a dream in which the dreamer realizes that they are dreaming. This
usually happens when the dreamer sees something strange in their dream, and, when stopping to
question the dream, discovers that it is, of course, merely a dream. Some people seem to have a
natural ability to do this and have lucid dreams every night, while others work hard for months
for just one lucid dream. This will happen on occasion for many people, but making lucid
dreaming a regular experience takes practice, skill, and special knowledge. This may appear to
be a useless ability, but in fact it can stop nightmares, lessen fear and anxiety, assuage stress, and
allow you to control your dreamsmeaning that you can fly, speak to your subconscious mind,
travel around the universe, and much more in your own dream worldthe only limitation is your
own imagination. There are many misconceptions about lucid dreaming that have survived since
the time when lucid dreaming was only considered a pseudoscience, and I feel that I must first
address these before moving on.
Some people still believe that lucid dreaming isnt real. To thousands of lucid dreamers
around the world, this statement seems ridiculous. If you dont want to experiment for yourself,
there was a famous 1977 scientific experiment that proved lucid dreaming to be real, directed by
Keith Hearne. At that time, it was known that a dreamers eye movements in their dream would
be reproduced while they were sleeping in real life. Because Keith Hearne knew this, he asked a
lucid dreamer to get himself into a lucid dream and move his eyes in a certain pattern to indicate
that he was lucid. The scientist would then detect this eye movement in the lab. The test subject
actually did become lucid and tried to signal that he was lucid with his eye movements, but made
an error, making the wrong eye movement. However, a few seconds later he tried again and
made the right eye movement. The researchers detected this, and when he awoke they greeted
him and he told them that he had become lucid, made the wrong eye movement, and then tried
again, making the right eye movement. All of what he described matched up with the recordings
of the researchers. Dr. Stephen LaBerge repeated this experiment seven years later and published
it in a peer-reviewed paper. He would later go on to write Exploring the World of Lucid
Dreaming with Howard Rheingold, a book that fully introduced the public to lucid dreaming and

established lucid dreaming as a popular phenomenon.

Still, it is said that lucid dreaming is unnatural because most dreams are experienced nonlucidly. However, lucid dreams often occur naturally and happen several times in a lifetime
without any effort. There is little difference between regular dreaming and lucid dreaming
besides the fact that the sleeper is aware of the dream in lucid dreams. If one truly feels that lucid
dreams are so unnaturalthat taking control of your dreams and having fun is so repugnant, then
they must hate man-made unnatural objects like jewelry, beds, airplanes, watches, computers,
and books.
Others argue that lucid dreaming removes the dreamer from reality and advocates for
escapism. Lucid dreaming occurs during sleep, at a time in which we have literally nothing better
to do than lie around in our bed. The only notable event from which the sleeper would be
escaping are some vague, blurry dreams. Lucid dreaming wastes no time at all and in fact leads
to many mental health benefits along with a much fun during sleep. Although many lucid
dreamers spend time talking about, preparing for, and writing down lucid dreams, it is the same
for any other hobby; in fact many other hobbies, such as playing video games, take the
participant further away from reality than lucid dreaming.
The next misconception is fortunately less common, but should still be addressed at once.
Lucid dreaming cannot cause the sleeper to fall into a coma or die any more than regular
dreaming. There is no reason why lucid dreams should be harmful or painful to the physical
body. Some argue that regular dreaming can cause death because extremely frightening
nightmares may cause the release of adrenaline, and adrenaline, if in large enough amounts in the
bloodstream, can cause death (this is why small animals such as rabbits can be literally scared to
death, although human hearts are much stronger). However, enough adrenaline would wake the
sleeper up, which is why you may recall dreams in which you fell from a great height only to
wake up just before impactwhen your fear is at its greatest. Once the sleeper wakes up, they
will realize that their experience was only a dream, and their adrenaline levels may then
decrease.
Although lucid dreaming has been associated with the New Age movement, it is not just
a New Age trend. Everyone has lucid dreams occasionally, and anyone can do itmeaning lucid
dreaming does not have to be limited by one viewpoint. There is no need to have any specific
spiritual or astrological beliefs to lucid dream. Lucid dreaming is actually a very old
phenomenon stretching almost as far back as civilization, so it is hardly new to popular
cerebration; in fact, the ancient Greeks had whole temples built just for lucid dreaming, and
some Indian cultures invented their own bed specialized for lucid dreaming.
There are many theories about why we dream, but no one yet knows for sure. It seems
dreams are most likely just assembled pieces of our subconscious thoughts, but I encourage you
to do your own research, and choose what you think dreams mean. Even though some may say
that lucid dreaming loses messages hidden in dreams, there is no need to be worried. Even if
dreams are meaningful and important, many people do not remember their dreams or even pay
attention to them (ironically, lucid dreamers can vividly remember their dreams and observe
them carefully) and if our mind was really trying to send us a message, it would likely appear,

lucid or not.
Some dreamers think that lucid dreaming could be scary, but in fact there is nothing scary
about being in a dream with the knowledge that it is just a dream. Furthermore, it is very relaxing
and soothing knowing that there is nothing to be worried about or afraid of because it is just a
dream. Even if something is scaring a lucid dreamer, they can manipulate the dream, and
therefore remove whatever it is that is scaring them, or simply wake up.
A couple other common misconceptions surround lucid dreaming. One is that youre not
lucid dreaming unless you are in control of the dream. Although lucid dreaming and dream
control are related, one can happen without the other. It is very possible (and common) for lucid
dreamers to experience little or no control in their dreams, and it is also possible to control a
dream without knowing that you are dreaming. Another misconception is that youre either lucid
or youre not. This is not truethere are actually five different layers of lucidity, each with
variations and four variations of non-lucidity about which I will get into further detail later.
Lucid dreaming is natural, beneficial, fun, and interesting. Thanks to a variety of different
scientific experiments, it has been popular in mainstream science since the 1970s and is now
commonly known. Although I cant guarantee that youll learn to lucid dream in one day or even
in a month, I can guarantee the following pages will help you on your journey and will provide
insightful tips and tricks to aid you on the path to lucid dreaming.
PART 1GETTING INTO THE DREAM
Understanding Brain Chemistry during Sleep
There are several processes that occur throughout human sleep that can help one learn to
lucid dream or get to sleep quicker if understood. Sleep and dreaming are quite complex, and
sleep is not at all a simple shut down of the brain. In fact, the brain is more active during sleep
than during waking life. Knowing about how the brain functions during sleep is important to a
central understanding of the function of not only lucid dreaming but also dreaming in general.
BRAINWAVES
The brain is made up of millions of microscopic cells that are called neurons. When one neuron
wants to give another a message, the neuron will send an electrical signal that is detected by the
other neuron. These electrical signals are called brainwaves and they can be measured in
frequency, which is measured in Hertz (Hz). Depending on what an individual is doing, theses
waves will vary in frequency. For example, watching television emits high frequency alpha
waves while sleeping deeply emits low frequency delta waves. There are five basic types of
brainwaves; going from highest to lowest frequency they are: gamma, beta, alpha, theta, and
delta.
Gamma brainwaves were discovered relatively recently and therefore not as much is
known about them. They are associated with bursts of thought and learning and the only time
that they ever occur during sleep is sometimes during lucid dreaming. Beta brainwaves are
associated with being awake and aware; the brain is conscious and concentrated on conversation

or some other task. Alpha brainwaves are associated with people who are awake, but relaxed
not as alert, but still awake. These brainwaves are also common during dreamingboth lucid
and non-lucid. Theta brainwaves are associated with people who are in a deep state of relaxation,
like meditation, hypnosis, or sleep. Finally, Delta brainwaves are associated with a state of very
deep relaxationdeep sleep and loss of body awareness. Delta brainwave sleep is always
dreamless and in it the sleeper is completely unconscious.
Although different brainwaves dominate the brain all throughout the day, there is never
just one brainwave active; in fact, all of the different brainwaves are being emitted at any given
timethey just vary in quantity. It is important to understand that whichever brainwave is the
most prevalent during a specific stage in sleep is associated with that stage of sleep, even though
that is not the only brainwave emitted. In waking life, we emit mostly beta and alpha brainwaves,
but these brainwaves are changing all day and all night, and while youre dreaming they follow a
specific pattern that can be traced and mapped.
NREM/REM SLEEP
While sleeping, every sleeper goes through two phases of sleep called NREM (Non-Rapid Eye
Movement) and REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. In short, REM sleep is when the eyes are
moving around under the eyelids to mirror any eye movements in a dream, while NREM sleep is
when the eyes stay still because the sleeper is (most often) not dreaming. While sleeping, one
goes through cycles of NREM sleep followed by REM sleep; these two switch about 5 times in
the night. NREM sleep is composed of 4 or (according to some sources) 3 basic stages:

Stage 1: This stage sees a decline in alpha waves and relaxing theta waves starting
to emerge. This is the stage at which one falls asleep; it is the doorway between
awake and asleep. At this stage hypnagogic hallucinations may occur (mild
hallucinations similar to dreams). During this time, the sleeper is very easy to
wake up because they are just drifting to sleep.
Stage 2: This is the stage at which the sleeper drifts into a little deeper sleep.
There is no specific type of brainwave emitted, but a unique electromagnetic
activity throughout the brain that I will not get into here for the sake of simplicity.
At this stage, sleep paralysis may occurwhen the body paralyzes itself to stop
the sleeper from acting out their dreams.
Stage 3: This is the beginning of a deep sleep when there is rarely any dreaming
or vivid dreaming occuring. This stage is characterized by the emission of less
than 50% of delta waves. Sleep paralysis does not occur at or past this point in
NREM sleep.
Stage 4: This stage has been recently excluded because it is paired with the third
stage, but I will include it here. This is the stage at which sleep is as deep as
possible (emitting more than 50% of delta waves) and it will be very hard to wake
the sleeper. An individual would have a very difficult time becoming awake and
alert if suddenly shaken out of this sleep.

Remember that the above four stages are part of NREM sleep, not REM sleep.
Throughout the night, these stages repeat, going from 1 to 4, then backwards from 4 to 1, then
REM sleep, and so on, repeating like this all night. The whole process from NREM to REM
takes about 90 to 110 minutes, repeating several times in the night. In a regular 8 hour sleep one
will sleep through about 5 cycles of NREM and REM. As the time goes on, there is less deep
NREM sleep and longer REM phases of sleep. With each cycle of NREM and REM sleep, the
REM sleep becomes longer and the NREM sleep becomes shorter, making the most vivid and
long dreams (in the REM phase) the ones that one has just before awakening in the morning. For
example, the first REM phase is usually around fifteen to twenty minutes but after twelve hours
of sleep the REM phase can be as long as two hours. This knowledge is very useful for certain
lucid dream induction techniques.
The REM phase contains the most vivid dreams and lucid dreams, making it more
interesting for us to explore. Although the REM phase is very light and actually close to waking
(during the REM phase, the brain emits alpha brainwaves), it is very essential for a healthy brain.
When the brain is not allowed to sleep through REM sleep, it will show significant loss of
memory, logic, and critical thinking. The NREM phase can still contain dreams, and even lucid
dreams, but these dreams are not nearly as intense, vivid, or common as the dreams of the REM
phase.
This is a visual representation of the sleep stages and NREM/REM phases:

The only other time that an individual may go straight into REM sleep without waking up
in the middle of the night is while taking a nap (although there is usually just a few minutes of
light NREM sleep before REM sleep). This makes naptime very useful for lucid dreaming,
especially because this allows the lucid dreamer to practice before going to sleep that night. The
best time to nap is around 2:00 to 3:00 PM because this is when the body is most tired (with the
exception of early in the morning from 2:00 to 4:00 AM). The best amount of time to nap is
about 20 to 30 minutes because sleeping for much longer will cause the sleeper to enter a deeper
NREM sleep and therefore feel groggy upon their awakening.
BRAIN CHEMISTRY
Once a full understanding of brainwaves and sleep cycles has been achieved, the next important
concept to explore is the brain chemistry during sleep. The brain produces several different
chemicals during the night which can be used to aid in the process of achieving a lucid dream.

Two essential chemicals involved are serotonin and melatonin (melatonin is not to be confused
with melanin, which gives skin, eyes, and hair their natural color). Serotonin causes an individual
to become alert and aware while helping the brain to transmit signals more freely; it is primarily
released by the brain during the day when the body and mind need to function and be active.
Serotonin is made into melatonin, which is almost like the opposite of serotonin. It helps the
individual relax and mentally and physically prepare themselves for sleep; melatonin is primarily
released during the night and in the evening.
Serotonin is made when one is exposed to light, while melatonin breaks down under light
and is made in the dark. At dusk, there is very little melatonin because the body has been
recently exposed to sunlight; however, the production of melatonin peaks around 2:00 to 4:00
AM and breaks down again at dawn.
Another important chemical that is involved in sleeping is the fight-or-flight hormone
called cortisol. This depletes from 8:00 AM until around 2:00 to 4:00 AM, when the production
increases again in preparation for the day. Its production will gradually awaken the sleeper
because cortisol is produced alongside two other hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine,
which naturally increase alertness and responsiveness. At around 4:00 to 5:30 AM cortisol and
melatonin cross paths, both at high levels, creating an ideal time for lucid dreaming using certain
techniques. This is because the melatonin levels make relaxation easy and cortisol (along with
epinephrine and norepinephrine) make the sleeper alert and mentally awake. Melatonin and
cortisol cross paths twice, once at 4:00 to 5:30 AM at high levels (creating the ideal time) and
once at around 9:30 to 10:00 PM, where they are at very low levels, making this time the hardest
time to lucid dream using Wake Induced Lucid Dream techniques.
Because melatonin is relaxing and therefore aids in the process of getting to sleep and it
is created with serotonin, it is helpful to have enough serotonin in the body to make melatonin,
which makes it easier to quickly fall asleep. This can be easily done by staying out in the
sunlight for about an hour before bed.
Humans are naturally accustomed to a gradual decrease in light that allows for a gradual
decrease in serotonin levels and an increase in melatonin levelsthis is what allows for thorough
relaxation and a smooth transition into sleep. However, with the relatively recent invention of
artificial lighting, the light does not gradually decrease but instead sharply drops off just before
bedtime. This means that we go to bed with high serotonin levels because the light has only
recently ceased to shine, making it hard to get relaxed enough to sleep, which can cause an
inability to fall asleep. The human body is not designed for the abrupt light change and thus it is
unprepared to go to sleep at the time that one may want it to. However, sunset may be simulated
by gradually dimming the lights inside, making the body ready to sleep before bedtime.
One other external influence on the bodys ability to fall asleep the color blue. This may
seem odd and surprising, but when the eyes perceive this color the brain thinks that it is looking
at the sky and therefore it is day and the body and mind need to be alert. In this way, the color
blue alone is able to make it more difficult to get to sleep, making it important to avoid blue
things before bed like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and more.
One of the most common activities that makes lucid dreaming much more difficult is

watching television before sleeping. In addition to the obvious fact that the television (like any
other electronic device) produces light and therefore wakes up the viewer, it also induces alpha
waves in the brain within just 30 seconds. These alpha waves keep the viewer relaxed, but still
alert in the waking state, therefore making it harder to get relaxed enough to emit more theta
brainwaves which is needed for the first stage of NREM sleep. Television also greatly numbs the
left side of the brain which is responsible for critical thinking (one needs to think critically to
have lucid dreams) and watching television releases opioids in the brain which altogether
produces a weak brain in a state that is susceptible to suggestion and will lead to hazy dreams,
which is the last thing a lucid dreamer wants.
A last note on falling asleep quicker is that it is important to have a regular sleeping
pattern. A few days of having the same sleeping pattern allows the brain to rely on going to bed
at the time that it is expecting, meaning that the body will able to sufficiently prepare for sleep.
This also creates the opportunity for more even REM cycles which aids in an easier flow of
dreaming and lucid dreaming.
Although all of the chemical names and various patterns of chemicals in the brain may be
confusing, the general concepts that are most important are that the best time to lucid dream is at
around 4:00 to 5:30 AM (the worst being at around 9:30 to 10:00 PM), it will help to gradually
dim the lights, having a regular sleeping pattern is good, and television turns the brain into mush.
Next, I will explain terminology and other related concepts.
TERMINOLOGY
Throughout the book, you will most likely see words like conscious, unconscious,
preconscious, non-conscious, or subconscious often, followed by the word mind. I will
briefly explain what each of these mean. They were all based upon the ideas of Sigmund Freud,
one of the worlds most famous psychologists. He mapped out his perception of the human mind
in his famous iceberg of consciousness. To understand each of the terms listed above, we must
first understand the iceberg.
On the tip of the iceberg is the conscious self, formed from everyday thoughts and
perceptions. It is what one is capable of experiencing and living in every day, and the only part
of themselves with which an individual is truly familiar, although it is only a small part of the
personality. Below the tip, just under the surface of the water is the preconscious mind, also
known as the subconscious mind. I will use subconscious in this book rather than
preconscious because it is the term generally used in the lucid dreaming community. Stored
knowledge and memories are contained in this level and the greater part of the subconscious
mind can usually be accessed in everyday life, but only with a little digging. It is not actively part
of oneself, but nonetheless an important part of the personality. This part of the mind is easily
accessible through lucid dreaming or hypnosis and is naturally much stronger, wiser, and more
knowledgeable than the conscious mind.
Below the subconscious mind is the unconscious mind. This is the deepest part of the
mind and can hardly ever be accessed, although its presence is still felt. This is where fears,
violent motives, immoral urges, unacceptable sexual desires, selfish needs, shameful

experiences, and irrational wishes are found. Surrounding the iceberg (the water) is the nonconscious self, which is made up of all of the things that an individual has not experienced or is
not aware of. Below is a visual representation of the iceberg:

In addition to the separate parts of the mind, there is also terminology for different
periods of sleep, in addition to NREM and REM sleep. These are several terms that you might
come across in this book pertaining to sleep:

Hypnagogic Stage: a brief stage experienced during the onset of sleep just before NREM
sleep begins. This stage is often characterized by hypnagogic hallucinations; these are
perceptual experiences occurring during sleep onset, like fragments of dreams. They are
usually only mild hallucinations. These can be easily noticed if one sustains a certain
degree of consciousness while falling asleep.
Hypnopompic Stage: much like the hypnagogic stage except it occurs just as the sleeper
awakens. This stage is also characterized by mild hallucinations, but these are less
common than hypnagogic hallucinations.
Hypnic jerk: (also known as hypnagogic jerk or sleep start) this is when the muscles of
the body contract just after sleep onset (or sometimes after a longer period of sleep) and
the body jerks the sleeper awake. This whole process takes about a second, and it is
usually paired with a feeling of falling backwards; sometimes one even dreams about
falling backwards just prior to becoming jerked awake. This is a normal occurrence and it
happens to almost everyone. It is not yet known why this happens, but perhaps it is
because the heartbeat slows down so quickly when the sleeper begins to fall asleep that
the brain thinks that the body is dying and therefore tries to jolt the sleeper back awake.

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Acronyms ending in ILD. These include MILD, WILD, DILD, SSILD, HILD, and so
on. I believe this trend started with Stephen LaBerges lucid dream research in which he
established the WILD and DILD methods and the MILD technique. In all of these the
ILD stands for Induced Lucid Dream, for example, VILD is Visually Induced Lucid
Dream. You might also see other sources replacing the Induced with Initiated or
Incubated (like Visually Incubated Lucid Dream); this does not change the acronym
or make any differenceit is just another way of expressing it.
OBE or Out of Body Experience. Although these are still not completely scientifically
proven, but recognized as a separate phenomenon from dreams, they are very similar to
lucid dreaming, and one cannot speak at length about lucid dreams without occasionally
mentioning OBEs. They occur when ones conscious awareness, soul, or astral body
leaves their physical body and explores the physical world, almost like a ghost. But dont
be alarmedthis process is completely harmless and rarely ever happens when you are
not intending it to happen.

METHOD VS. TECHNIQUE

The difference between a method and a technique is not related to brain chemistry or dreaming,
but it will make the ensuing chapters much easier to understand. A method never changes. For
example, if one removes a light bulb and replaces it, that is a method. However, the specific
manner in which one does it is a technique. Using the light bulb example, one could remove it
with gloves, using feet, or using a contraption, but the method is unchangedthat the light bulb
is being removed. The two methods to achieve a lucid dream are the DILD method and the
WILD method and they each have their own techniques, which can become confusing if the
difference between a method and technique is not fully understood. In fact, there is a WILD
method and a WILD technique, which are both very different. In this sense of the word method,
it is like a categorya category of different specific instructions to induce lucid dreams, while a
technique is a specific means of inducing a lucid dream, in its own category. This is like music.
In music, there are certain categories, such as pop, jazz, rock, and classical (the methods) and for
each genre there is a specific set of composers to compose the music in that genre (the
techniques).
Dream Recall and Vividness
Within five minutes of waking up, the average person forgets 50% of their dreams;
within ten minutes, they forget 90%. Obviously, this is not good for a lucid dreamer. As a lucid
dreamer, it is essential that your dreams are vivid and that you can remember themwhats the
point of becoming lucid if you wont be able to remember it?
Dream recall quite simply means the ability to recall ones dreamsthis is the foundation
of lucid dreaming. By recalling and understanding regular, every-night dreams, one can further
advance their understanding of the subjects of their dreams. If you cant even recall your dreams,
they must not be very vivid, and you must not be very conscious in them, which makes lucid
dreaming much more difficult. Some people have naturally vivid dreams, and others can always

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recall all of their dreams, but every lucid dreamer needs to be able to remember their dreams.
To make all dreams in general more vivid, one often strains to remember every dream in
as much detail as possible, improving dream recall dramatically. By doing this, one may also be
able to pay attention to recurring symbols in their dreamsfor example, an old friend named
Steven that appears in many dreams. These recurring images are called dream signs, and I will
go further into them in the next chapter.
DREAM JOURNAL
As mentioned above, remembering dreams is a fundamental aspect of learning to lucid dream; it
is the very first step. The most important and effective means of remembering dreams is by using
a dream journal.
A dream journal is a written or recorded collection of all of the dreams that one can
recall. It is something in which one writes every morning after awakening or during the night if
one wakes up after a dream. Writing in this journal is one of the most important tasks as a lucid
dreamer. It is not a personal diary in which one writes down feelings and thoughts, but merely a
record of all of the dreams that a lucid dreamer has had. I also like to include my experiences
with sleep paralysis, hallucinations, and other interesting dream-like things in my dream journal.
Most people who use a dream journal just have a small notebook and a pencil or pen on
the side of their bed or near their bed, but others record their dreams on a recording device or
type it on a computer or cell phone, but I wouldnt recommend typing it because the screen is
bright enough to wake you up which is not good if you want to get back to sleep to have more
dreams.
Initially, it may seem that writing down dreams would not help remembering them, but it
certainly will if you are doing it correctly. The main element of this is not the writing; it is the
straining. If you strain to remember every last detail of your dreams every morning, your brain
will eventually decide to just remember them like normal memories, making them more vivid
and intense and allowing you to remember them much better. Straining every morning to
remember your dreams in great detail is the only way that your dream recall will improve using
the dream journal. So why then do we write the dreams and not just think about them? Writing
your dreams helps you keep a record of your dream signs, helping you achieve lucidity, and if
you reread your latest dreams before going to bed you will be more prepared to remember your
new dreams. Also, it makes it easier to organize dreams and is necessary if you want to interpret
your dreams.
HOW TO DO IT
It is important to be very detailed when writing down your dreams. Remember what you felt,
heard, tasted, saw, smelt, or anything else you could rememberanything counts. Even if it is
just a vague feeling or something completely random and nonsensical, like I remember smelling
the color green write that down. Here is an example of a poorly recorded dream:
I was talking to my friend at his house. It was rainy outside.

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This does contain enough detail for us to achieve a general understanding of the dream, but there
are many more questions to ask. Was it cold inside? What were you talking about? What room
were you in? Did everything in the house seem normal? Was your friend normal? How long did
you talk? Was the rain loud? Were you sitting or standing? How could you tell it was raining?
And so on. If you cannot remember details of your dream as specific as that, do not worry
dream recall is a learned skill and you will get better as you go. When I started keeping a dream
journal, my entries were short and simpleabout a paragraph or less. In just a couple weeks, I
was writing 1 to 3 pages of my dreams every morning, and it was actually a fun experience. It is
also exciting to reread interesting or vivid dreams that you have had so that you can experience
them once again.
The way that you should start your entries should be with the date, time (or at least
indicate if it is morning or night), dream title (you dont have to assign a catchy title to each
dream, I just label them Dream 1, Dream 2, Dream 3, and so on in chronological order of what I
can remember), followed by the dream description(s). I also encourage you to draw illustrations
as much as you can, even if youre not much of an artist. Some people even draw more than they
write. Anything that helps you give meaning to you dreams or helps you remember or record
them accurately is worth doing.
When you wake up to write a dream down, dont move. If you immediately start moving
when you wake up your brain will be overloaded with sensory information and you will be too
focused on waking up for you to remember your dreams vividly. Before you move, take the time
to recall as much as you can without thinking about your daily concerns, building as many vivid
details as possible. This can take a few seconds to thirty minutes. When youve got what you
think is all you can presently remember of your dreams, write them down in as much detail as
possible. This is easier if your dream journal is right next to your bed. If you think you had no
dreams in the night, you are wrong. Everyone has 3 to 7 dreams a night (about 2 hours of dreams
in total)you just have to remember them.
When you are writing down your dreams, remember to write what you were feeling in the
dream also. You could have a dreaming experience that would seem very peaceful, unless you
felt afraid or angry in the dream. You could also have a vague feeling, like I was in the car, but I
had the feeling of being home; this is not uncommon. It is just as important to include feelings
as it is to include the actual context of the dream.
Also, if you are using the dream journal at least partially for dream interpretation, I
recommend you leave a blank page after each dream entry for later interpretation. Even if you
are not interested in lucid dreaming, you can still use your dream journal for dream
interpretation, although I will not be getting into how to interpret your dreams in this book.
Sometimes I make side notes in the margins next to my dream description that indicates why I
believe a certain part of my dream was there (for example, I could have seen my old friend Amy
in my dream because I had just called her before I went to sleep), although sometimes dream
interpretation is not so obvious.

13

IF YOU CANT REMEMBER

If you cannot remember even the slightest detail of a dream, retrace your steps from the moment
you woke up the previous morning. Your actions and experiences from the previous day form
most of your dreams, so remembering them might serve as a catalyst for remembering your
dreams. Also, it gets your mind in the right state for remembering things. While you do this,
remember to stay still, and it might also help to close your eyes. If you can only remember
snippets or scraps of dreams, write those down.
If you still cant remember any dreams, there is still hope. While you go about your
business in the day, there could be a random occurrence that reminds you of your dreams, and a
sudden burst of recollection; however, this is less likely to happen later in the day as your brain
immediately starts deleting your memory of your dreams when they end because they are not
very important to the brain and their memory is held in a different place than the regular waking
life memory (although lucid dreamers learn to overcome this). You could also try to vividly
imagine snippets of your dreams and put yourself in their context; this might help in bringing
back the fully memory of these dreams. If you can, act out the scraps of the dreams in waking
life.
If you find yourself still unable to remember any dreams for one morning, do not get
frustrated, as it will not have a giant effect on your dream recall, but do write down that you
couldnt remember any dreams. This is just to build the habit of writing down your dreams. In
the future, try sleeping for longer, because the longer you sleep, they longer youll dream, and
remember that you will have more vivid and longer dreams later in your sleep cycles.
If you consistently are finding yourself unable to remember any dreams, it will help you
to improve your waking life recall as this will improve your dream recall. To do this, in your
dream journal write down all of your experiences from the day in extreme detail. This may take a
very long time, so you can just write about chunks of your day if it is more convenient. You may
also ask yourself fundamental questions about yourself and ask why the answers are, asking a
new question each day. For example, ask yourself who is my best friend? and then ask yourself
why they are your best friend, and how it got to be that way, and how that got to be that way, and
so on, tracing back your memories farther and farther back. Record this in your dream journal.
IF YOU WAKE UP IN THE NIGHT
Because your brain deletes the memory of your dreams very quickly, it will be difficult to
remember dreams youve had earlier in the night, especially because these dreams are shorter
and less vivid than dreams you have early in the morning. To combat this, many lucid dreamers
wake up during the night right after they dream so they can write down their whole dreams. This
can be done through training, special beds, timers, or just a natural tendency to wake up after
dreams. After youve had one of your first few lucid dreams, it is most likely you will wake up
just after it ends, which helps.
We will often wake up in the night unintentionally (the human body is originally
programmed for two four hour sleep cycles, which explains why we are sometimes unable to get
to sleep in the night). We wake up briefly approximately 10 to 15 times in the night, but we have

14

forgotten almost all of these short awakenings by the morning because they only last a matter of
seconds. If you find yourself accidentally waking up in the middle of the night and you have the
memory of some of your dreams, write them down. I guarantee that there is a very low chance
that you will still remember them in the morning. Whenever I wake up in the night and dont
write down any dreams I remember, I always regret it, and it makes dream recall a slower and
more frustrating process.
If you do remember your dreams and get up to write them, remember that light will wake
you up and make it harder to get back to sleep and have more dreams, so avoid turning on bright
lights to write down what you remember. I actually will sometimes write my dreams in complete
darkness. It is difficult to read my sloppy handwriting in the morning, but I am still able to
decipher enough of it to remember the dream almost entirely. I also have a book lamp that is like
a tiny flexible flashlight that I can clip on to my dream journal to illuminate the paper without
being too bright; I recommend using something like this, but make sure the book lamp is not too
bright. I also recommend using a bookmark of some sort in your journal so that you can flip to a
blank page easily.
As long as you are committed to writing down your dreams every morning, you will find
that dream recall can come easily and quickly, but using a dream journal isnt the only means of
recalling your dreams; you may also use affirmation to encourage your subconscious mind to
hold onto memories of dreams.
AFFIRMATIONS
Because dreaming, memory, and beliefs are literally all in your head, believing and repeating to
yourself that you will remember your dreams can actually work. If you mentally repeat to
yourself expressions like I will remember all of my dreams tonight or I will wake up after
every dream tonight you will find that it is much easier to remember your dreams. This mantra
that you repeat will drill the statement into your mind until it is accepted, and it will surprisingly
greatly affect your progress with dream recall.
The best time to do this is just as you are falling asleep. While you fall asleep, be sure to
repeat this to yourself many times. It might not immediately work, but, in conjunction with a
dream journal, it can get you ready for lucid dreaming relatively quickly. Although this
technique is usually not as effective as keeping a dream journal, it will psychologically prepare
your mind for dream recall, rather than just trying to pick up the pieces of dreams and record
them.
There are also many vitamins, supplements, herbs, and diets you can take to help your
dream recall and lucid dreaming abilities, but the details of those will all be in the Lifestyle for
Lucidity chapter, so read on.
Once you have a dream recall that functions well enough for you to vividly remember at
least one dream every night, you should be ready to start lucid dreaming.
Get to Sleep Quicker
It is important for lucid dreamers to get enough sleep because the most vivid dreams (and

15

therefore the dreams in which you are most likely to become lucid) are the ones you have at
around your eighth hour of sleep or later, and it is therefore very important to get at least eight
hours of sleep every night. To do this, it will help you to get to sleep quickly so you can get as
much sleep as you need, without having to sleep in late and miss work or school. First, I will
review what I had provided in the first chapter Understanding Brain Chemistry during Sleep,
but I will not get into much detail. In the first chapter I said that you could get to sleep faster by
getting about an hour of sunlight every day before bed, avoiding the color blue, gradually
dimming the lights to simulate sunset, having a regular sleep schedule, and avoiding TV before
bed.
After youve done these, you need to relax thoroughly so you can fall asleep easily. One
more thing avoid doing before bed that I havent mentioned yet is eating and drinking. If you eat
food before bed, your body has to slow and stop digestion before you go to sleep, which takes
time. It will also psychologically trick you into becoming more tired if you yawn as if you were
tired, and yawns can also make you feel drowsy when much of your carbon dioxide is expelled
on the exhale.
RELAXING BEFORE BED
If you want to get to sleep quickly to improve your chance of a lucid dream, it is important that
your body is relaxed enough for you to peacefully fall asleep. To help you with this, I will
explain a few physical exercises to do just before bed followed by two relaxation techniques that
will relax your body into a comfortable state that allows you to quickly slip into sleep. Before I
start, I recommend that you perform 20 to 60 minutes of physical exercise each night before bed
as this will make it easier to relax. If you dont have any weights or a treadmill and you cant
afford to go to a gym, it is acceptable to just do push-ups, sit-ups, and planking beside your bed
each night. Also, avoid any substances that will interfere with your sleeping schedule, such as
alcohol, coffee, sugar, or cannabis (cannabis, like alcohol, reduces the length and intensity of the
REM cycle).
Before you get in bed, you should stretch your muscles out in preparation for the
relaxation. The most important muscle to start with is your jaw, because it holds the most
tension. It is the strongest muscle in terms of exerted force, and can hold much more tension than
other muscles. This makes your jaw the most important muscle to relax before going to bed.
Below is the list of all of the muscles to stretch for complete relaxation:
1. Jaw Massage. Firmly massage the meaty part of your upper jaws in front of and below
your earsthis is where the most tension is held. Press strongly with your fingers on both
sides of your head until it hurts a bit. Next, squeeze your jaws with your palms instead of
your fingers on both sides. Slacken your jaw while you do this, and apply much force.
Your palms should be positioned so that your fingers are pointing behind you and rested
on the back of your head. Once your jaws are more relaxed, stretch them by pulling them
open with your fingers to remove any leftover tension.
2. Wall Chest Stretch. Place your palm flat on the wall so that your arm is horizontal and
parallel to the ground. Turn your body away from your arm so that it is behind you (not

16

3.

4.

5.

6.

beside you) with your palm still placed against the wall. Turn the trunk of your body so
that you can stretch your whole arm, your biceps, and across your chest. Exhale and
release all of the tension. Repeat this twice with both arms.
Vertical Wall Stretch. Place both palms against the wall above your head and then lean
forward toward the wall. Inhale and exhale slowly three times. This targets your shoulder
and chest tension. Then, stand up normally and repeat this two more times.
Foot Stretch. Prop your foot up against the wall so that your toes are against the wall and
the heel of your foot is still on the ground. Do this with each foot, and then sit down and
massage the soles of your feet with your hands. This will stretch your calves and your
feet.
Hand Stretch. Stretch your hands and forearms by pressing the fingers of each hand
back with the palm of the other hand while holding your arm out straight. Do this with
both hands.
Windmills. Stretch your shoulder muscles (which hold almost as much tension as your
jaw) by slowly moving your arm in circles, going from your side to behind your back to
above your head to in front of you and then back at your side, creating a windmill
pattern.

(Adapted from Nicolas Newports Fast Relaxation for Lucid Dreams and OBEs Lucidology
101 Part 5/12)
This concludes the stretching steps, and after you finish these you should lie down in a
comfortable position and close your eyes. Keep your limbs stretched out and do not cross your
legs or arms. At this point, you should start breathing deeply from your stomach. It helps to put
on socks before you do this because your feet usually get colder in the night when your body
temperature drops which can make it hard to relax. Also, wearing earplugs to block out any
outside noise can help if you sleep in a noisy environment (similarly, you may use earphones to
listen to relaxing sounds such as a steady rain or waves splashing on the beach). After you are
comfortable, close your eyes and use one of the following two relaxation techniques to relax
your body:
The first one starts with the release of tension in the forehead and goes down to your feet.
You can do this in the opposite order, and it is optional to tense each muscle before releasing the
tension from it. You should spend at least a few seconds on each muscle and exhale deeply as
you release the tension. This is a list of all of the muscles from which you must release tension,
starting with the forehead:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Forehead
Eyes
Mouth/Jaw
Neck
Shoulders
Arms

7. Hands
8. Chest
9. Stomach
10. Thighs
11. Calves
12. Feet

The second relaxation technique is slightly different. Remember to breathe deeply, stretch

17

your limbs out (keeping them uncrossed), and close your eyes. Progressively tense and relax
each muscle group, starting with your dominant hand. Bend your hand backwards at the wrist,
and hold that position tight for 5 to 10 seconds. Release the tension and relax. Then, take a deep
breath and repeat the process for the other hand. Next, tense and relax your forearms, upper
arms, forehead, jaws, neck, shoulders, abdomen, back, buttocks, legs, and feet, respectively.
Pause to take a deep breath between each muscle. When you have done this, let your muscles go
limp and tense and relax any muscles that still feel tense. It may help you to visualize any tense
areas as bright red and relaxed areas as a cool blue. When you relax yourself, imagine these red
areas dissipating and floating away while a cool blue mist runs down through the area and takes
its place.
Once you have done one or both of these relaxation techniques (Step 7), roll around in your
bed for a few minutes and release any remaining tension you have (Step 8). By lying in a
different position, you will be able to fully relax muscles that you hadnt been able to get to
before. When you finish this, proceed onto the next few steps:
9. Stop. Lying on your back with your legs and ankles uncrossed, lift your arms above
your head and rest them on your pillow. You elbows should be bent at around 90
degrees and your hands should not be touching your head. Relax in this position as
deeply as you can and breathe deeply and regularlymimic the breathing pattern you
use when you sleep (deep and slow breaths). You can also inhale for 4 seconds, hold
your breath for 7 seconds, and then exhale for 8 seconds and repeat. This relaxes you
and helps you get ready for sleep.
10. Forget your Eyes. Roll them around in both directions a couple times and then let
them rest. This is to stop micro-movements and forget about your eyes completely.
Focus on your heartbeat or breathing instead, or you could count backwards from 60
to 0, preferably moving back a number each breath. If you find yourself forgetting
that you should be counting and getting distracted, this is good; start again from 60
and you should fall asleep soon. If you dont, start counting from a higher number,
like 100 or 200.
11. Drop. Drop your arms down by your sides; do not cross them or put them on your
chest. This releases all the shoulder tension that you had with your arms up.
12. Tense and Relax. Do this with any muscles you feel are still tense. Do this slowly
and remember to breathe deeply.
13. Roll. Wait until you feel a strong urge to roll over, and when you do, slowly roll to
your left or to your right. This releases the tension held in your back. Your goal is to
stay in this position until you fall asleep. Do not bend your legs, cross your ankles, or
make any other movements as this will wake you up. If you do not feel this sensation
strongly, daydream a bit and wait until you do. You may fall asleep before you get to
this step.
The combination of the Stop, Drop, and Roll steps is unsurprisingly called Stop, Drop, and
Roll and it is used to relax thoroughly and respond to your bodys preparation to fall asleep.

18

This will help you get to sleep quicker as well as release all of the remaining tension in your
body. One tip that you may use to aid you is to do all of the above steps until 9 on the floor
(uncarpeted is best) so that when you do go to bed your body will be grateful to be resting
comfortably and will relax and fall asleep faster.
Take note that constantly rolling around when trying to sleep will reset your body and you
will fall asleep very slowly. It is therefore important to, after the last step, remain still without
moving and you will be able to fall asleep quicker. If I am trying to get to sleep fast but I dont
want to use all of the above steps, I will lie perfectly still, focusing on my breathing and thinking
nothing at all until I fall asleep. This works surprisingly well for me.
If you have done all of these steps correctly, you should be very relaxed and much more
likely to fall asleep. This is a list of all of the exercises listed above in chronological order:
1. Jaw Massage
8. Roll Around
2. Wall Chest Stretch
9. Stop
3. Vertical Wall Stretch
10. Forget your Eyes
4. Foot Stretch
11. Drop
5. Hand Stretch
12. Tense and Relax
13. Roll
6. Windmills
7. Relaxation Technique(s)
Once you have done all of this and you do it regularly for at least two weeks you will start
falling asleep faster. Although you do not have to go through this entire process every time you
go to sleep, it is helpful to use one or more of the techniques presented here when attempting
lucid dreaming. Using the information in this chapter and other information that will be
presented later, you can start falling asleep much faster and easier every night and, if you are
affected by it, you can make significant efforts to overcome insomnia.

19

REARRANGING YOUR SLEEP CYCLE

As I have explained, REM cycles are longer and more vivid in the later hours of sleep, making it
essential that you get as much sleep as possible to improve your memory of your dreams and
your likelihood of having lucid dreams. However, for many people this is impossible as they are
busy and cannot find the time. Although there is no way to somehow fit more hours of sleep into
the same time, there is a trick that you can use to increase your chances of having lucid dreams
without increasing the time you need to sleep; this is done by rearranging your sleep cycle.
If you normally sleep from midnight to 6:00 AM and then spend two hours preparing for
the day from 6:00 to 8:00 AM, then instead wake up at 4:00 AM, spend the two hours then (until
6:00) and then sleep the remainder from 6:00 to 8:00 AM. During your second period of sleep
you will have much more REM sleep than usual which will intensify your dreams and increase
your chances of having lucid dreams. It helps even more to write, think, or read about lucid
dreaming in your last 30 minutes of waking before you go to sleep for the second time and of
course you can try an induction technique upon returning to sleep.
This can be very effective for busy people, but it is only an example. Rearrange your
sleep anyway you see necessary, varying the amount of time sleeping or staying up to see what
works best for you.
DILD
A DILD (Dream Induced Lucid Dream) is one of the two methods of achieving a lucid
dream, the other being WILD. It takes place when the dreamer in some way realizes that they are
dreaming inside the dream, after previously being unaware of this. This differs from the WILD
(Wake Induced Lucid Dream) method in which the dreamer almost always never loses
consciousness and understands that they are going into a dream. One cannot directly induce a
DILD from a waking state, unlike WILD techniques, and therefore a variety of different tricks
must be used to have a DILD. I would recommend starting with the DILD method before the
WILD method because the DILD method is usually less intense. It is also mostly easier and
simpler, although it usually takes longer and there is less of a chance of becoming lucid (but
remember that everyone is different; some avid lucid dreamers have only ever used DILD
method techniques). The most important aspect of a DILD and one of the fundamental pieces of
lucid dreaming in general is reality checks, sometimes called state tests.
REALITY CHECKS
Reality checks are based on habits. Habits we form in waking life tend to transfer into our
dreams, especially when we are thinking about them often; lucid dreamers use this fact to have
more lucid dreams. Reality checks are done in waking life in the hopes of accidentally and
habitually doing them in a dream, thus making it easy to recognize that one is dreaming.
A reality check is simply a check done habitually to prove to yourself that you are indeed
not dreaming. These checks take advantage of strange oddities that exist in the dream world,
such as how people often do not have a pulse in dreams or that you might have extra or missing

20

fingers. Although we all have had dreams, you may not have noticed that there are many of these
peculiarities in the dream world or that the dream world can be very different from the real
world. Each reality check targets something that is dramatically different in the dream world
which you will be able to notice due to your habitual reality check. For example, looking at your
hands habitually (aim for about 10 to 15 times a day) to see if they are normal will eventually
transfer into your dreams in which you will take advantage of the fact that they just could have
20 fingers on them, thus becoming lucid. This is called a RCILD (Reality Check Induced Lucid
Dream), but this is an uncommon term and DILD is sometimes used in its place, although that
can get confusing due to the difference between the DILD method and DILD technique.
When you do reality checks, you have to concentrate fully on them. If you are just going
through the motions, they will not work. For example, if you check your hands all the time but
you are never really paying any attention to them, you might have very frustrating dreams in
which you see that you have 6 fingers, but just dismiss it with Huh. Thats weird and miss out
on an opportunity to become lucid.
Also, I want to point out that there are two types of reality checks: physical and mental.
Physical reality checks focus on physical features, like hands, while mental reality checks focus
on thinking about dreaming, like asking yourself is this a dream? If you combine these two and
do these consciously throughout your waking life, you will eventually have a DILD.
Note that some reality checks may not work for youthere is no universal reality check
as everyones dreams work differently. This is a list of all the different reality checks so far that
have been discovered to work, although there could be more potential reality checks that havent
been noticed yet (you yourself could find someexperiment).
1. Check your hands. Hands are almost always very strange in dreams. It is not
uncommon that the dreamer will notice, upon examining his or her hands, that there
seems to be six, seven, or more fingers, an extra hand, and/or distorted fingers. This is
probably the most popular one because it is easy and simple. Another important
aspect of doing a reality check is that it doesnt attract much attention. If youre in a
crowd of people and you decide you want to jump to reality check, youre going to
get people asking what are you doing? and you cant just say oh, checking to see if
this is real or not, thats all.
2. Jump, to see if gravity is normal. If you jump in dreams you tend to slowly sink down
or just float there. Generally, there is a distorted sense of physics in dreams, and you
might even start flying through the air after you jump. I explained how this could
result in awkward social interactions, but if youre feeling energetic or youre at a
rave, go for it.
3. Look around you. This is to make sure that everything is normal because in a dream
sometimes things are not quite right. These differences can be hard to spot, so I
recommend doing this with another reality check, perhaps a mental one.
4. Count your fingers. This is similar to checking your hands, but it is a bit more
detailed. Hold each finger individually and go through each one on your hand,
afterwards holding another imaginary sixth finger (or seventh if you happen to be

21

born with six fingers) in the air next to your palm. In a dream, this finger may
actually be there.
5. Blow through your closed nose. In a dream, you can still breathe through your closed
nose. Hold your nose tight and try to breathe/blow through it. This is discreet and
effective, but take note: this will not work well for you if you have a hole in your
nose.
6. Flick the light switch. Light switches rarely work in dreams. Electronics also will
only sometimes work properly, but still can act normally. This can be the most
awkward of all reality checks and you cant find a light switch everywhere, making it
not a very useful reality check.
7. Look at a digital watch or writing. These will look strange, fuzzy, jumbled, or they
will change rapidly in a dream. In dreams, writing usually changes when the dreamer
looks at it or examines it with a second glance. This is because the area of the brain
that processes writing is shut down during dreaming. If you look at a digital watch or
a sign in a dream, you might see the letters or numbers moving around in circles, like
a pool of alphabet soup being stirred. The problem with this one is that you might just
accept it and try to make sense of it rather than becoming lucid. Analog clocks may
also look strange, but this is less common.
8. Push your fingers through your palm/a wall. Your fingers may be able to be pushed
through your palm in a dream, and your palm may be able to be pushed through a
wall. This will usually work in a dream, but because you are already using your hands
I suggest you check them as well.
9. Stretch your finger. Simply pull on one of your fingers and if it stretches out like a
rubber band you will know that youre dreaming.
10. See if you can see well without your glasses. This obviously only works if you wear
glasses, but if you do, make a habit of taking them off or checking that theyre there
throughout the day and see how well you can see without them. In a dream your
vision should rarely be affected by your glasses.
11. Change your appearance. In a dream, your appearance should be unchanged, so you
can change your appearance and then observe it throughout the day. For example,
grow a very irritating beard and check if it is still there every day.
12. Remember what you did before now/yesterday. You sometimes have a very active
memory in a dream, but most of the time you can never remember how you got to a
certain point in the dream. Ask yourself what was I just doing?
13. Check your pulse. You rarely have one in a dream, although you usually can feel your
heart beating if you are doing something exciting. This might work for some people,
like doctors or nurses, but personally I can never find my pulse, so this would never
work for me. I assume there are similar people.
14. Look in a mirror (but dont). If you look in the mirror you will rarely see yourself, but
rather a blur, demonic or scary figure (which can induce nightmares, so be careful), a
shadow, or just nothing at all. Looking in a mirror will often result in you seeing

22

some unearthly figure rather than yourself, so it can be used as a reality check, but it
can also cause nightmares, so my personal recommendation is to stay away from
them completely for now, however they do have some interesting properties to
explore once you become more experienced. For example, stepping through them can
bring you to a parallel dream world.
15. Look for strange occurrences. As a general rule, anything that happens that is strange
or unexpected is a good sign that you are dreaming. There may be more strange
occurrences in dreams than in waking life, but if you ever even have the slightest
strange experience, do a reality check. Also, you may feel strong emotions all at once
in a dream, which makes it helpful to look for this as well.
16. Close one eye and try to look at your nose with your other eye. If you cant see your
nose, you are most likely dreaming, or you just have a small nose. This can be done
quickly and easily, but I think it would work best for people with big noses.
17. Notice your ability to feel pain. In a dream, you will very rarely be able to feel any
pain, so while you are waking it might help to flick yourself or pinch yourself;
however, these may not work very well because you can still feel pressure in a dream.
18. Set your watch to go off every hour and perform any other reality check with the
alarm. This can be carried over to your dreams or directly programmed into them if
the watch goes off when you are sleeping. This is more of an aid to a reality check
than its own reality check. Similarly, an effective technique would be setting a picture
as a home screen on a smartphone that reminds you to do a reality check, or writing
something on your hand to remind yourself.
19. Use sticky notes. Write things like are you dreaming? on sticky notes and place
them around places that you regularly visit, like on the side of a mirror. This is more
of an aid to a reality check as well. A variation to this is writing are you dreaming?
on small slips of paper and putting them all around in pockets, wallets, and pursers.
20. Jam out. Listen to a song frequently in waking life (try to use one that reminds you of
dreams) and while you listen to it tell yourself that you are dreaming or do reality
checks. When you go to sleep, loop this song loud enough so that you can hear it and
it may be incorporated into your dreams.
21. Ask yourself is this a dream? or what am I feeling? Does it feel like a dream?
Questions like these are mental reality checks, and they are best done with physical
reality checks to double check. It is important to not just say things like obviously,
Im not to questions like am I dreaming? because, just like the question, the
answer will be carried over to your dreams too, and you will find that you answer
your question as soon as you ask it. Dont just tell yourself that you are not
dreamingprove it. You may use sticky notes to remind yourself to do this.
(There are a few more reality checks that are done without moving; these and their uses
will be explained in the FILD section of the next chapter).
Remember to always do more than one reality check at a time; this will help you avoid
convincing yourself that everything is normal in a dream. When you do a reality check in a

23

dream, your brain will try to stop you from becoming lucid by making you think what is
happening is normal or just a bit strange. For example, if you wake up one morning and see you
have no hair, your first though should be I am dreaming and then you fly out the window or
whatever else you want to do. However, your brain might trick you and you could think oh my
god, where is my hair? What am I going to do? I have work in 2 hours, Ive got to find a wig!
To fix this problem, remind yourself what the purpose of the reality check is while you
are doing it. For example, think if I am dreaming I will have six fingers while counting your
fingers. This should help you put two and two together in your dream. As mentioned above, it
will also help to really question your environmenttell yourself to prove that you are not
dreaming when you do your reality checks.
Although any time is a good time for a reality check, there are four times especially to do
reality checks throughout the day. Firstly, do them quickly once you wake up in the morning.
This protects against false awakenings, which is when you wake up in a dream but think youve
woken up in real life. The best reality checks to do at this time are ones with little movement or
none at all so that when you move about you do not forget memories of dreams. Next, do reality
checks whenever you see a dream sign. In the next part of this chapter I will explain what a
dream sign is and how it helps you, so stay tuned. Another time to do them is when you see
anything strange, even if it is just slightly out of the ordinary; this helps because there are lots if
strange things in dreams. Lastly, do them at night, just before going to sleep. This is to get
yourself to remember to do them while you dream and to remind yourself of your lucid dreaming
endeavors.
When you do a reality check and it turns out that you are actually dreaming, I recommend
you do it again and do other reality checks. This serves two purposes: to make you more lucid
and therefore give you more control over the dream and also to make sure that you are really
dreaming. If you do a reality check in waking life and see an optical illusion, you dont want to
go jumping off buildings and flying around just yet. If you take it slow in your lucid dreams this
will also make them less likely to collapse, meaning they will last longer.
Another tip is to stick to one set of reality checks rather than doing random reality checks
at random times. Personally, I ask myself what I was just doing, then I count my fingers and
check my hands, then I hold my nose shut and see if I can breathe through it while thinking am
I dreaming? Your reality checks dont have to be as extensive as this, but it is important to
choose a set of reality checks, put them together in your own order, and then do them regularly.
Remember that you have to stick to the same reality checks to build the habit.
DREAM SIGNS
Dream signs are where reality checks and dream journals come together. I have alluded to them
before; they are recurring images, thoughts, people, emotions, places, or events that appear in
dreams. You might already have something in mind, but if you dont immediately recognize any
dream signs, check your dream journal. Anything that appears often in your dream is a dream
sign, so if youve been taking careful notes of your dreams you should see some.
Some people have water as their dream sign, meaning in their dreams they often see a

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glass of water, an ocean, or anything to do with water. Others have colors or people as dream
signs, some people could have very strange dream signs, like an elephant in a suit riding a purple
bicycle. You might have never realized you had a strange dream sign until you started keeping a
dream journal and having vivid dreams. You can also have multiple dream signs, have a shift in
your dream signs, or have temporary dream signs.
The purpose of knowing your dream signs is to notice your dream sign in waking life and
do a reality check whenever you see it. After you build this habit, you will automatically do a
reality check when you see a dream sign while dreaming, which will be often of course
otherwise it wouldnt be a dream sign. This will increase your likelihood of performing a
successful reality check in your dreams. If you build the habit well enough, you will start
automatically doing them whenever you see a dream sign.
Some people define a dream sign as anything that could make you question reality, such
as waking up to see that you have no hair, but the majority of lucid dreamers define it generally
as a personalized recurring element in ones dreams.
IF YOU CANT FIND ANY DREAM SIGNS
You might not be able to identify any dream signs. This is not uncommon and not a problem. All
that you have to do is set a reality check for you to do whenever you do something often in
waking life, like walk through a doorway, see a certain letter or word (this is easy if you write
and read often), or think about something that you like doing. Essentially, all that you are doing
is replacing a personal dream sign with something that happens often in everyones dreams.
Sometimes you can recognize a dream sign, but it rarely appears in waking life. If this is
the case, there are two solutions to this: the first is to do the same thing as you would if you
couldnt find any dreams signs at allchoose something you do commonly in waking life, and
the second is to associate something that is related to the dream sign with the dream sign. For
example, if your dream sign is an old friend from college named David, but he moved far away
and you rarely see him or talk to him anymore, then find something that is closely related to him.
Maybe he plays the guitar, and you think about the guitar or hear it often. Once youve found a
connection like this, just assign the guitar to David by always thinking about the guitar when you
think of David and vice versa and whenever you think of, hear, or play the guitar you do a reality
check. Because David has been closely associated with the guitar in your mind, he will often be
paired with it in your dreams, compelling you to do a reality check.
PAYING ATTENTION TO DETAILS
In a dream, you may notice that most times things seem normal but arent quite right. For
example, if you have a dream about walking through your house but instead of walking into your
bedroom you walk into a bar, then that is an indication that you have to do a reality check. To see
these small (or sometimes large) flaws in your dream more clearly, you need to pay attention to
the details in your dreams. This will be emphasized several times throughout this book. Using
the same concept as a reality check, it will be beneficial to pay attention to your surroundings
very closely in waking life, therefore transferring this habit to your dreams and thus increasing

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your likelihood of having a lucid dream.

MILD
A MILD (Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreamthe M is silent in Mnemonic) is more of an aid to a
technique than an actual technique, although it can be very useful, especially when paired with
another technique. It works best after just waking up from a dream to fall back asleep again and
it is ideal for beginners because it is not very difficult or intense.
A MILD is made up of several factors. First, you should be able to look for and recognize
dream signs and you should be performing several reality checks daily. Once you are doing
these, the next step is a form of repeating something in your head before you fall asleep (the
phrase that is repeated is called a mantra, like meditation) and then visualizing a dream just
before falling asleep. This will help you do whatever you just told yourself you were going to do
and the visualizations could even put you into the dream that you had imagined. For example, if
you wanted to increase your lucidity (your awareness of the dream) you would say to yourself
tonight, I will become more lucid in my dreams over and over again while you fall asleep and
then visualize yourself becoming lucid. You could also use one of a variety of other mantras,
such as I will notice dream signs, the next scene will be a dream, I will realize I am
dreaming, or I will remember my dreams.
You may say your mantra out loud a couple of times, but be sure that you are only
thinking about it when you are falling asleep. You can use the MILD mantra technique for all
kinds of dreaming abilities, from telling yourself that you will remember your dreams to telling
yourself that your dreams will last longer.
Here are a few tips and tricks pertaining to this:
1. Try to keep the phrase short, under around 15 words long because you want the
message to be easy to remember and sink into your subconscious mind.
2. Avoid negative words like wont or not. Change the phrase so it is positive if you
do have any negative words.
3. Do not use the term lucid dream in your phrase. Studies have shown that using
tonight I will realize I am dreaming is far more effective than tonight I will have a
lucid dream. This is most likely because saying I will be aware that I am dreaming
is much simpler and easier for the mind to digest.
4. Focus on your mantra and put a feeling to the wordsfeel the intention as you are
saying it.
5. Dont say what you want or wish to happen; say what will happen. Say I will
be aware that I am dreaming rather than I want to be aware that I am dreaming.
This makes the statement stronger.
6. Ignore any random thoughts that come to mind when doing this. Do not suppress
them, just turn your focus back to the mantra.
7. Personalize the phrase for yourself and see what works best for you.
Although it is not strictly a mantra, you could also count down as you are going to sleep,

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like this: 100. Im dreaming. 99. Im dreaming. 98. Im dreaming and so on. This might help
you stay on track and it can tell you how long it takes you to fall asleep. Also, every night before
you go to bed plan what you want to do so that just in case you have a lucid dream you will be
ready. This way you will waste no time thinking about what to do in your dreams and by
thinking about it you will be planting it in your subconscious mind. It also helps if you read and
think about lucid dreaming before going to bed.
The mantra portion of the MILD technique depends on subconsciously remembering
something by internal means onlyrepetition. This can be very challenging for some people,
especially if they have a bad memory and usually rely on external sources to remember things,
such as cell phones, alarms, or to do lists. To increase your ability to remember things
consciously while asleep, it helps to be able to consciously remember things while awake.
There are daily exercises that you can use to help you with this and build your memory.
Each morning, when you wake up, ask yourself to remember to notice three random things in the
day. These can be the first time I hear a dog bark, the first food I have after lunch, or the
first person I wave to. You can keep your progress of these exercises in your dream journal.
Take careful note of what you remember to do, what you remember to do but do not notice the
first time it happens, and what you forget about. This should help your memory while waking,
and therefore also while asleep.
As for the visualization part of MILD, it will help if you have an active imagination and
good visualization skills. Ill explain how to increase your ability to visualize in the Meditation,
Music, and Mental Exercises chapter, but now I am going to tell you what to visualize. When
you feel like you are about to fall asleep, start visualizing yourself in a recent dream or one that
you can remember well. However, this time you are going to re-dream it so that instead of it
ending with your waking, you will observe a dream sign or perform a reality check and become
lucid, saying Im dreaming! Imagine this whole dream vividly and in as much detail as
possible. Then, imagine what you are going to do when you become lucid, such as fly off to the
moon or shape-shift into an elephant. At this point, you will probably fall asleep. This is actually
the intention of this exercisethat your last thought before falling asleep is about lucid
dreaming. Although you are really only day-dreaming (or rather night-dreaming), this will
greatly increase your chance of having a lucid dream. This works even better when you wake up
after 4 to 6 hours of sleep for 20 to 30 minutes and do this while falling back asleep.
When used alone, MILD can be effective, but as said above it is really less of a technique
and more of an aid to a technique, although it could be used either way. MILD will increase your
chances of lucid dreaming when used with other techniques, although some people have found it
to work well for them alone.
SUGGESTION/AUTO-SUGGESTION
The suggestion technique (also known as auto-suggestion or intention setting) is very simple and
similar to the MILD technique. It uses a mantra targeted at lucid dreaming and sometimes
visualization, although it is unlike MILD visualization. These are some easy mantras to repeat
after you have cleared your mind and relaxed: tonight in my dreams, I will realize I am

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dreaming and become consciously aware, tonight in my dreams, when I see something strange,
I will realize I am dreaming, or tonight in my dreams, when I see [dream sign] I will realize I
am dreaming and become consciously aware. Do not strain yourself or try too hard when
repeating this; simply expect it to happen like you would expect the sun to rise in the morning.
After this, you can either go to sleep immediately or first imagine yourself happily writing down
your lucid dream in the morning. Remember to repeat his phrase until you feel yourself drifting
to sleep. This technique works best for people who are easily hypnotizable. The main difference
between the suggestion mantra and the MILD mantra is that when using the suggestion technique
you need to be relaxed and sure that you are not straining yourself, whereas the MILD technique
will become more effective if you try harder.
A variation of this technique that is combined with reality checking is called the
Castaneda Technique. It is done at night before you fall asleep. Sit on your bed and clear your
mind, then stare lazily at the palms of your hands and tell yourself tonight while I am dreaming,
I will see my hands and realize that I am dreaming. Continue to repeat this slowly as you look at
your hands. Then, after about five minutes or once you feel sleepy, go to sleep. You should see
your hands at some point in your dream and mentally make the connection to your dreams,
therefore becoming lucid. If this doesnt work well for you, you can set your alarm for about 4 to
5 hours after you fall asleep and do the exercise briefly again before returning to sleep; this will
increase its effectiveness.
VILD
A VILD (Visually Induced Lucid Dream) is an imagined dream in which you become lucid and
take control of the dream. It is imagined before going to bed and visualized just as you are falling
asleep. This is a bit like the visualization part of the MILD technique, but it has some differences
and tends to be a bit harder; mainly, the visualizations are more vivid and intense, making VILD
difficult for some, although for others it will work well.
First, you must write down your imagined dream sometime before you go to sleep and
memorize it, going over it again and again. This can be a dream completely conceived by
yourself or one that you have had recently. It is best to do this in the morning before you attempt
VILD so that you will have plenty of time to think about it in the day before going to bed.
Remember to write it down and, if you can, carry the writing (or a picture of it) with you
throughout the day to look over it. The dream scene should be short and simple and you should
become lucid in it by recognizing something as unusual. For example, in the dream someone
asks you to show them one reality check and you do the reality check and realize you are
dreaming.
Here is an example of a VILD that you could write before going to bed: I am in my
living room when my best friend, Mary, walks in. She asks me to show her my new engagement
ring. I look at my hands and see that I have seven fingers on them. Im dreaming, I say. After I
become lucid, I walk outside and fly away.
When you go to bed and you are relaxed and on your way toward sleep, start visualizing
the scene. Not just once, but play the whole scene from start to finish in your mind again and

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again, like a gif or a loop. The only requirement of VILD is that you should be visualizing this
scene again and againthere are no mantras involved. While you visualize it, do not change or
add any details to the dream that you originally imagined. You should fall asleep while
visualizing the dream.
This dream will stick to your subconscious mind, and, hopefully, when you enter your
REM cycle you will start to dream it, inevitably ending with your lucidity. An advantage of this
technique is that the dream you created is much more stable than a regular lucid dream and
therefore will not collapse and cause you to wake up as easily because you are already familiar
with the dream and have memorized it. This technique uses dream incubation, which is when
you imagine a dream vividly and practice it enough so that you will actually dream it. This
technique is more effective if you wake up after around 4 to 6 hours of sleep in your REM cycle
and then do it.
CAT
CAT stands for Cycle Adjustment Technique. This technique is an easy means of attaining lucid
dreams every other night for beginners, although it does take some commitment and a week of
practice before any lucid dreams can be achieved. All that you have to do is slightly alter your
sleeping schedule for the next week and you should start seeing results the week after. Before
reading on, please note that this is not a technique for lazy people and it requires a certain level
of discipline. This technique used alone will give you up to four lucid dreams a week, or about
one every other night. This is less than the more desirable seven or more lucid dreams a week,
but if youre having three or less lucid dreams a week already this technique is worth a try. This
technique relies on your brain being more active during the early morning REM cycles, therefore
increasing your chance of lucidity and dream vividness. This is how it is done:
Your body has natural sleep cycles that make you want to sleep at night and wake up in
the day. However, these cycles can be changed so that your body expects to wake up at a
different time. For example, you may notice that sometimes you wake up just a few minutes
before your alarm goes off. This is because your body has become accustomed to your sleeping
schedule, knew when you were going to wake up, and woke you up naturally at the right time.
Your body does this because it doesnt like being jolted awake and would prefer to wake more
peacefully and prepared for the day. While your body was preparing to wake up, you started to
have more brain activity and alertness so that you could wake up ready for the day. The CAT
takes advantage of this phenomenon.
This technique is done by waking up 90 minutes earlier than normal for one week, setting
your body to wake up at that time. If you arent a morning person, dont worry, you can still get
plenty of sleepyou just have to go to bed earlier (but try to be consistent with sleeping and
waking times). For example, go to bed at 10:00 to 10:45 PM every night and wake up at 6:00
AM instead of your usual 7:30. The hardest part of the technique is doing this for a week
getting out of bed early when you would love just another hour and a half. It helps to put your
alarm on the other side of the room so that you have to get up immediately to turn it off. When
you are up and awake, never go back to sleep. This is also a good time to do lots of reality

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checks. If you do decide to stay asleep until your normal time, youve wasted all your hard work,
and now your body is at least somewhat confused. You cannot do this, which is why the
technique requires discipline.
After this week, in the next week (and for however many weeks after that) get up 90
minutes early just every other day. On the days that you sleep in later, your body will have
already started to increase brain activity and make you more alert by the time your last REM
cycle starts, so you will be much more conscious in your dreams, making lucidity much easier.
The CAT can be combined with other techniques, such as MILD and reality checking.
Also, every night when you go to bed set your intention to wake up at the earlier time. This will
plant the idea in your subconscious mind (even if you will not actually wake up at that time) and
make it more likely for your brain to be more active. If you naturally wake up early on a day you
should be sleeping in, try to get back to sleep or try the WILD technique (see next chapter. Also,
this is called a WILDCAT). As explained above, after the first week you can wake up at the
normal time every other day. However, it is recommended that you repeat the first week of
training every few months to refresh the cycle.
CAT isnt a technique that most people will like, but it is easy and it can be used for as
long as you want after that first week of waking up early. You may not be able to achieve
guaranteed lucid dreams every night with this technique, but up to four lucid dreams a week is
better than none.
HILD
A HILD is a Hypnosis Induced Lucid Dream, or more accurately a Self-Hypnosis Induced Lucid
Dream in which you plant the idea of having a lucid dream in your subconscious mind through
self-hypnosis (hypnotizing yourself). Much of lucid dreaming relies on your subconscious
expectation of your ability to lucid dreamdreams are shaped by our subconscious minds, and
hypnosis programs your subconscious mind to help you have lucid dreams. Therefore, the HILD
technique can be very effective. Although some people are naturally more hypnotizable than
others, HILD can be like MILD on steroids; in other words, its not so mild (pun intended). All
you need to do is get into a relaxed, hypnotized state and repeat an affirmation to yourself and
you can program your mind to lucid dream.
You dont have to be an evil psychologist bearing an old-fashioned pocket watch to
understand how hypnosis works, nor do you have to be the victim of some performing hypnotist
that makes you act like a chicken; in fact, you have probably been in a hypnotic trance before,
such as when you have been daydreaming when you realize you do not remember anything that
just happened in the external world or when you were too distracted by watching a movie at the
movie theatre to notice who was sitting next to you. Hypnosis is not some evil method of taking
advantage of someone; in fact, it can be used for relaxation and helps many people become
calmer and happier in their lives. Self-hypnosis is the act of putting yourself into a trance state,
like meditation or sleep, which makes you more suggestible to repeated affirmations that will
directly influence your subconscious mind. So, please, put away your old perception as
hypnotism as vulnerability. You still maintain complete control over yourself while you undergo

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self-hypnosis.
Hypnosis can be used for more than just lucid dreaminghypnosis has been proven to be
effective in overcoming insomnia, anxiety, addictions, and many other disorders. This works
because when you are in a hypnotic trance, your focus is narrowed in on one thing and your
subconscious mind is open to suggestion. Following is a step-by-step guide on how to hypnotize
yourself to perform the HILD technique:
1. Put on comfortable clothing and make sure that you are not too hot or too cold. You will
not be able to focus if you are too concerned about your pants cutting off your
circulation.
2. Get into a comfortable position. You need to be able to relax, so comfort is essential,
especially because you could be in the same position for a little while (about 20 minutes).
Its best to do this when youre already tired, although not completely exhausted.
3. Unplug. Turn off your phone, drop your child off at your parents house, and lock
yourself in your room. Do whatever you need to do to be assured that you will not be
disturbed in the ensuing 15 to 30 minutes. Remove yourself from the external world.
4. Choose your affirmation and try to keep it in the present tense. It could be about lucid
dreaming or you could use one that helps you hypnotize yourself. For example: I am
able to realize when I am dreaming or I am calm and relaxed.
5. Relax. Use a relaxation technique to help you. Stretch yourself out and un-tense all of
your muscles. Close and relax your eyes and breathe deeply. Try to stay mostly still if
you can.
6. Mentally relax. Clear your mind of the daily minutia that constantly pulls on your
consciousness, such as ugh, I still have to do that thing for work or what if someone
needs to call me? Am I missing anything on Facebook right now? Do not think, and
when thoughts do arise, gently take your focus off of them. Practicing mediation will help
you do this. I will give a detailed step-by-step approach to that too in a couple of
chapters.
7. Imagine that you are at the top of a flight of stairs which, at the fifth step, start to
submerge into water. Picture every detail of this scene vividly, from the color of the
water to the smell of the air. Imagine yourself descending the stairs slowly, from the top
step. Take another step down each exhale or two, and see the number of the step you are
on, counting as you go down. Tell yourself that you are getting more relaxed and calm as
you go down the stairs. Remember to visualize each detail. Feel the steps under your feet,
especially when you reach the fifth step, when you should feel the refreshing coolness of
the water on your feet. Once you get to the bottom, feel the sensation of floating in the
water as the water goes up to your chest (or wherever you want it to). Once you are in
this stage, you are hopefully in the beginnings of a hypnotic trance, and you can influence
your subconscious mind, as you have walked down the stairs of the conscious level to the
subconscious level.
8. Start repeating your mantra. The affirmation you should use should be just like the MILD
techniqueit should be somewhat short and aimed at what you want to do, like I will

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have long, vivid dreams tonight in which I will realize I am dreaming. Remember to try
not to include anything negative in your mantra and to keep the word lucid out of it
because your brain does not process the meaning of it as well as simply stating that you
will know that you are dreaming. Focus on your words and what they mean while you
repeat them. At this point, you are basically programming your mind. You might also fall
asleep from this pleasant state of consciousness, or you could choose to return to waking
life. You can return whenever you want to.
9. Ascend back up the stairs. Do it slowly, and count each number as you go up, feeling the
sensation of the water and seeing everything else vividly. Once you reach the sixth step,
you may feel yourself getting heavy. Simply wait until this feeling passes, and continue
up the stairs.
10. Once you have ascended, give yourself a few relaxing moments before opening your
eyes. You may want to slowly count down from 10 and tell yourself that when you reach
zero you will open your eyes. Stand up slowly, and give yourself plenty of time to
reawaken.
After you have woken from this state, your subconscious mind has hopefully been programed
to lucid dream, meaning that you only have to go to sleep and you will likely find yourself in a
lucid dream, or at least with increased awareness in the dream. You can do this exercise before
bed, but I recommend you do it in the morning after waking up in the middle of your REM sleep
because after you finish the hypnosis and go back to sleep you will be put right back into REM
sleep which means dreams, so it is more likely that it will work because the affirmation is fresh
in your mind.
There are other ways to induce hypnosis, and some may work better than others for you. This
is the second out of the three techniques I will be presenting:
1. Follow the first six steps of the first HILD technique above, except keep your eyes open.
2. Focus on an object across the rooma clock, a picture, anything. Choose an object that is
a bit above your line of vision so that you have to strain your eyes a bit to see it.
3. Continue staring while saying to yourself, My eyelids are becoming heavier and heavier.
My eyelids feel as if heavy weights are pulling them down. Soon they will be so heavy
they will close. Repeat these sentences to yourself about every thirty seconds (do not
actually count).
4. Focus on your eyelids. You will notice that your eyelids are actually beginning to feel
heavier. Dont rush yourself, but let your eyes close when you feel they need to close. As
they close, say to yourself, relax, and let go. You can say this quietly or think it.
5. When your eyes close, take a deep breath in through your nostrils and hold it for a few
seconds. Then, exhale through your slightly parted lips, letting your jaw drop and feeling
a wave of heaviness spread over you from your head to toes.
6. Continue to breathe slowly and smoothly. As you exhale, say or think the word calm or
relaxed to yourself and let your relaxation deepen. Youve now entered a light trance.
7. Going deeper, take a deep breath and hold it for a few seconds. Exhale slowly through

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your lips while saying the word deeper to yourself. Repeat this process a few more
times.
8. Imagine that youre stepping onto a slowly descending escalator that will take you to a
state of deeper relaxation. Say something to yourself like I am slowly sinking into a
deeper state of relaxation.
9. As you descend, count backwards on each exhalation, from 10 to 1.
10. When you reach the bottom of the escalator, imagine that you are stepping off of the
escalator and onto another similar one. Again, count backwards from 10 to 1. Continue
this to deepen your trance until you feel you have reached a comfortable level of
relaxation. Depending on how hypnotizable you are, you may only need one escalator
ride or you may need several.
11. Repeat your affirmation at this point, like you did in the other self-hypnosis induction.
12. To leave the trance, count slowly backwards from 5 to 1, between each number saying to
yourself: when I reach one, my eyes will open and I will feel completely awake and
refreshed. As you count down, notice your eyes beginning to flutter open and give
yourself time to relax after they are open.
This is the final technique, which does not use any stairs or escalators and requires a coin of
some type:
1. Once again, repeat the first six steps of the first self-hypnosis technique, except you must
sit on a chair with arms and legs uncrossed and feet flat on the floor.
2. Hold the coin with your dominant hand and extend your arm out in front of you. Your
palm should be facing the ceiling and your fingers should wrap around the coin in a loose
grasp. Start to breathe deeply and regularly from your stomach.
3. Start to feel the warmth of the coin in your hand. Internally narrate what is happening and
how the coin feels. Tell yourself that you are aware of the warmth surrounding the coin.
4. Convince yourself and truly allow yourself to believe that in some way the coin possesses
special qualities, taking the shape and form of a balloon.
5. Imagine that each breath inflates the balloon steadily and that the coin is expanding
slowly. Vividly imagine it inflating in your palm so that your fingers start to open and
unwrap.
6. Imagine that the coin-balloon is getting comfortably warmer and is expanding more and
more. Notice that your fingers are opening up and tell yourself that they are opening up
on their own. Convince yourself of this and it should happen naturally.
7. Imagine the pressure building in the palm of your hand as your fingers open.
8. Rhythmically breathe as you count down from 10 to 0, relaxing more with each breath
and each number as the balloon inflates and your hand opens. Tell yourself that the time
it takes for you to count to zero is the time it takes for your fingers to fully open and for
the coin to drop to the floor.
9. Remind yourself of the coin dropping, and, as soon as it does drop, you have reached a
light trance.

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10. Now imagine that without the coin supporting you your arm is starting to feel heavy and
you want it to float down into your lap. As your arm gently drifts back to your lap, you
should be going deeper into a state of hypnosis. Tell yourself that you are going deeper as
your arm floats back to your lap.
11. Once your arm reaches your lap, exhale and relax yourself further. You may now use
your affirmation.
12. To leave the state, take some deep breaths, reorient yourself, and open your eyes when
youre ready.
After youve used one of these three techniques, remember to go to sleep relatively soon. If
you are interested, you can also listen to subliminal messages for lucid dream induction before
you go to bed, which are similar to hypnosis but are a bit milder.
DREAM CHARACTERS AND CHILD
Although it is uncommon, spontaneous lucidity can occur. Sometimes you just suddenly realize
that you are dreaming with no effort at all. This can also happen when dream charactersthe
people in your dreamstell you that you are dreaming or give you hints. This sounds very
strange, but it is possible for you to be fully submerged in a non-lucid dream and have someone
walk up to you and say youre dreaming and then walk away, resulting in your lucidity. A
dream character could also say things like look around you. Dont things look a big different?
Arent things a bit off? This seems like some friendly advice, but it is actually your
subconscious thoughts informing you that you are dreaming through dream characters (Ill get
into communicating with your subconscious mind through dream characters more in Part 2).
I have also heard of a couple of lucid dreamers who tried an experiment to ask one dream
character to stay in the dreamers subconscious and appear in every dream that the dreamer had
in order to tell them that they were dreaming. For example, they would see their friend in a
dream and ask him or her to come to their dreams every night and just say youre dreaming.
The lucid dreamers that tried this got no results, but it has yet to be tested on a larger amount of
peoplefor many people it could even work every night. Other than this example (if it does
work), there is no way to rely on dream characters to tell you that you are dreaming, but it is
interesting to know that it could happen.
This has been called a LILD (Lucid Induced Lucid Dream) but that can be confused with
LILD as in Light Induced Lucid Dream, so here I will call it CHILD (CHaracter Induced Lucid
Dream). You can try it yourself; in your first lucid dream, ask a dream character to help you
become easily lucid in the future. This would help if the character you asked is in many of your
dreams. You can also ask the whole dream to help you become lucid in the future. This could be
more effective, however, this technique depends on your expectations. If you expect it will not
work, it probably will not. But if you believe it will work, it certainly could. Thats not to say
this is just a placebo (something that only works if you believe it will), but dreams are literally
all in your head. Even if it was just a placebo, who cares? Placebos still work.
Something else that is interesting is another experiment that at least one lucid dreamer
has tried. It was actually the opposite of the first experiment, but first I want to give you a bit of

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information about when you first realize you are dreaming. This will be in Part 2, but the basics
are that most beginner lucid dreamers will get so excited when they have their first lucid dream
that the dream starts shaking and falling apart and they lose the dream, therefore waking up.
There are ways to get around this, but I will save that for later.
In his experiment, the lucid dreamer, by the name of Giz Edwards (an experienced lucid
dreamer) was in a lucid dream when he suddenly turned to one of his dream characters and told
her that she was dreaming. A look of surprise took over her face, and the dream started shaking,
as if it was collapsing. Giz tried everything he could to keep the dream stable, but he soon woke
up, despite his efforts. It was almost like he was in her dream, and he just told her that she was
dreaming, resulting in her short lucid dream. You might immediately jump to theorize that it was
a shared dream experience and that this explains why dream characters will randomly tell you
that you are dreaming, but the next day Giz asked the dream character he had spoken to in the
dream (who he knew in real life) if she had had any strange dreams, but she said she didnt
remember any. This seems to be a bit open to interpretation because she could have forgotten it,
but either way it is interesting.
EILD, LILD, AND SILD
EILD stands for Externally Induced Lucid Dream (or sometimes Electrically Induced Lucid
Dream) and LILD (Light Induced Lucid Dream) falls into this category. An EILD is typically
caused by sounds or lights that have been transferred into the dream from the outside world,
usually by a device created for this purpose. While we sleep, we are not totally detached from the
outside world. We still hear and sense things and these external sensations are often brought into
our dreams without us knowing. For example, if someone was playing the piano while you were
sleeping you might dream you were at a concert, or if someone kept telling you to wake up you
might hear their command in your dream. An EILD device takes advantage of this fact.
EILDs can happen without a device; for example if you were sleeping next to your
husband or wife and you could hear them snoring you might become aware of the fact that you
were dreaming and that the snoring was due to your brain monitoring your external
surroundings. These dreams are somewhat uncommon, especially because if the sound or light
from the outside world is intense enough it is likely it will wake up the sleeper rather than make
them lucid and if it is not intense enough it will not be incorporated into the dream. There are
several ways to induce EILD, but the most common use light and sound.
The most common device using lights are sleeping masks that go over the sleepers eyes
and flash red or white lights in a specific pattern. These lights are bright enough and close
enough so that they will be detected by the retina and therefore incorporated into the dream. This
can happen in a variety of ways, such as seeing flashing lights flying around the dream, a dream
character handing the dreamer a device that emits intense lights, or the lighting in a dream
flashing and changing colors rapidly. The hardest part of this is recognizing that the light
indicates that you are dreaming. Products that work like this include the Remee or the
DreamLight.
EILD audio devices and software most often will either use repeated phrases such as

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you are dreaming or a certain type of music that puts the brain in the right state to lucid dream
(this is called brainwave entrainment). The device inducing the lucid dream has to know what
stage of sleep the dreamer is in; this is normally done through careful timing. There are several
apps available on the app store that will do this as well as YouTube videos. More information on
this can be found in the Meditation, Music, and Mental Exercises chapter.
You can also use your cell phone to have an EILD by setting an alarm to wake you up by
your phones vibration (do not use soundjust vibrations). Keep it in your pocket or in some
place where it is touching you and the vibrations might be incorporated into your dreams. In the
day, set your alarm for random times so your phone will vibrate in your pocket and do a reality
check every time that you feel it. This way, when you feel the vibrations in your dreams, you
will do a reality check by habit and become lucid. However, you could also just be woken up by
the vibrationsit depends on when they occur and what kind of sleeper you are.
The SILD (Smell Induced Lucid Dream) technique is an EILD and works basically the
same way. Its not very popular or as effective as other EILD techniques, but it may work for
some people with a good sense of smell. You can purchase machines that will emit a certain
smell (like lavender, for example) at the right time in the night. You can also fill your pillow
with aromas and hope that you notice these smells in your dreams. These will be explained
further in the Lifestyle for Lucidity chapter.
EILDs tend to be very effective and some even will allow the sleeper to have a lucid
dream in the first night, but some EILD devices can be expensive or only made for certain types
of sleepers. However, if you do decide to purchase a device that induced EILDs, I recommend
you use MILD along with the EILD device as that will significantly increase your chances of
having a lucid dream.
ADA
All Day Awareness (ADA) is a true DILD technique. It is done by becoming and remaining
extremely aware all day long and then becoming more aware in dreams as a result so that the
chances of lucid dreaming are increased. For example, when one performs an ordinary, mundane
activity such as driving they must truly observe the activity, their surroundings, and their own
physical and mental state. Some questions to ask, going from the most general to the most
specific are, where are you driving? How long will it take to get there? Are you going slowly or
quickly? When was the last time you stopped at a red light or stop sign? What was the last road
sign you passed on your left? What is your current speed, and what time is it? Are there
sidewalks on the side of the road?
Once you have considered all of these and more, do not forget to take the time to examine
your own physical body. Can you feel the muscles tensing up in your leg as you drive? How do
your clothes feel on your body? Can you feel the texture of the steering wheel on your hands? Do
you smell anything in particular, like the smell of French fries from a fast food restaurant nearby
or exhaust fumes from other vehicles? Do you feel the way that your tongue rests in your mouth?
What do you hear? What was the last word that you heard someone say? When was the last time
that you blinked? Are your shoulders relaxed? Are you breathing quickly? Then, consider your

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mental state: what emotion are you currently feeling? Are you excited about where you are going
in the car or do you dread it?
Doing this may obviously be difficult, and doing it all day will of course be all the more
difficult, but it will eventually increase the chances of a lucid dream, as awareness from waking
life transfers into dreams. It may be easier to start small with this technique before concentrating
on becoming constantly aware; perhaps five to ten minutes daily would suffice. After one
becomes increasingly acquainted with this technique, most of the time being this aware will
become automatic, so that practice becomes much easier and more convenient.
WBTB
Like the MILD technique, the WBTB (Wake Back To Bed) technique is sometimes considered
an aid to a technique and sometimes considered a techniqueit could serve as either one. This
technique is great for beginners because it has a high success rate and doesnt have to be
involved with sleep paralysis (a process that occurs during dreaming that can sometimes be
frightening; I will properly introduce sleep paralysis in the WILD chapter). Another advantage of
this technique is that it can be combined with many other techniques to provide a larger chance
of success.
The first step of the WBTB technique is to go to bed at your normal time and wake up
about four to six hours laterduring or near your REM sleep. Alternatively, you could wake up
about 90 minutes before you usually do. If you wake up naturally during the night or you have
used a technique to wake yourself up after each dream you may proceed to the next step. It is
best to wake yourself up in your later REM cycles because they are the most vivid and last the
longest, but you can use any REM cycle. To find your REM cycle, wake up at about five hours
after falling asleep. If you remember the beginnings of a dream, youve woken up at the right
time. If you have no memories of dreams, you shouldve got up later; if you have extensive
memories, you shouldve got up earlier.
After you wake up, you must get out of bed and stay up for 20 to 60 minutes (some even
stay up for 90 minutes). See what time works best for you. A good rule of thumb is that when
you start yawning you should go back to bed. If you have trouble getting up, try putting your
alarm on the other side of your room or get someone else to drag you out of bed (you have to get
up). Do something to keep your mind alert, especially something that involves lucid dreaming
because it will plant the idea in your subconscious mind and make it much easier to have a lucid
dream. Reality check often in this time period and really question your environment. Write in
your dream journal, start practicing MILD, and maybe do a little reading on lucid dreaming. It
also helps to get motivated and excited to lucid dream. However, do not get too alert because
then you could have a hard time getting to sleep. If you have nothing to do when you get up, do
chores, use the bathroom, get a sip of water, or walk your dog. Try to dim the lights in your room
and do not wash your face or take a shower (unless you are staying up for a longer time).
When you are ready, go back to sleepthe faster you fall asleep the better off youll be.
If you are too alert, you might want to reduce the amount of time you stay out of bed or practice
meditation or relaxation techniques. As you are falling asleep, this is a good time to try MILD,

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VILD, or simply imagine what you will do when you become lucid. When you fall asleep, you
have a much higher chance of lucid dreaming than if you had never woken up (especially if you
involved yourself in lucid dreaming things while you were awake).
This works well because you stimulate your conscious brain at the time you would
normally be experiencing REM sleep; this will lead to consciousness in dreams. Also, when you
return to sleep you will go right into REM sleep which means if you were involved in anything
related to lucid dreaming when you were awake the idea will be fresh in your mind and most
likely incorporated into your dream, which should be an obvious indication that you are
dreaming. These two factors make this technique very good for beginners because it is easy and
often successful, especially when paired with MILD, VILD, or anything else. The only
disadvantage of this technique is that you will lose sleep, so I recommend you only do it on
weekends or when you will be able to sleep in.
A technique similar to WBTB is NILD, which stands for Nap Induced Lucid Dream. All
you have to do in this technique is sleep for 5 to 6 hours, then stay up for 1 to 2 hours, then go
back to sleep. This can be used with MILD and lots of reality checks to make it more effective.
The time spent awake should be spent doing lucid dreaming related things, like reading about it
or just counting your fingers periodically. It is essentially the same as WBTB, except you stay up
for longer and the remainder of your sleep is more of a nap than finishing your sleep cycle.
UILD
UILD is an interesting technique and it can be somewhat successful, but you stand at risk of
wetting the bed while using it. Hence, the Urinate Induced Lucid Dream (UILD). This is a bit of
an extreme technique and something that shouldnt really be done unless you have tried
everything else, but it still works. If you have a health condition that prohibits you from drinking
too much water, then this technique is not for you. If you have a very weak bladder, then this
technique is also not for you. Now that thats over with, here is how to do it:
Start by doing reality checks every time you use the bathroom for at least one day. Then,
before going to bed, drink enough water so that you will have to urinate in the night. The amount
of water varies from person to person, so you just have to be sure that the amount that youre
drinking is enough for you. When you do this, you will often have dreams of using the bathroom.
Because you have been doing reality checks in real bathrooms, you should also do a reality
check in the dream bathroom, therefore becoming lucid.
Another advantage of this technique is that it can serve as a variation of the Wake Back
To Bed technique, called the Wee Back To Bed technique. This is almost the same as regular
WBTB, except your bladder wakes you up at the right time rather than the alarm. This is actually
more natural because your body can prepare fully for your waking. When you do get up to do
Wee Back To Bed, you should use the bathroom to avoid the risk of bed-wetting. If you want to
do UILD again, you can drink more water at this time, or you can just sleep regularly.
One of the major disadvantages of UILD and Wee Back To Bed is the possibility of
actually urinating. Children often wet the bed because they have less control over their bladders,
and an adult over-filled bladder can act just the same way. This doesnt mean you are going to

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wet the bed every time, but just be cautious, especially if you sleep in the same bed as someone
else. Also, while you are in the dream you may feel like you need to urinate the whole time,
which can be distracting, but still manageable.
TILD
A TILD (Thirst Induced Lucid Dream) is just the opposite of a UILDyou drink no water in the
hours before bed rather than lots of water. This is also a technique you should use only when
youre having a hard time becoming lucid, but it can be very effective, and you dont have to wet
the bed to do it. Although TILD is the opposite of UILD, it uses the same concept.
You start by doing reality checks whenever you drink something. Then, before bed, you
become very thirsty, so you dream of going to get a drink and hopefully do a reality check to
become lucid. The goal is to avoid any drinks starting a few hours before going to sleep and you
might also want to eat salty or spicy foods, but to me that just a bit cruel. Then, you go to sleep
normally and wake up 5 to 6 hours later by alarm (or anything else of your choice) and place a
large glass of water or juice right next to your bed and while youre falling asleep think about
how good it would be to drink from it. Remember to do reality checks whenever you find
yourself drinking something. If you do have a lucid dream, make sure to hydrate yourself after
you wake up from it because it is healthier and it is good to reward yourself after lucid dreaming
(see RILD technique).
If you have any health conditions that prohibit you from becoming dehydrated, do not use
this technique. Also, pregnant women should not try this for the health of their babies. Although
this technique can be uncomfortable, it is effective because you will almost certainly dream
about drinking and it doesnt involve your bladder, which is always a plus.
WAKING UP AFTER REM CYCLES
The two previous techniques, UILD and TILD, involved waking up after REM cycles. This can
be very useful for dream recall, especially right after a lucid dream. Holding in your urine or
being thirsty are two ways of waking up after an REM cycle, as REM sleep is very close to
wakefulness and your body will probably wake you up after or during this time to try to get you
to use the bathroom or drink. Some people can naturally wake up after REM cycles, although for
others it requires training, usually in the form of the suggestion technique. You can manually do
this by setting an alarm to wake you up every 90 minutes in the night so that you can recall your
dreams right after you have them, but this costs you a lot of sleep and can be irritating.
RILD AND PILD
The RILD and PILD techniques are hardly techniques at all, but really aids. However, I dont
want to add another chapter for aids because many aids can also be used as techniques, so I will
just include them here. These techniques dont really fall under either method perfectly, but they
do not involve maintaining consciousness while going into a dream which makes them closer to
the DILD method.
The first technique, RILD, stands for Reward Induced Lucid Dream. This is about

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motivation, and relies on your subconscious perception of success. This cant actually be done
until you have your first lucid dream, but after that it can help you to have more. To use this
technique, first have your first (or just a regular) lucid dream using either a DILD or WILD
technique. Then, as soon as you wake up, reward yourself like you would reward a child or a pet.
This reward will make your subconscious mind happy and associate lucid dreams with rewards,
therefore making it strive for more lucid dreams. It will also help to constantly remind yourself
that you will get a reward if you become lucid.
So what does this reward have to be? Well, it depends on what you like. Some people
keep a favorite drink or food by their bed and take a bite or a sip of it after waking from a lucid
dream. You might also give yourself a foot rub, take a bath, or do something else that is
pleasurable to you. Just make sure that it makes you happy.
A PILD (Punishment Induced Lucid Dream) is just the opposite. It focuses not on your
desire to get a reward for your efforts, but rather your desire to not get punished for your lack of
effort. It uses the same concept as a RILD, except when you wake up and you dont have a lucid
dream, you punish yourself immediately. Throughout the day, remind yourself that you must
become lucid or youll be punished. You have to carry through with the punishment quickly, or it
will not work. You can use this for dream recall too, not just lucid dreaming.
Although the idea of punishing yourself may seem strange, your punishments shouldnt
be harsh or severe; however, they should be severe enough so that you really dont want to
experience them. They shouldnt really be punishments at all actually, more like discomforts or
annoyances. You dont have to get a spanking or a slap every time you fail to lucid dream
(unless youre into that kind of stuff, but then I guess it would be a RILD), you just have to do
something that is distasteful or uncomfortable. For example, take a cold shower, eat a breakfast
that you dislike that morning, try to do UILD, miss out on something that you enjoy, or text an
ex-boyfriend/ex-girlfriend.
Overall, the main goal of RILD and PILD is to treat your mind like a dogsay good
boy when it does well and bad boy when it doesnt. You can just use either PILD or RILD
alone, but together they are far more effective because your mind wants to avoid punishment
while seeking rewards. Remember that these techniques are really just aids and therefore you
shouldnt use them aloneuse them with something else like MILD, VILD, WILD, etc. These
techniques are more for beginners who need a boost, and once you are having lucid dreams
frequently, you probably wont need these techniques anymore. Theyre more like training
wheels, and you wont need them after youve become somewhat skilled at lucid dreaming. After
all, who wants the possibility of taking a cold shower or eating something distasteful every
morning?
WILD
The WILD (Wake Induced Lucid Dream) method is different from the DILD method in
several respects. It is usually quicker and more likely to get you to lucid dream, but it can be
intense and sometimes frightening, which is why I recommend starting with the DILD method.
In the WILD method, the dreamer goes into the dream with the awareness that they are

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dreaming; they almost never lose consciousness like they would using the DILD method
(although there are some techniques that are exceptions). Before I go on, I want to remind you
that there is a WILD method and a WILD technique. Right now, I am explaining the former, and
the latter will be explained later on. To avoid confusion, I will indicate if I am speaking about the
method or the technique from now on.
To use this method, you dont need reality checks or dream signsthose are part of the
DILD method. In the WILD method, through most of the techniques, you go through the same
process as you do every nightyoure just aware of it. The most famous (and infamous) part of
this process is what is called sleep paralysis and it is one of the most essential parts of not only
WILDs but also OBEs (Out of Body Experiences).
SLEEP PARALYSIS
Sleep paralysis, otherwise known as REM atonia, is when your body shuts itself down and
paralyzes itself in your sleep. This might sound like part of a horror movie, but it happens 4 to 5
times every night (one for each sleep cycle) during REM sleep and sometimes in the hypnagogic
or hypnopompic stage (just as going to sleep or just as waking up). This stops you from acting
out your dreamspeople who cannot paralyze themselves in their sleep sleepwalk and move
around in their beds every night. This whole process is normal and healthy, and many people will
occasionally experience this while they are conscious of it, more often just as waking up than
just as going to sleep. This is nothing to be afraid of. However, what comes with this is very
frightening.
If you were to wake up while your body was paralyzed in sleep paralysis, you would find
yourself completely unable to move at all besides using your eyes or breathing and slight
finger/toe wiggling. You would also usually feel a numbness (kind of like the same feeling you
have when your foot falls asleep) and you would most often feel like you were being pressed
down, like something was sitting on your chest. Other common feelings include a feeling of
spinning, being stretched or squashed, being lifted, falling, floating, or vibrations that are created
because your body and mind are not quite in touch with each other and dont know what you are
feeling.
This would be bearable for a lucid dream even though still a bit frightening, but thats not
all. Auditory, visual, and kinesthetic hallucinations are common in sleep paralysis and they are
sometimes (but not always) frightening hallucinations. These hallucinations do not indicate that
you are going insane or have a mental conditionthey are just fragments of dreams projected in
front of you because part of the brain is asleep and dreaming while the other is awake, thus
allowing you to see images from a dream in waking life.
When you wake up and find yourself unable to move, you often get frightened, allowing
your subconscious mind to feed on this fear. This is normally what causes you to see frightening
hallucinations in sleep paralysis. The most common of these are a shadowy figure, some kind of
demonic creature, the sound of shuffling feet, or the sound of a door opening. Also, closing your
eyes or using a blindfold during this usually will not help, as the hallucinations can still appear
on the back of your eyelids, like pictures (however this may make the experience more bearable

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as it is less convincingly realistic to see the hallucinations in this way; this is recommended as it
is often at least a bit less frightening). These dreadful images, however, are common only for
those who are not familiar with sleep paralysis. When youre aware of what is happening, fear is
often never there in the first place.
But even if you are not willing to experience sleep paralysis, dont be disturbed by this
informationyou dont need to give up on lucid dreaming to avoid sleep paralysis. Understand
that sleep paralysis is only used in the WILD methodthe DILD method doesnt get involved
with sleep paralysis, allowing you to have lucid dreams without it. Furthermore, you can still use
the WILD method without going through sleep paralysis; even though most techniques are
involved in it, some arent. There are also several techniques that you can use to get out of sleep
paralysis quickly, even though you cannot move. I will explain all of them as well as how to
prevent sleep paralysis altogether.
As for the hallucinations: they can actually be pleasant, although this rarely ever happens.
The hallucinations feed on your subconscious fear, like nightmares. If you are not afraid, it is
much less likely you will experience them. The only problem is that it is very difficult to stay
fearless, but it helps to remember that these hallucinations are entirely in your mind. They can
only scare youthey cannot harm you. The more experienced you become, the less frightening
the hallucinations will be. You may also feel like you are unable to breathe in sleep paralysis, but
remember that although it may feel like it, you are not being suffocated, and you can still breathe
just fine. If you couldnt, you would be at a great risk of dying in your sleep every night.
These hallucinations are created by your own fears, and a great example of this is that it was
only after the popularization of aliens and UFOs in films and television that people started
reporting vivid alien abductions in which the aliens paralyzed them and probed them in their
sleep. When you are experiencing negative hallucinations in sleep paralysis, what you fear the
most is usually what appears the most.
Most people experience this at least a couple times in their life and they will usually call
it a bad dream, ghostly encounter, demon, or alien abduction. Some people have sleep disorders
that cause them to experience this more often than normal, which can lead to insomnia if not
treated properly (speak to your doctor if you experience sleep paralysis often and read on about
how to prevent sleep paralysis). People experience and have experienced sleep paralysis all
around the world. In fact, many cultures have their own saying for it; for example, in Mexico,
most teenagers know the phrase a dead body climbed on top of me to describe this, and in
African culture it is known as the devil riding your back. As horrifying as this might sound,
many lucid dreamers try intensely to achieve this whenever they can; sleep paralysis is the
doorway to the dream world in which you will have perfect dream recall and be fully lucid. To
lucid dream using this technique, you must have your mind awake, but body asleep, rather than
the regular sleeping experience of having your mind asleep while your body is awake. I will
explain not only how to get into sleep paralysis but also how to get out of and prevent it. How to
enter the lucid dream from sleep paralysis will be covered later with the WILD technique.
The reason you rarely ever experience this when getting to sleep is because your mind is
asleep before your body shuts downyoure not conscious to witness your body paralyzing

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itself. When our body is getting ready to wake up, we are naturally coming down from our deep
sleep and our body is preparing to start the day, so the brain un-paralyzes the body so that when
we wake up we can act immediately. However, when we are woken up prematurely (like from a
nightmare) and our brain isnt completely aware of this, it is likely that we will still be in sleep
paralysis. Another time this happens often is when we wake up early in the morning to do
something out of bed and then quickly go back to bed. The body is eager to get back to sleep and
you are already relaxed so the sleep paralysis stage will often come on early, before you are
unconscious. If you dont want this to happen to you, avoid waking up early in the morning with
the intention of going back to sleep within a few minutes (you should be safe if youre staying
out of bed for 20 minutes or more).
In summary, sleep paralysis is normal and healthy, but if you are conscious during it, it will
tend to be frightening. It is preventable and escapable, but most lucid dreamers do not want to
escape it because sleep paralysis is one of the best ways to get into a lucid dream. If you really
do not like to see hallucinations, I suggest you use a DILD method instead, but the WILD
techniques can be much more effective.
STAGES
There are three main stages of sleep paralysis that should help you identify where you are in it.
Each person is different in when they enter certain stages and how they experience the stages, so
I will adapt the three stages for what the majority of people will experience, although if you have
had different experiences do not feel like youve done anything wrong or you are unhealthy.
Before the first stage begins, the sleeper has to feel relaxed and physically tired. Then, the
sleeper enters the first stage:
The first stage is when the sleeper is relaxed and the body is preparing to sleep, but is easily
awakened (this is called the hypnogogic stage). This is usually paired with hypnogogic
hallucinations, but do not confuse these with Stage 2 hallucinations. The hypnogogic
hallucinations are very mild and dull in comparison to the infamous sleep paralysis
hallucinations. You will usually see a very clear image pop into your head for a split second or a
flash of light. You could also hear a slight mumbling or a musical instrument being played. As
for motor hallucinations, you can feel your body gently swaying back and forth, spinning around,
or moving in any other way. These hallucinations are usually short, vague, and somewhat vapid.
I have never had an unpleasant hypnogogic hallucination, and I have never confused one with
reality. This is also paired with an intense desire to roll over, swallow, or scratch an itch.
Stage 2 is the real deal sleep paralysis. This is when the body detects (or thinks) that the mind
is asleep and almost always paralyzes the body at least partially. This is often felt with tingling or
vibrations through the body because the brain is not completely aware where the body is or what
it is doing. This is also when vivid, intense hallucinations could occur which are most often
unpleasant and could be mistaken for reality. This is the stage at which the sleeper can have an
OBE or start to safely enter a lucid dream.
By the time Stage 3 commences, there is a bit of separation between the mind and body.
Thats not to say you leave your bodyyou just lose your sensation of it completely, like a

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regular dream. Your body could feel like it is vibrating, numb, in a different position, or just
without any sensation at all. Your mind enters or begins to enter a dream lucidly around this
time. At this point, the body is paralyzed and the mind is free, which is almost the opposite of
Stage 1.
PREVENTION AND PRACTICE
Before I explain how to use sleep paralysis to induce lucid dreams, I want to explain how to
prevent it and escape it first, as it can be a terrifying experience. Remember that sleep paralysis
is a very personal experience so some techniques here will not work for you while others will.
First, to escape it, remember that the body is paralyzed, and there is no use trying to sit up
or break free; in fact, this puts you deeper into the sleep paralysis. Instead, think of the two parts
of your body that arent mostly or completely paralyzed: the eyes (because you use them in REM
sleep) and the diaphragm (because you do need to breathe). The eyes dont really help much, but
you can use specific breathing to alert the brain that you are alert and peeing yourself. Breathe
deeply and irregularly as if you just ran a marathon and now youre trying to meditate. In other
words, inhale deeply and pulse your breathing, like youre shivering, and then exhale deeply,
doing the same. Relax as much as you can and remind yourself that any hallucinations can only
scare you. Theyre not evil entities unless you consider a portion of your mind to be an evil
entity. Make an active attempt not to fight back and just go with the flow. It might help to repeat
a mantra like this is only sleep paralysis; I am okay.
Another way you can get out is to try to focus on the areas of the body that arent that
paralyzed. The paralysis is mostly concentrated on the chest and legs and less concentrated on
the fingers, hands, toes, and feet. If you flex and wiggle these four areas, you brain will
understand that you are awake and remove the paralysis. Your face is also not as affected, so it
will work well for some people to scrunch up their face two or three times, snarling and
squinting.
Some people can also speak in sleep paralysis, but not everyone. If you can, and you
sleep with someone every night, you can say help or cough loudly to try to alert them that you
are in sleep paralysis so that they can shake you out of it. Coughing could actually get you out of
sleep paralysis alone because it exercises your diaphragm. Once you do awake from sleep
paralysis, if you do not want to go back into it, get out of bed, turn on a light, and wash your
face. If you just stay in bed, you will likely slide back into it.
If you want to stay in sleep paralysis to have a WILD, breathe normally and at the same
rate as you were when you woke up, do not try to move anything at all, and try to stay fearless to
limit the amount of unpleasant hallucinations (of course, this can be difficult if you are a
beginner). If you do wake up from it and you become un-paralyzed, do not move at all, but stay
very alert and it will easily come back to you.
If you find yourself frequently experiencing sleep paralysis and you want to prevent it,
there are several things that you can do to decrease your chances of waking up during it. First of
all, make sure you are having regular sleeping patterns and that you are not sleep deprived. Sleep
deprivation can make you enter the REM state prematurely, causing sleep paralysis. If you tend

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to sleep on your back, make a habit of sleeping on your side. Sixty percent of sleep paralysis
episodes occur when the sleeper is on their back. To break the habit of sleeping on your back, it
may help to attach a tennis ball to the back of your nightshirt. Eat healthy and avoid foods or
beverages that can influence sleep, such as alcohol, candy, or coffee. You may find triggers in
your diet that influence sleep paralysis; you must identify these and avoid these.
There is also a specific method of inducing sleep paralysis on your own. I will provide a
numbered list for this as it should occur in a somewhat specific order.
1. Go to sleep at around 8:00 to 11:00 PM and wake up at around 4:00 to 5:30 AM. This is
optional, but in comparison to the morning, the nighttime will rarely allow you to slip
into sleep paralysis because of your brain chemistry; I explained this in the first chapter.
If you do want to try to experience sleep paralysis at night, go to bed physically
exhausted (after exercising) and avoid bright lights before going to bed. Also, perform a
relaxation technique. Your sleeping area should be comfortable and there should be
nothing that could disturb or awaken you.
2. After waking up, you will be already relaxed. You are most likely to enter sleep paralysis
if, upon awakening, you immediately stay completely still, not even moving your eyes
not even a bit. If you do need to move (to turn off an alarm, for example), make the
movements small and unnoticeable. Sleep paralysis will not begin until you do not move
at all. I will explain why this is soon, but in short the body will think you are ready for
sleep paralysis if you resist urges to move.
3. Breathe deeply and regularly. Stay relaxed.
4. Close your eyes (they should be already closed, actually, and dont move them) and stay
mentally awake. You can count in your head to stay alert; count 1Im dreaming, 2
Im dreaming, 3Im dreaming and so on. This will also help you identify how long it
takes you to enter sleep paralysis.
5. Wait for the paralysis. If you have just woken up and you havent moved at all, it should
only take a matter of minutes or even seconds. If you have moved a bit, it will take a little
bit longer. If you chose to do this at night, unless you are extremely tired, its going to
take much longer than that, probably at least 20 minutes, but it depends.
6. If you still havent entered sleep paralysis, do not give up; just do not move, swallow, or
breathe irregularly. Stay alert and focused and try not to think anything (besides
something that will keep you awake).
7. The physical sensation you will feel when you enter sleep paralysis will almost feel like a
lead blanket being laid over you, from your feet up to your head (although some people
could experience the wave a bit differently). When you feel this (although you do not
always have to) you know for sure you are in sleep paralysis. If you cant tell if you are in
sleep paralysis or not, you probably arent. You may be in partial sleep paralysis, which
means only a part of you is paralyzed or you are just about to be fully paralyzed. To get
to full paralysis from here, relax as much as possible and make sure you are breathing
deeply and slowly. Also, making small and gentle muscle twitches at separate point in
your body may help you. Semi-paralysis happens because your body is not 100% sure

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whether you are asleep or not because you might have been making small movements, so
it decides to just paralyze a part of you, or just paralyze slowly.
8. Once you do enter sleep paralysis, wait, and a dream will come soon. Do not forget to
hold onto your lucidity, thinking Im dreaming again and again. Eventually, you will
most often find yourself almost popped into a dream, and if you were aware and
conscious, you will already be lucid. This is not the only way you can get into a dream,
but it is the easiest. I will explain the rest with the WILD technique.
Tips:
1. The best sleeping position for sleep paralysis is lying on your back, head and upper body
elevated, hands by your side or gently resting on your abdomen, and legs and arms
uncrossed. You may get the urge to cross your legs but you must ignore it.
2. Stay completely relaxed the whole time.
3. If you find yourself uncontrollably twitching or flinching, do not worry, this does not
bring you away from sleep paralysis. As long as you didnt control it, it was part of a
natural descent into sleep, and your muscles were just relaxing. This doesnt count as a
movement; it actually means youre getting closer.
4. If you find any hallucinations to be unbearable (not that they always will be), use an
escape technique. If not, hold on tight and wait lucidly for the dream.
5. You will almost definitely feel a strong urge to roll over, swallow, or itch. Ignore all of
these, because if you do move, your brain will realize that you are still awake and you
will have to restart from the beginning.
6. If you find yourself constantly unable to do this, dont give upit isnt normal for your
brain and body to do this (it does just the opposite) so it can be very difficult, although
rewarding in the end.
7. Keep your arms and legs fully extended and try not to bend them at all as this will hold
muscle tension.
8. If you wake up into sleep paralysis and want to use it to have a lucid dream, adopt the
same breathing pattern that you had when you first woke up, this breathing pattern is
called Sleep Breathing.
9. Throughout the day, your eyes move very slightly, even if you dont realize it. These are
called micro-movements and can be noticed if you close your eyes. Relax your eyes to
prevent these by rolling them around a few times in both directions and then trying to
forget about them completely, focusing instead on something like your breathing,
heartbeat, or counting.
10. Throughout the whole process, it is very helpful, if not, necessary to refrain from thinking
any thoughts. If you do unintentionally think of something, simply casually observe it
without interaction and let go of it. Meditation and brainwave entrainment can help you
with this.
11. If you ever wake up to find you are not breathing at all, this is not because of sleep
paralysis. It is because of an existing medical health condition you have called Sleep

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Apnea, or, otherwise, you have become too frightened to breathe and have temporarily
forgotten to.
ROLLOVER SIGNAL
We all experience rollover signals when we are getting to sleep. They take on many forms, but
they generally appear as a strong urge to roll over, swallow saliva, itch, extend an arm or leg,
move a hand, or any other similar physical movement. This is actually the brain and the body
communicating in their own unique language. If you understand this language, you will be able
to understand sleep paralysis and several WILD method techniques much better.
The mind does not always know what the body is doing (such as when we are dreaming)
and the body does not always know what the mind is doing (such as when we are awake trying to
induce sleep paralysis). This pair communicates through the rollover signal, which, in short, is an
urge to move. The body does not know if the mind is yet asleep, so it sends a signal to the
sleeper which generally takes the form of an urge to move. If the sleeper does move, the body
knows that the mind is still awake and responding and sleep paralysis should not be induced.
However, if the urge is not responded to, the body knows (or thinks) that the mind is asleep and
initiates the paralysis. Using the WILD technique and inducing sleep paralysis means taking
advantage of this and tricking your body into inducing sleep paralysis by staying still and not
responding to any urges.
When you refuse to respond to any urges, you will relatively quickly enter sleep
paralysis, especially when you are very tired. However, this is easier said than done. The urge
can vary in intensity and it can even be painful. You will feel at least a slight discomfort while
trying to induce sleep paralysis, although it is usually much more than that. Remember that the
rollover signal includes the urge to make any movement, not just rolling over.
When trying to induce sleep paralysis, do not confuse the rollover signal with a
discomfort in your body position. When you get ready to enter sleep paralysis you must be very
relaxed and comfortable so you that will be able to ignore your body easily and have a WILD
experience (no pun intended). Rollover signals will occur about 5 to 15 minutes from the time
you started trying to induce sleep paralysis, but if you are just uncomfortable, you will feel it
almost immediately. With discomfort, you will find an itching pain first and then an urge to
roll/move out of it, while with the rollover signal you will feel the urge to roll over first, and then
if you ignore this it will usually be followed by a pain or tingling feeling.
If you want to get to sleep paralysis, you most often have to go through rollover signals.
And by go through I mean ignore. A good way to cope with these signals is to let your mind
wander and pay no attention to anything your body is doing until you are sure you have entered
sleep paralysis, but be sure to not become too attached to your wandering mind and rather let it
do its own thing. To ignore the rollover signal you must take your focus off of your body as this
will lessen the urge to move, but still do not become too submerged in your mind. If you think
about how far youve gotten, what you would do just to scratch that itch, or what your dream is
going to be like, you will find the rollover signals getting much worse. In general, the more you
focus on the rollover signals, the worse they get. Act as though you are an observer, not a

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participant. However, do not observe your bodymentally detach yourself from it. Be passive
and do not try to affect any imagery you might be seeing around this time or during sleep
paralysis as this can signal to your brain that you are awake.
One of the most common forms of the rollover signal is a natural urge to swallow. This is
known as the swallow reflex and is one of the worst you will come across. It is annoying, but
fortunately avoidable. There are several solutions to this problem and some may work better than
others for youeveryone is different. It will help to practice several techniques of avoiding it at
the same time. You should always remember to try to ignore saliva build-up as much as you can,
focusing instead on your mind or another place on your body.
The first technique is an attempt to have the saliva trickle down your throat, meaning you
will never get the urge to swallow. This can be done by elevating your head and upper body
using pillows to have gravity assist you. Some people will only need to sleep under a couple
extra pillows for this to work, but some people have so many pillows that they are almost sitting
up in their bed. A variation of this is to tilt your head to the side so that the saliva will go down
the side of the inside of your mouth and not in the back of your throat.
Another technique uses a direct drainage so that you are in a position that allows all of
the saliva to just drain out of your mouth. In other wordsdrool. This may sound distasteful and
gross, but whatever floats your boat. This is best done on ones side or with the head tilted far to
the right or left, although always avoid uncomfortable positions. Some people even use tissue
papers or towels stuffed in their mouth with this technique when theyre really desperate, but you
dont need to do that.
In preparation for the WILD, do not eat much food before going to bed. Eating food
makes you salivate, thus creating an extra buildup of saliva in your mouth. You can also limit
saliva production by loosening your jaw, lifting your tongue up to the roof of your mouth, and
pressing it to the back of your front teeth. Then, curve the tongue back slightly inwards as if
youre trying to lick off peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouthbut only curve the tongue
back a little bit, not all the way. Sustain this position while you practice the WILD technique; if
you are on your back, doing this will let saliva run down the throat unnoticed and make it
become less of a distraction. This is actually adapted from a technique used in meditation that
reduces the irritability of having to swallow.
While using one or more of these techniques, make sure that you are still relaxed and in a
comfortable position. A problem that arises from this is that to release all the tension in your jaw,
it must be relaxed, which means opened at least slightly. This means you will be breathing air
into your mouth, making your mouth and your throat dry, and if you close your mouth you will
be sending the signal that you are still awake. The best way to avoid this is to prop your jaw
closed. This can be done (while you are lying on your back) by folding a thin pillow in half and
resting it on your chest, parallel to your body so that the top (or bottom) of it is under your jaw.
You could do this with any other object as long as it is comfortable. You could also just ignore
the dryness in your throat, but you will probably need to drink some water afterwards.
If you do not swallow while trying to induce sleep paralysis, all that will really happen is
a mouthful of saliva and a dry throat. If you do feel that you are in some physical danger after

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not swallowing, for example, if you feel you cannot breathe, then it is important to swallow, even
if it means losing a chance to lucid dream. The swallow reflex is something that some people
experience much less than others, and some people do not experience it at all.
WILD
When you can put your body into sleep paralysis while keeping your mind awake you will be
able to enter a vivid dream in which you will have perfect dream recall because youve never lost
consciousness. This is called the WILD technique and its first step is getting into sleep paralysis,
as explained in the previous few pages. This requires no dream signs, reality checks, or any other
part of the DILD method. In the WILD technique, you enter the dream world fully aware that
you are dreaming, which is really wild (pun intended). For this reason, it is sometimes called the
Mind Awake/Body Asleep technique.
Once you are in full sleep paralysis, you are ready to go into the dream and complete the
WILD technique. As you fall into sleep paralysis and REM sleep, your body is getting ready for
a dream, so you will likely find yourself simply popped into a dream, pulled into a dream,
falling into a dream, or floating out of your body into a dream. Like all dreams, this dream will
be influenced by your thoughts and emotions that you had just before falling asleep, which
makes it important to avoid focusing on any frightening sleep paralysis hallucinations as they
could be incorporated into your dream. It helps to use affirmations to manifest the dream as a
good onetell yourself that you are entering a pleasant and fun dream to allow the idea to get
implanted in your subconscious mind and therefore incorporated into your dream.
A good time to try to have a WILD is in an afternoon nap, but the best time is at 4:00 to
5:30 AM after waking up because this is when you have optimal brain chemistry for lucid
dreaming, as explained in the first chapter. You should also wake up at around 4 to 6 hours after
you go to sleep, meaning you should go to sleep at around 10:00 to 11:30 PM, although going to
bed earlier will not hinder the technique. You can do a WILD when you are first going to bed at
around 9:00 to 11:30 PM but this is literally the hardest time to do it and it takes the longestit
is nowhere for a beginner to start; in fact, there is no good reason to try to attempt it at night
unless waking up temporarily in the morning will totally ruin your day. You also will not enter
directly into REM sleep at that time, meaning a successful WILD could be impossible or you
could simply find yourself in a continued sleep paralysis state.
When you wake up to have a WILD, remember that staying still immediately after
waking and not making a move will bring on sleep paralysis faster, but it is easy to (mentally)
fall back to sleep and lose a chance to have a WILD when you do this. It may help you to count
or focus on your breathing to stay mentally awake. You could get up for 10 to 60 minutes (see
what works best for you) but remember that a good rule of thumb as to when to go back to bed is
when you start yawning. Getting up for 20 to 60 minutes means it will be harder to get your body
to fall asleep, but easier to stay alert. If you choose to try having a WILD at night, be sure that
you are relaxed and conscious.
Once you are in sleep paralysis, there are a few ways that you can enter the dream. You
shouldnt be too concerned about getting into the dream because it will happen naturallythe

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natural process will eventually end with a dream as long as youre not doing it when you first go
to bed at night. However, not everyone likes to hang out in sleep paralysis in their free time, so
here is how to get into a dream from sleep paralysis:
1. Wait (as explained above). After a minute or two, sleep paralysis will have died down
a bit and you will start entering the dream. As I have said, you will usually suddenly
pop into a dream, but you could experience other sensations that will bring you into
the dream. You could also dream that you woke up in your bedroom at this point; be
careful not to confuse this with reality.
2. Visualize. In the paralysis, visualize a scene around you and experience it with all of
your senses. For example, visualize that you are walking to the bathroom or visualize
yourself at the beach. Close your eyes and visualize intensely and vividly, but stay
relaxed. Be where you want to go, declare that you are there and that you are
dreaming. Forget your body and embrace this dream scene. After you do this for a
little while, you will find yourself in the dream, usually in the place that you were
imagining. It helps to focus on sensations with which you are familiar. For example,
if you are a musician, it may help to focus on auditory sensations, while if you are an
athlete it might help to focus on tactile sensations.
3. Feel. Concentrate on the physical sensations of sleep paralysis and let them take you
away; for example, if you feel like you are floating, go with that feeling and you
could find yourself floating into a dream. Go with the sensation and accept it in a
relaxed manner.
4. Practice the HIT (a technique that Ill cover next), although this is difficult in
comparison to the others.
You might find yourself in a false awakening after doing this in which you think you had
just woken up and failed. To avoid this, always remember to do reality checks before concluding
that you are awake. Recall that affirmations will help you manifest the dream you want. One way
to check and be sure that you are dreaming without moving is to use the Apple Pie Technique.
All you do is focus on the thought of an apple pie being right next to you and what that would
smell like. Concentrate on being aware that you are dreaming, and if you do smell an apple pie,
you have just manifested it in a dream.
If you are having trouble getting into a dream, try this technique in the morning rather
than at night. You could also be trying to practice these techniques too early; be sure that you are
waiting for the proper signals and not trying to get into a dream prematurely.
It is difficult to hold onto a passive state of awareness like you must in the WILD
technique. However, it will get easier with practice. You may be able to successfully have a
Wake Induced Lucid Dream on your first try, but for others it can take longer to get used to. As
always, be patient with it.
HIT
The HIT (Hypnagogic Imagery Technique) is a slight variation of the WILD technique. This

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technique places an increased focus on the hypnagogic hallucinations occurring when your body
enters sleep paralysis. The only difference in this technique is that when visual images do appear,
you let them flow past while you casually observe them, but do not focus on just one of them. As
you get deeper into sleep paralysis and closer toward a dream, these images will become more
vivid and complex, making them similar to a dream scene. Eventually (if you wait long enough),
these will become vivid dream scenes. While maintaining awareness and lucidity, allow yourself
to be casually drawn into these dream scenes. Do not try too hard to do actively involve yourself
in these dreams, but do not try too little also, because that will make it difficult to stay alert and
lucid. This is a very difficult step, but if done successfully it can be used to induce a lucid dream.
This is not a very good technique for beginners, but it is fun if you like to stare at the pretty
colors.
FILD
A FILD (Finger Induced Lucid Dream) is very similar to the WILD technique. However, in the
FILD technique you focus on two of your fingers while falling asleep and you do not need to
wait a long time for sleep paralysis; in fact sometimes you will not experience sleep paralysis at
all, and when you do it will be virtually unnoticeable.
To use the FILD technique, first wake up after 4 to 6 hours of sleep and then slowly and
separately twitch the middle and index fingers of your dominant hand. Your fingers give you
something on which to focus, aiding you in maintaining consciousness into a dream. Alternate
between the fingers and try not to think as this could take you off focus. Its important that you
understand that you are not really supposed to move at all, but you do have to feel the movement.
This is something you should practice on a flat surface before you try it for a lucid dream, but it
is not that difficult. Remember that there should be no movement, but it is okay if your fingers
are moving extremely slightly.
This is often compared to playing piano keys, but just with one hand. You could also
compare this to typing or playing guitar, but take note: youre not playing Beethovens fifth
symphony, typing out your essay at 11:00 PM the night before its due, or killing a sweet Van
Halen solo. The movements should be non-existent or so slight that you wouldnt be able to see
them if you were looking right at your fingers. You need to feel them, but without moving them.
Your hand and fingers should be relaxed while you do it (do not stretch your fingers out), and
you need to focus on your fingers the whole time.
FILDs need to be done after waking up early in the morning around the time of an REM
cycle (4 to 6 hours after falling asleep). It works better the more tired you get. Once you wake
up, it is best to not move at all and start doing the FILD exercise when you are sure you are about
to fall back asleep. Once you have been doing it for about 30 seconds to a couple minutes (but
dont actually count, just try to feel the time), do a reality checkpreferably one with little
movement. You may find that you are dreaming because the dream usually starts in your bed, so
that you will think you are still trying to get into a lucid dream when you really are already in
one.
A variation of this FILD technique is when you push your two fingers together and then

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bring them apart, like you are flicking them together back and forth. This is the only difference,
and you still are really not making any movements at all, just feeling them.
You should be very careful with the reality check you use. If you sit up and try to count
your fingers and it just so happens that you are really awake, you will have to start all over again
at a later time. To avoid this, use a reality check with little or no movement. For example, try to
close off the nasal passage at the back of your throat and see if you can still breathe through your
nose. If you know you can, and youve done it right, you are dreaming. The same muscle that
stops you from breathing is the one that closes your nasal passage when you swallow, if that
helps. Always remember to use multiple reality checks too. These are a few other reality checks
that require little or no movement:
1. The blindfold test. Put on a blindfold before you go to bed. If you can see your
room through the blindfold you know youre dreaming. Technically, you dont
need the blindfold because sometimes you can see in the dream through your
eyelids, but it isnt easy to tell if your eyes are closed or not.
2. Spoon bending. Go to bed or start the technique with a spoon in your hand. When
you think youre in the dream, slowly squeeze the spoon and try to bend it. If it
bends, youre either very strong or in a dream. Although this uses movement, its
only a little bit and shouldnt be enough to take you out of your trace if you are
still awake.
3. Try to float, fall, and/or spin away by imagining yourself manipulating gravity.
This sounds strange, but if you can do it you are definitely dreaming (or possibly
having an OBE, which is very similar). Be sure to focus on willing yourself to
move and convince yourself that you are dreaming, even if you arent.
4. The Apple Pie Technique (explained earlier in the WILD technique). Imagine an
apple pie sitting right next to you and concentrate on what it would smell like, all
the while maintaining the feeling that you are possibly and probably in a dream. If
you can smell the apple pie, you are dreaming.
If the technique doesnt work for you and you are sure that you are not dreaming, go to
sleep, wake up again a little later in the night, and try it again. Trying to do FILD again will not
work as quickly or easily, so I recommend only trying the whole process (including going back
to sleep and waking up again) three times and then going to sleep for the night so that you are not
laying around all night twitching your fingers. You can still try MILD, WILD, or whatever else
at this point. If you have continuous failures with this technique, try and increase the time you
twitch your fingers before reality checking.
The advantage of FILD is that it is quick and you do not always have to go through sleep
paralysis, or youre just not aware of it when it happens. Sometimes you just go smoothly from
the waking state to a dream without sleep paralysis and other times you will not even notice it
because you are so focused on your fingers. When you do the FILD technique, you will only be
awake for it for about 10 to 60 seconds when you will usually enter a dreamif you are not too
awake. Remember that you do not necessarily start the FILD technique as soon as you wake up,

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but rather when you feel that you will soon fall asleep (which can be at the same time if you
wake up without moving at all). This technique has very high success rates, making it highly
recommended if you havent been able to do any DILD techniques successfully.
WHITE NOISE TECHNIQUE
This technique is still obscure and not yet completely scientifically researched, but it can be
successfully used to induce either a lucid dream or an OBE. It is based around the fact that you
cannot fully mentally fall asleep in the middle of a thought. For example, if you are thinking,
Im dreaming because I your thought will get cut off just before you fall asleep.
All that you have do in this technique is repeat a phrase over and over again in your mind
quietly while you fall asleep. You repeat it subtly and for such a long time that eventually your
brain tunes out to itlike white noiseand assumes that you are not thinking and ready to fall
asleep. Then, parts of the brain shut down for sleep while you remain conscious and aware. You
can actually feel parts of your body and brain falling asleep. This can result in some strange
hallucinations and experiences.
A good phrase to repeat is mind awake; body asleep to remember the point of the
exercise, but virtually any phrase can work; for example, you can count one two three, one two
three, one two three, and so on or repeat roam groam. The only known disadvantage of this is
that it can cause sleep loss for that night.
DEILD
A Dream Exit Induced Lucid Dream (DEILD) or dream chaining is a technique that can be
used to have multiple lucid dreams each night. This technique can only be done after a few hours
of sleep and is more like taking a break from sleep than awakening and going back to sleep. This
technique requires little preparation and can be a very reliable lucid dream induction technique.
Although you have to pass through sleep paralysis to use this technique and it can sometimes be
difficult to stay conscious during it, the technique is very effective.
To use this technique, first you have to go to sleep and wake up about five hours later.
You might need to adjust this time a little bit to make sure you are waking up in your REM
phase. You will know you have woken up from your REM sleep if you have the fresh memory of
a dream that you just woke up from in your head, and, also, if you are a man you will almost
always have an erection at this time (this is where the phenomenon of Morning Wood comes
fromwhen you wake up from your REM sleep in the morning).
When you wake up, do not move a muscle. This can take practice, but you should get
used to it. You wont be able to turn off your alarm clock, so you will just have to wait until it
stops. When it does stop, lie still with your eyes closed (you should never have opened them or
moved them) and stay mentally alert. If you have not moved, it will take about 10 to 30 seconds
before you enter sleep paralysis. It is very hard to stay conscious and awake at this point, making
it essential to focus on something external or repeat something in your head to keep you alert.
Once you are in sleep paralysis, use one of the techniques in the WILD section of this chapter to
turn it into a lucid dream. Just before you go back into the dream, you can either visualize the

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dream you were just in (if you dont remember, use a different dream youve had) or just wait.
The dream that you find yourself in will probably be more vivid and detailed than regular
DILDs, and another advantage of this technique is that you can do it as many times as you want
in the night if you keep waking up. You may notice that this technique is very similar to a WILD
done after waking early in the morning, but the only difference is that a DEILD is done after
waking with no movement at all while a WILD is done with at least a little movement, like
adjusting your position to get more comfortable and in a position in which you are more likely to
enter sleep paralysis. Also, WILD doesnt always have to be done after waking up; DEILD does.
FILD is also similar to DEILD, but in FILD slight movements after waking up are acceptable
and the fingers become the focus.
SSILD
The SSILD technique is one that is relatively new to the lucid dreaming community, whereas
other techniques like MILD were introduced in the late 1980s and techniques like WILD have
been around for thousands of years. It was first introduced in 2011 to help beginners learn to
lucid dream in an easy and simple way. It was posted on a Chinese forum and the very first title
given to it was A Very Mysterious Technique which was certainly fitting, because at the time
no one could understand how it worked; even to this day there is only a basic understanding of it.
Despite this, the feedback for it was extremely positive, and within a few months hundreds of
success stories were collected.
The tutorial went through many revisions and was first introduced in English in 2012
with the new name Senses Induced Lucid Dream, or SSILD. Its approach was very successful
because it was as simple and easy as it could be and it usually showed results within the first few
days. These achievements showed no signs of slowing, as many people were experiencing lucid
dreams and even Out of Body Experiences (OBEs) every night using this technique, with very
little effort. Although many techniques wear off over time, this technique seemed to always be
effective.
One of the best parts of this technique is that it has nothing to do with sleep paralysis, the
rollover signal, the swallow reflex, or staying still. If you want to roll over or move around, the
technique will not be disturbed, and the entire intention of SSILD is to let the mind fall asleep
quickly, not the other way around. This is a large benefit if you are too frightened to go through
sleep paralysis or if you do not have enough willpower to withstand the rollover signal.
SSILD is designed with aspects taken from both DILD and WILD; it is like a hybrid, but
I chose to include it in the WILD chapter because you will often not lose consciousness going
into a dream, although you fall asleep normally. SSILD does not use difficult techniques like
relaxation or visualization and removes the need for tedious mental challenges. Its so basic and
simple that if you tried to use it with another technique (like MILD or WBTB) it is likely it
wouldnt work, so it is best if you just follow the steps outlined here.
THE CYCLE
The foundation of the SSILD technique is called the cycle. It consists of three steps:

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1. Focus on your sight. Close your eyes and pay attention to the darkness behind your
eyelids. Do not strain your eye muscles or try too hard to look for something; your
eyeball should be relaxed. If you do not see anything, that is completely normal. Do not
attempt to look at anything that you do see by moving your eyes around (you may see
hypnagogic hallucinations).
2. Focus on your hearing. Relax your eyes and turn your attention to your ears and what you
are hearing. You can listen to external sounds if they are loud enough, like dogs walking
around, a television, or an air conditioner, or you can listen to the sound of your heartbeat
or your breathing.
3. Focus on your touch. Now, direct your attention to your body. Feel your body and its
sensations; try to look for unusual sensations such as spinning, heaviness, floating,
tingling, or lightness. If you cant feel any of these, feel things like your heart beating, the
weight of your blanket on you, the air temperature, etc. Pay attention to the head, hands,
fingers, feet, toes, and abdomen the most.
Constantly stimulating these sensations conditions our body and mind into a state that is
optimal for natural lucid dreams by keeping you alert, but relaxed. While doing this, do not try
too hard, just relax. You may feel like you want to see things, hear things, and feel things, but
this will usually not happen; it is better to expect nothing to happen.
WHAT TO DO
Here are the steps of how to carry out the technique properly:
1. Go to sleep. Try do this at around 9:00 to 11:00 PM. You cant try SSILD as you are
going to bed at your usual time because the technique relies on falling into REM sleep
and when you sleep in the night you start with NREM sleep. You could do this during an
afternoon nap, because you would immediately enter into REM sleep.
2. Wake up. You should do this at around 4 to 5 hours after you fell asleep, and, as always,
see what works best for you. The goal is to wake up in or just before your REM cycle.
3. Get out of bed and stay up for 5 to 10 minutes. Walk around, visit the bathroom, and
stretch out a little bit. Make sure you dont wake yourself up too much though.
4. Go back to bed and lie down in a comfortable position, but it should be one youre not
used to, to prevent you from falling asleep too early. If you have a hard time doing this,
you can use your usual position.
5. Quickly perform the cycle 4 to 6 times. Each step of the cycle should be short, only a few
seconds long (but dont actually count). This is a warm-up for step 6.
6. Slowly perform the cycle 3 to 4 times. Be sure to not do this too many times, but a couple
extra times is okay. Each step should be no fewer than 30 seconds, but the specific
amount of time that you want to do it is up to you. Remember not to actually count to 30
seconds or any other time. This step very important and you should take extra time during
each step of the cycles. You will most likely be relaxed at this point, and you may see
lights, colors, or movements or hear sounds, but if this does not happen you are fine. If it

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does, do not get too excitedjust stay relaxed. At this point, you might become
distracted by random thoughts. This is good, as it means you are close to falling asleep.
Accept these thoughts and let them gently wash over you. If you find you have lost your
place in the exercise, it is no problem, just start from the beginning of a cycle and you
will be fine. If you forget how many cycles youve done, just do another one or two and
move on to the next step.
7. Return to your most comfortable position and fall asleep as quickly as possible. The
quicker you fall asleep the more likely it will work. Do not think about it too much, and
do not worry if you think that it will not work or you cannot fall asleep right away.
Do not try to add any MILD, mediation, breathing, visualization, or relaxation to this
technique. You are free to try these once you have mastered the technique, but it will usually
hinder beginners progress. You could combine this with the WBTB technique, but I also
recommend you wait to do this.
Also remember that you can move, roll around, and itch yourself while doing this. You do
not need to try to avoid the rollover signal and you need to be as comfortable as possible. If you
spend a lot of time rolling and moving around, you can do another one or two extra cycles to
compensate for it. It is okay if the mind falls asleep before the bodythat is what is supposed to
happen; just remember to do the cycles just before you drift to sleep.
Also remember that the amount of seconds you should do each cycle and each part of the
cycle for is just there for referencedo not count it in your head. Go through these steps relaxed
and lazydo not focus on them too much. Try to stay thoughtless, but when random thoughts do
come, do not push them away, just go with the flow.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN
There are several possibilities of what could happen next. Among these are:
1. Hypnogogic hallucinations. You may feel various sensations, such as the feeling of
falling, floating, flashing colors, loud sounds, and many more. When you have these
sensations, you are likely in a dream or approaching one. This could also happen while
you are awake doing the cycles. When you do find odd things happening, it is a good idea
to do a reality check.
2. False awakening. The SSILD technique is known to cause many false awakenings,
especially realistic ones. This can be annoying, but easily taken care of by getting in the
habit of performing a reality check whenever you wake up, even if you are positive you
are not dreaming. You could also find yourself immediately taken into a false awakening,
so it seems as though you cant get to sleep, when really you already are asleep and
dreaming.
3. DILD. When entering a dream, it is common for spontaneous lucid dreams to occur as
you will have heightened awareness in the dream, allowing you to spot out oddities much
more effectively and perform reality checks, therefore becoming lucid.
4. Real awakening. You wake up after trying this and find, after a reality check, that this is

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the real life. Do not get too concerned about this, and just relax, go back to the cycles,
and try again. This time, you should do more of the longer cycles. If you relax your head
and allow it to sink into the pillow, you could enter vibrations which could lead to an
OBE, or you could fall asleep.
5. OBE (Out of Body Experience). You will know you are having an OBE if you feel wide
awake and weightless and you can do strange things, like float or pass through walls. You
could also wake up with vibrations or strange sensations which will lead you to an OBE
if you hang onto them.
WILD WITH DILD AND COMPARISON
The DILD and WILD methods have one main difference: in the WILD method the lucid dream
is initiated by staying conscious into sleep or by bringing on sleep paralysis, while in the DILD
method the sleeper goes to sleep and becomes lucid after entering the dream unconsciously and
(in most cases) observing some indication that he or she is dreaming. The DILD method usually
takes longer but does not get involved in heavy stuff like sleep paralysis and hallucinations; the
WILD method usually takes less time, but is more intense. Some people prefer to generally focus
on one or the other. Everyone is differentsome people are more patient than others and some
people get scared easier than others. The DILD method might actually be more intense for you
while the WILD method is easy.
The DILD method provides four ways to become lucid: from a dream sign, from dream
incubation (like MILD and VILD), from rationalizing something as evidence of a dream (this
includes reality checks), or from spontaneous lucidity/dream character induced lucidity
(CHILD). Disregarding the last one, these are all skills to develop. You need to be able to
identify and look for dream signs, you need to be able to incubate and influence dreams before
going to sleep, and you need to have a heightened awareness and do many reality checks.
The WILD method provides a whole variety of other ways to become lucid with most
relating to sleep paralysis. WILDs are usually much more vivid than DILDs and you tend to have
a much better memory of them. They can also be done successfully relatively quickly, which is
why they are good for beginners who dont mind the possibility of hallucinations (or who dont
know about them).
These two methods are not completely oppositethey actually work very well together;
in fact, your chances of having a lucid dream are much higher if you use both at the same time.
For example, using WILD with HILD or FILD with MILD. Im not sure if this is a good
analogy, but its kind of like cooking. You add certain spices and ingredients (techniques)
together to get the meal (lucid dream). Also, if one spice doesnt work well for you, you can
choose a different one, or use a backup spice. For example, if I wake up to do FILD and it ends
up not working for me I will immediately start SSILD. Knowing all of these techniques is like
having your own tool-belt to induce lucid dreams. The best way to go about using this tool-belt is
to explore all of the induction techniques and see which ones work best for you.
Meditation, Music, and Mental Exercises

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In this chapter, I will be exploring other means of boosting your chances of having a
lucid dream through meditation, various mental exercises, apps and music. Similarly, in the next
chapter I will discuss foods and (legal) drugs as well as habits and things in general that you can
use to help you lucid dream. After that, I will move onto Part 2what actually will happen once
you do get into the lucid dream. So lets begin:
MEDITATION
Meditation is great in general. Physically and mentally, regularly meditating is very healthy. But
its effect on lucid dreaming is just as positive. When one mediates, their body is completely
relaxed, they are usually breathing deeply with a focus on their breathing, most of the time they
are sitting straight up in a chair or on the ground in a cross-legged position with their eyes
closed, and they are not thinking anything, keeping the mind clear and undisturbed. I will explain
how to mediate a bit later but first understand what defines mediation: essentially, an absence of
thoughts and a thorough relaxation. Although it may sound simple to just not think, it is
actually very difficult and takes some practice. Soon you may find yourself asking is this it? or
remember something that inspires an automatic thought, only to realize that you have broken the
silence. The power to control ones thoughts can become very useful in certain lucid dreaming
techniques; for example, sometimes you must repeat a mantra over and over again in your mind
without straying and sometimes thought can interfere with the process of lucid dreaming, ruining
the experience through subjective judgment. This is one reason why meditation is useful, but
another is because of the state of mind that it puts you in.
Meditation leaves you relaxed, but still awake and conscious. The relaxed alertness you
experience is actually due to alpha waves (see Chapter 1, Understanding Brain Chemistry
during Sleep if you dont recall them) that you experience when focusing during meditation. As
you go about your day, you are normally around the beta or alpha wave ranges. Beta waves are
typical when you are trying to concentrate on something or working on something while alpha
waves take on a form of less concentration but still alertness, yet relaxed alertness. Most
meditation takes place in a lower alpha state, keeping you alert but relaxed, much like you need
to be in your lucid dreams.
Through your alertness, meditation also makes you more reflective and self-aware,
another skill needed in lucid dreaming. A great amount of self-awareness can actually serve as a
reality check by itself. Self-awareness helps you recognize the difference between reality and
dreams in the dream world, making it easier to become lucid. In addition, meditation bridges the
gap between your subconscious mind and conscious mind and helps you explore new altered
states similar to lucid dreaming.
In order to meditate, you must first find a quiet place in which you will not be disturbed
for the next 10 to 40 minutes. Most people have 20 minute meditation sessions, but beginners
typically start at around 10 minutes. Once you have found a place to meditate, either lie down, sit
down on a chair with legs uncrossed in front of you, or sit down on the ground cross-legged. If
you are sitting, keep your neck and back straight (you can lean up against a wall) with your arms
placed loosely in your lap. Close your eyes gently (do not clench them shut) and relax all of your

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muscles, one at a time. While you do this, start to breathe deeply from your stomach (not your
upper chest). If you can go from this state straight to thoughtlessness, then go ahead, but most
people cant. In order to refocus your mind, count backwards from 100 to 0, then backwards
from 30 to 0. While you do this, ignore any intruding thoughts and go on counting. If your mind
isnt clear by then, you can count backwards again or focus on your deep breathing, hearing and
feeling yourself inhale and exhale. If you have any thoughts, do not push them away or get upset
with yourself for thinking themsimply turn away from them gently and let them wash away
and dissolve in your inner silence. Do not try to forcibly suppress your thoughts or they will just
return stronger than before. Remember to focus on your breathing. Your meditation will end
whenever you want it to or whenever you have intruding thoughts that disrupt your flow of
consciousness. It is best to meditate 40 minutes daily20 minutes in the morning and 20 at
nightbut any amount of meditation is still good.
Although it is not completely needed, you can use a mantra while meditating. Mantras
can give you something on which to focus, or, like a mild form of self-hypnosis, suggest things
to your subconscious mind. You can speak the mantra aloud or just think it while you are
meditating. Two good mantras to use are:

On the inhale: I am not the body.

On the exhale: I am not even the mind.
On the exhale: OMmmmmm
On the inhale: (silence)

The second mantra is actually an ancient Buddhist mantra, originally spelled as AUM_. The A
represents the birth of the universe, the M represents the collapse, and the U represents
everything in between. The silence at the end represents the nothingness in between universes. A
variation of this is AHhhhhhhhhh on the exhale (or inhale) and MMmmmmmm on the
inhale/exhale. You can also use a mantra relating more directly to lucid dreaming, like the MILD
technique. It is best to meditate just before going to sleep if you are trying to lucid dream; this
way the mantra and state of mind are fresh. Waking up at the beginning of a REM cycle an even
better time to start meditating.
If it helps you, you can also use a guided meditation recording. These can be found online
(especially on YouTube) and in apps. They typically consist of relaxing music with someone
talking to you about what you need to do in each step of the meditation. For example, they might
focus your attention on your breathing every once in a while and remind you to let any thoughts
drift away. These can keep some people on track while theyre meditating but can also distract
others.
A different meditation technique focuses on reflection and is similar to the first one. It is
used to improve ones memory, which makes it very good for dream recall. It follows the same
first steps: start by relaxing and getting into a comfortable position and then go through your day
completely and in as much detail as possible. Try to remember everything you did since you
woke up in the morning, or back to last nights dreams if you want to go back that far. After you
review your entire day, sit back and relax, then proceed to go to sleep or get up and do things.

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One other type of meditation focuses more on being aware of your senses and
surroundings, like the All Day Awareness (ADA) technique. It is called Mindfulness Meditation.
To meditate this way, get in a comfortable position and ask yourself questions about what
physical sensations you are feeling. For example, how does your left arm feel resting on your
right arm? Do you feel the pressure of it in your right arm? Is your neck relaxed and straight? Do
your legs feel comfortable on the ground? Gradually move your awareness from one point in
your body to another, putting all of your focus on one point at a time.
MUSIC AND SOUND
Although listening to music during and before sleep can improve your chances of having more
vivid dreams by itself, there is a special kind of music specialized for lucid dreams and other
states of consciousness; it is called brainwave entrainment and splits into two main types:
binaural beats and isochronic tones. Brainwave entrainment is specialized for getting you into
unusual states of mind. First, understand binaural beats, the older and more popular of the two.
Binaural beats can be found on YouTube, bought online, or purchased in apps. Binaural
beats were first discovered in 1839 and first used commonly in the 1930s. They have been
refined and improved ever since. The way it works is as follows: the listener puts on headphones,
and, for the music to be most effective, lies down (staying still), turns up the music, and closes
their eyes. The music has to be listened to through headphones because on one earphone a tone is
played and on the other earphone a slightly different tone is playedthese tones cannot mix into
the air or the effect will be lost. The two tones are typically not easy to hear, as they are drowned
out by the relaxing music that is played with them, but the effect is still preserved. On the left
earphone 300Hz may be played, while on the right 308Hz may be played. This difference is too
small for the human ear to completely and consciously perceive, making it sound like a slow
oscillating sound to the listener. The difference between the two tones, in this case 8Hz, is
eventually replicated in the brain so that the brainwaves may be tuned to 8Hz (in the alpha
range). Thus, through binaural beats, artificial brainwaves may be formed. In this way, binaural
beats are used to alter brainwaves so that they can be optimized for lucid dreaming.
Binaural beats have a wide range of uses in addition lucid dreaming. They can help with
meditation, insomnia, OBEs, and boost confidence or happiness. Some binaural beat makers
even claim that their music can recreate the feeling of certain drugs (LSD, ecstasy, and absinthe
are among the drugs that have their own binaural beats). Although the music can get the listener
in a general state of mind that parallels the drug, binaural beats are much milder than the actual
drug, especially if you are not staying still with your eyes closed to focus on the sound.
A similar type of brainwave entrainment is called monaural beats, which works the same
way except that the two frequencies are combined in the recording before you listen to them.
This means that instead of 300Hz playing in one ear and 308Hz playing in the other, 300Hz and
308Hz are playing together in both ears. This way, you do not need headphones, although this is
a weaker form of brain entrainment.
Isochronic tones, the other main type of brainwave entrainment, were discovered much
more recently and not as much is known about them, but many claim that they are much more

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powerful than binaural beats. They work by pulsing a single tone separately at regular intervals.
The tone can be pulsed faster or slower depending on the desired state of mind and you do not
need headphones for this type of brain entrainment. Isochronic tones, like binaural beats, create
brainwaves through sound.
Although brainwave entrainment technology has existed for a long time, many people
assert that it is unscientific, as an unsufficient amount of scientific research has been done into it.
Others suggest that the success related to binaural beats is merely a demonstration of the placebo
effect. I do not disagree with these claims, and believe that more research should be done, but I
do not discourage the usage of brainwave entrainment, as, placebo or not, it has aided many lucid
dreamers in their attempts to have lucid dreams.
Binaural beats, monaural beats, and isochronic tones are all typically listened to with
relaxing music playing that has been mixed into the tones, but it can be found puremeaning
it is just the tone(s) without any additional sound. In addition to brainwave entrainment, there are
also other recordings specialized for sleep and lucid dreaming.
Much like guided meditation recordings, there are also guided recording for lucid
dreaming. These come in two forms: (1) for the WILD technique in which the speaker walks you
through the process of getting into sleep paralysis and beyond, and (2) for when you are sleeping,
in which the speaker repeats words or phrases that are programmed into your dream (used as an
EILD).
The first type can be especially useful if you have trouble ignoring the rollover signal as
the recording gives you something else on which to focus. It can also help beginners who dont
know what to expect. Usually, it is recorded with relaxing music and the speaker will
occasionally tell you what should be happening at one point or another.
The second type of lucid dream recordings can be used to implant something into your
dream that you have already prepared yourself for so that you can reality check when you see it
and become lucid, or it can be used to just have a generally pleasant non-lucid dream. The way it
works is by repeating a phrase like beach over and over again at a certain time so that you can
incorporate the beach into your dreams. It knows when to repeat this either by predicting when
your REM phase is by the time you entered as when you will fall asleep or by sensing when you
are in that phase. It usually does this by detecting your movements after you place a sensor under
your pillow. When you stay completely still (because of sleep paralysis), it will know you are in
the REM phase.
MENTAL EXERCISES
Below is a compiled list of various mental exercises for strengthening skills related to lucid
dreaming. Other exercises can be found elsewhere in this book, such as relaxation techniques or
working memory practice in the MILD section.

Lie down with your eyes closed and visualize the room around you in vivid detail.
Once you can do this, visualize outside scenes as well. Then imagine yourself
walking around these places and interacting with the objects around you. This
sharpens your visualization skills.

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Watch a burning candle flame from three or four feet away, studying it
meticulously. Do this for as long as you can, but not so long as to tire your eyes.
When youve finished, close your eyes and visualize the candle flame in your
minds eye. Open your eyes and see if your visualization was similar to the actual
image. Repeat if necessary.
Concentrate on a simple object, watching it closely and carefully until youve
soaked up the general image. Then, close your eyes and try to picture it until it
fades away. Repeat this process several times, and, when youre ready, start to
move the object around and manipulate it in your minds eye. For example, make
it rotate, become larger or smaller, or stretch out like a rubber band.
A simple way of boosting awareness and dream recall is by remembering specific
details about your day as you go to bed at night. For example, remember the color
of the car that you saw when you parked at the grocery store or what your cashier
looked like.
Become more aware in waking life as well as in your dreams by paying closer
attention to your senses. Habitually go through each sense several times a day.
For example, focus on what you are hearing for a few seconds, then on what you
are feeling, then on what you can see, etc. This can also help you with the SSILD
technique, and is similar to doing ADA (All Day Awareness).

Lifestyle for Lucidity

This chapter wraps up the first part with additional tips on lucid dreaming and other
miscellaneous things. In general, this chapter suggests that lucid dreaming is fit for an entire
lifestyle, not just a hobby. You will see it has more effect on us personally later in Part 3.
DRUGS, FOOD, AND SUPLEMENTS
Four drugs to always avoid when trying to lucid dream are cannabis, alcohol, caffeine, and
cigarettes. Cannabis and alcohol reduce or eliminate the REM stage of sleep, making lucid
dreaming nearly impossible. Caffeine and cigarettes make you restless and will make it more
difficult to get to sleep. Other prescription drugs could have a similar effect, so read the labels of
any drugs you take and do research on them. There are actually some prescription drugs that
could intensify REM dreams, which could help you lucid dream.
Most lucid dreaming and dream recall herbs and supplements shouldnt be used by
beginners, but some are harmless (like Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, or Choline Bitartrate). Before
taking any herbs or supplements it is strongly recommended that you speak to your doctor about
it. Be sure not to take these with any other prescription drugs before you do research on them.
These are the most popular herbs and supplements lucid dreamers take, most taken in a pill or tea
form:

Calea Zacatechichi. Makes dreams a lot more vivid and improves dream recall. It has
been used by Mexican shamans for millennia and is the best herb to start with for a

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beginner.
Galantamine. Used in Alzheimer patients, it can increase intensity of dreams and
memory. It also increases the amount of short awakenings in the night, which can cause
more sleep paralysis. Galantamine has been used for centuries by the Chinese as a
memory-enhancer. It can have mild side effects, but it is typically regarded as the best
lucid dreaming supplement.
Huperzine-A. Similar to Galantamine, it enhances REM cycles and can cause mild side
effects, but less so than Galantamine.
Choline Bitartrate. An essential nutrient found in in Vitamin B. Alone, it does not do
anything, but combined with Galantamine it can intensify the effects. There are little to
no side effects of taking Choline, as it occurs naturally in large numbers in the body.
Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Vitamin B5, tryptophan, or melatonin (see below for more
details).

There are many foods that contain helpful vitamins to help you lucid dream. Steer toward
foods with high levels of Vitamin B6 (also known as pyridoxine; produces serotonin which is
used to produce melatonin) and B5 (an essential part of the reaction to make melatonin). You can
also take pill supplements of these vitamins, but remember that if you take an excessive amount
in just one night your chances of lucid dreaming will not be amplifiedyour body will just flush
out most of the excess. You just need to make sure you have enough of these vitamins every day
and possibly a bit more. Healthy adults need just 1.3 mg of Vitamin B6 each day. Some foods
that contain melatonin, which can help you get to sleep and improve the overall quality of sleep,
are:
White mustard (378 Nano-grams per teaspoon)
Black mustard (258 Nano-grams per teaspoon)
Almonds (39 Nano-grams per gram)
Sunflower seeds (29 Nano-grams per gram)
Cherries (15 Nano-grams per gram)
Flax seeds (12 Nano-grams per gram)
Oats (1.8 Nano-grams per gram)
Rice, red radishes, poppy seeds, tomatoes, bananas (0.5 to 1 Nano-grams per
gram)
Other foods that contain Vitamin B5 and tryptophan (used to make serotonin) are sweet
potatoes, mushrooms, lentils, broccoli, yogurt, eggs, white rice, flour, and milk. Cheese is also
known for its effect on dreams; even before it was known that cheese contains Vitamin B6 many
people believed that eating cheese before bed will give you nightmares. This is not always true,
but it will often intensify your dreams. Other foods that contain Vitamin B6 are carrots, oranges,
spinach, chicken, beans, eggs, and various nuts. Spicy foods are known to intensify dreams as
well.
Although it is not very common among lucid dreamers, it is also possible to use essential oils
for lucid dreaming, dream recall, and in general having more pleasant dreams. Rose oil is

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commonly used. To use it, place one drop of it into the palm of your hand and rub it around on
the sole of the opposite foot. Repeat this twice more and then do the same for the other foot. You
apply it to the sole of the foot because it is one of the most permeable surfaces in the body and
therefore the oil can integrate into the bloodstream quickly.
Other essential oils used for lucid dreaming and dream recall include helichrysum essential
oil, sandalwood essential oil, palo santo essential oil, cedarwood essential oil, clove essential oil,
lavender essential oil, anise essential oil, tangerine essential oil, and patchouli essential oil. You
can also purchase aromatherapy kits to help you lucid dream using a combination of essential
oils, which is a form of SILD (Smell Induced Lucid Dreamnot to be confused with SSILD).
HABITS AND PERSPECTIVE
To amplify your chances of having a lucid dream, it is helpful to change your habits. Of course,
it is always necessary to have a consistent sleep schedule. Going to bed and waking up at around
the same time every day trains your body to know what to expect and therefore it can prepare
you for sleeping and waking much more easily. You can see evidence of this when you wake up
a few minutes before your alarm goes off. This has been explained before; it happens because
your body knew when you would be woken up and started to get ready for your awakening
naturally. Its also important to get 7 to 8 hours of sleep if you are an adult and around 8.5 if you
are a teenager or young adult. You should also be sleeping in complete darkness, as this keeps
your melatonin levels high, and melatonin can break down under light. Recall from the first
chapter that melatonin helps you relax and get to and stay asleep.
Although it has been explained previously, I should also mention spending time with
electronics. Looking at bright things in general can reduce melatonin levels, but electronics can
also interfere with your sleep through electromagnetic fields. You should always sleep without
any electronics too close to you. For more tips on getting to sleep quicker, read the Get to Sleep
Quicker chapter. When going to sleep, remember to relax your muscles and find your natural
sleeping position so you can get comfortable in it. You can tell what your natural sleeping
position is by what position you wake up in.
Also, going to sleep earlier is better for lucid dreaming and for health in general because
it keeps you in tune with your natural alarm clock (called your circadian rhythm)this is also
linked to your serotonin and melatonin levels which are naturally influenced by the time of
sunset and sunrise. What this means is that it is better to sleep from 9:00 PM to 5:00 AM than it
is to sleep from 1:00 AM to 9:00 AM.
Another way to adapt your lifestyle for lucid dreaming is by doing something called lucid
living. This is a philosophical way of looking at life as a whole. Lucid living means accepting
and being open to the fact that life could be a dreamyou would never know if it was a dream or
not, so this theory is irrefutable, although still untenable. If you understand this, you will be more
likely to question your reality in your dreams and in so doing have lucid dreams. You can
practice this further by comparing reality to a dream very closely when doing a reality check and
being attentive of what differentiates the two, as well as being generally skeptical and existential
throughout your life. In this way it is similar to ADA (All Day Awareness) but more mental and

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spiritual. If you are not conscious, alert, and observant enough in your waking life, you certainly
will not be in your dreams. Turn your senses outward and be more observant.
PART 2IN THE DREAM
Understanding the Dream
Of course, before you can control your dreams, you must first understand them. This is
the purpose of this chapter, which serves as an introduction to Part 2, relating to what happens
after you become lucid. If you havent had at least one lucid dream by now, keep trying and
review Part 1. Otherwise, learn more about your dreams and (later) how you can control them.
THE FUNCTION OF SLEEP
Ironically, scientists still do not know for sure why sleep occurs, despite one third of our lives
being spent sleeping. As always, there are theories, but we do not yet know exactly what purpose
sleep serves. However, we do know that sleep reorganizes the brain, provides our body and mind
with rest, is essential for good health, and helps us learn through dreams. Leading theories point
out these characteristics and claim that we need sleep to refresh our brain and store memories;
indeed, a few days without sleep can cause forgetfulness and lack of concentration.
From the perspective of dreams, we also learn from sleep by having dream experiences.
Several studies have shown that when a test subject plays a certain game and then dreams about
it he or she will experience improved skills in the game upon playing the next morning. This
helps us in an evolutionary sense so that dangerous things that we encounter (like fire, wolves, or
other humans) we can learn to face more effectively or see if avoidance is better in our own
realistic simulations. Another recent theory suggests that we sleep to clean out our brain. It
points to new research done that reveals that cerebral spinal fluid is pumped around the brain to
wash away molecular waste that cells have put out during the day. The fundamental reason that
we sleep may not be verified for years, but it will most likely turn out that it is a combination of
all of these theories.
WHAT CAUSES DREAMS
Much like sleep, scientists are still unsure about why we dream and how dreaming works. Again,
we know that sleep is essential, and we know that the REM cyclewhich is almost always the
cycle in which we dreamis essential for keeping a healthy, sane mind. As in the
aforementioned theory, we may dream to learn new things about our environment and dangers.
Another popular theory treats dreaming as a side effect. As we are busy organizing memories in
one part of our brain, this part sends off electrical signals that can be picked up by other parts,
which do not understand these signals and try to make a story out of themespecially because
these parts of our brain do not have much else to do at this time. This process, according to the
theory, is what creates dreams.
An even more mysterious question is how dreams work. For examplewhy do our hands
always look different in dreams? Who are the people in our dreams? Are dreams just formed by
our subconscious mind? These questions are still quite unresolved, despite much research. Many

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scientists will agree that dreams are formed out of our subconscious perceptions and
expectations, and that is the general viewpoint I take in this book, but this explanation does not
always hold well. For example, when I jump in a dream, I should subconsciously expect to fall
down normally, just like I have always done in waking life. However, when I do jump in a
dream, I will rarely ever land normally. Instead, I could float or even fly away, in spite of this
theorys fundamental assertion. Although there are some aspects of waking life that our brain
simply cannot reproduce in dreams (like writing), our brain should be able to structure a jump
easily. This seems to almost hint at the dream world being a totally separate reality from the
physical world, with its own laws of physics and naturebut that is getting into metaphysical
territory and there is so far no solid evidence to support this. Whatever dreams may be, it seems
we are free to decide for now.
Although we cannot explain how dreams work, we can explain the structure of the
dream world. Everyone has had dreams, so you are already familiar with how dreams are
structured. However, to lucid dream you need to understand some qualities of dreams that make
them easy to manipulate. Firstly, dreams are influenced by our waking lifenotably our longterm memories, perceptions, expectations, emotional states, desires, and memories from our day,
called day residue. Whatever dreams are caused by, they are models of our waking life world,
and usually behave as such. For example, gravity, air, space, and humans all exist in our dreams
because we have had experience with them and we expect them to be there. However, these
qualities only exist because we expect them to exist. If we become lucid in our dreams, we
understand that these qualities no longer have to exist and we can soon take over the dream and
control it for ourselves, overcoming waking life expectations like gravity or physics. Our
thoughts alone can control an entire environment in a dream. In a dream, if you think you can,
you can. This statement is the foundation of dream control.
THE SUBCONCIOUS MIND
As I have previously explained, dream characters are elements of our subconscious mind and we
can treat them as such. Our subconscious mind is much closer to whom it is that we really are
than our conscious mind, making it a place to go for lucid dreamers trying to find themselves.
This is because we can receive wisdom and personal knowledge through our subconscious mind.
I will provide a list of interesting questions to ask your subconscious mind that may or may not
give you any results.
You may be wondering how one asks their subconscious mind a question in a dream.
This is really very simple as all you have to do is grab a dream character and ask them a
questionthe character is part of your subconscious mind. You can summon characters in your
dream (a skill I will cover soon) to speak to, and while it may be interesting to arrange a meeting
with your deceased great-grandfather, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, The Beatles, and the former
president in your dream, do remember that these characters have not been brought back from the
dead but rather recreated by your own subconscious mind. They will take on special
characteristics due to your subconscious perception of them, but in general all dream characters
have the same fundamental knowledge and personal qualities, although some knowledge may be

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displayed in certain dream characters more than others. You may request to the dream (by
shouting out or by mentally feeling the request) to speak directly to your subconscious through
a dream character if you want. You may also communicate with your subconscious mind by
pulling out a cell phone, dialing your own phone number (or just any phone number) and talking
to whoever picks up. A somewhat similar technique is asking a question out loud to the dream
and reaching into a pocket to pull out a slip of paper with (hopefully) the answer on it.
Your subconscious mind will never lie to you, although it will sometimes ignore you or
refuse to respond to the question clearly. Also remember that your subconscious mind is not
some all-knowing entity but rather a wiser, more knowledgeable version of yourself. This is a list
of things you could ask your subconscious mind:

Ask it to give you lucid dreams

every night.
Ask it what career you should
choose.
Ask it to help you sense who is good
and who is bad in waking life.
Ask it why you liked your favorite
book/movie so much.
Ask it to show you forgotten
memories.
Ask it to pick up where you left off
in each dream every night.
Ask it to show you something that
will make you very emotional.
Ask it to help you hold a lucid state.
Ask it to break a bad habit.
Ask it if a certain friend or lover is
really good for you.
Ask it why you are stressed, angry,
sad, etc.
Ask it what your perfect significant
other would look like.
Ask it to tell you how to help
someone else that is suffering.

Ask it to get over an unrequited

crush.
Ask it to make you happier.
Ask it to show you something
random.
Ask it to show you your past dreams.
Ask it a deep and philosophical
question.
Ask it if you have already met the
person that you should marry.
Ask it why you love the person that
you do.
Ask it to make you laugh.
Ask it what your greatest fear is.
Ask it to help you understand
something better.
Ask it to make it seem like dreams
happen over a longer period of time.
Ask it what a good idea for a
movie/book would be.
Ask it to help you love yourself
despite appearance.
Tell it a joke and see how it
responds.

When you are lucid dreaming, the characters in your dream are not there for your
amusementthey are pieces of your own mind. There is no reason to harm them or treat them
with disrespect or rudeness, and do not forget that you can learn things from all of them. Some
lucid dreamers even call dream characters members of their higher self.
An interesting trick to use when you dont know how to do something in a lucid dream is ask
a dream character. After you have finished reading the dream control section of this book, most

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of the information will be in your subconscious mind, even if you dont remember it consciously.
Therefore, you should be able to ask someone in your dream how to do something like teleport to
another location once youve learned how.
LAYERS OF LUCIDITY
Lucid dreaming is not at all as black and white as you might think. Different types of lucid
dreams have been noted as long as people have been able to lucid dream, but only relatively
recently was the term Layers of Lucidity coined to describe this by YouTube user Reece Jones.
He describes five separate levels of lucidity, emphasizing that one is not inherently better than
any other and that to be a lucid dreamer doesnt require you to get past Layer One. He also
explains that you can move up or down layers within one dream. This system helps lucid
dreamers understand which level of consciousness they have gotten to. To go along with each
layer, there are also two variations of that layer: major and minor. These will be explained as
well, but if they confuse you, you can disregard them as they are considered more advanced.

Layer 0: These can be very frustrating, past non-lucidity but not quite lucid. They happen
when you get some kind of a hint in a dream that you are dreaming, but fail to actually
become lucid. Anything past this layer is considered a lucid dream.
a. Minor: When you see, hear of, think about, talk about, or engage in anything related
to lucid dreaming but do not become lucid.
b. Major: When you get an odd feeling that things arent right, but usually just dismiss
it. You have a strange feeling that your actions wont affect the future, yet you do not
know why.
Layer 1: You become aware that youre dreaming, but you snap out of it immediately and
wake up or become non-lucid.
a. Minor: You realize that youre dreaming but then wake yourself up within seconds,
either intentionally or unintentionally. Remember that if you stay still after waking up
you can easily slip back into sleep paralysis or reenter the dream.
b. Major: When you realize that youre dreaming but then have a false awakening and
carry on non-lucid, or the dream around you changes and you become non-lucid as a
result.
Layer 2: You become lucid and you stay in the dream, but you dont have total
consciousness or control, not fully understanding what it means to be lucid. For example,
you do not realize that you are really not in the dream but rather sleeping in a bed.
a. Minor: The dream characters in this dream cannot be convinced that it is a dream.
b. Major: You are still partially non-lucid, but the characters in the dream are fully
aware that they are not real, even more lucid than you. This is a rare layer.
Layer 3: You now have full or almost full lucidity and the dream becomes much less
hazy and more vibrant as you understand what it really is. You still do not have full
control over the dream.
a. Minor: The dream characters do not know what they really are, but you know and are
more lucid than they are.

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b. Major: Very similar to layer 3 Minor except now the dream characters realize that
they are not real.
Layer 4: The classic lucid dream. You have complete power and control. This is what
most people want.
a. Minor: Although you have full control, the dream characters are not aware of what
they are.
b. Major: The same as Layer 4 Major, but the dream characters understand that they are
not real and accept this without a doubt.

There is a level of lucidity in dreams beyond Layer 4, but it is very rare. It occurs when
the entire scene becomes overwhelmingly vibrant and you can feel and sense everything as if it
was real. In fact, it will feel like the dream is realer than reality itself. At this point, you are
extremely lucid and feel like you have complete, utter control over the dream world. I use the
term Peak Lucidity to describe this.

VARIATIONS OF NON-LUCIDITY
Although non-lucidity is generally less important to note than lucidity, there are also levels of
non-lucidity, also created by a YouTube user, Giz Edwards. These variations are not popularly
used, but you can still use them if you want. They are called variations rather than layers of nonlucidity so that they will not be confused with the Layers of Lucidity, but perhaps we can look at
variations of non-lucidity as negative Layers of Lucidity.

Variation 1 (Layer -4): There is no dream recall at allyou do not remember any dreams.
Variation 2 (Layer -3): You do not have input in the dreamyou are watching it rather
than experiencing it or participating in it. You do not make any important decisions.
Variation 3 (Layer -2): You are a character in the dream and you react to situations in the
dream as you normally would in waking life.
Variation 4 (Layer -1): The same as Variation 3 but you have access to waking life
memories.

DREAM INTERPRETATION
Although I mentioned that I would not be covering dream interpretation, I think its hard to get a
thorough understanding of our dreams without trying to learn what they mean. Of course, this
depends on your viewpoint. If you believe dreams are merely a byproduct of other night-time
activity in the brain, then dream interpretation is meaningless. If you believe that some or all
dreams are a result of your subconscious mind trying to teach you something, dream
interpretation can be somewhat meaningful. If you believe that dreams come from a God or
otherwise more sacred or spiritual source, then dream interpretation could also be meaningful.
Personally, I believe that our subconscious mind occasionally will communicate to us through
dreams, but this is not the main purpose of dreams.
As explained earlier, we will sometimes dream about stressful situations so that we can

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get used to them and learn to deal with them in waking life. After all, the most commonly
reported emotion in dreams is anxiety, which suggests that we are getting prepared for
something. We could use this information to interpret stressful dreams, along with a basic
knowledge of how our subconscious mind works. For example, we could dream about making a
speech or playing an instrument onstage in preparation for public speaking or a live performance
that we are thinking about. We could also see strange things because of subconscious
association. In this example, we could see large eyeballs in the audience to represent our
subconscious association with eyes and the audience staring at us. This is a very superficial
example, as it can get much more complicated than this due to deep subconscious links. Dreams
can also be created by anxiety disorders we have; for instance, a dream about skydiving could be
due to a phobia of heights.
You may also notice recurring dreams; these can happen occasionally and usually take on
the form of one dream repeating itself a few or more times with slight variations. This is a good
way to get lucid and perhaps explore the dream a little bit, as a side note. These dreams most
likely happen because dreams can be caused by emotions and you could be experiencing the
same emotions in a similar situation during waking life. This could likely form the outline of the
dream while your subconscious mind fills in the details and variations of it.
Whatever the meaning of your dreams is, remember that dreams can be very random and
nonsensical. Finding clarity in an unclear dream can be very difficult, so dont beat yourself up
over being unable to understand them.
Becoming Lucid and Stabilizing the Dream
In their first lucid dream, many beginner lucid dreamers will lose control of the dream
and unintentionally cause it to collapse. At this time, the brain realizes that you are now
conscious by recognizing what areas of the brain are active and sometimes even tries to get you
back into a regular dream because it is not used to lucidity. After much practice, your brain will
eventually become accustomed to your lucidity and you can further prevent losing your lucid
dreams by learning what to do in any unstable situation.
You can become forced out of your lucidity in several differing respects: you might just
wake up (this is especially common for beginners), the dream could fade and turn into another
one in which you have forgotten that you are dreaming, you could have a false awakening in
which you thought you just woke up but youre really just in another dream, or your lucidity
could simply slip from your grasp while the same dreams continues. To stop any of this from
happening, you must learn to stabilize and establish yourself in your dreams after you can have
them.
STABILIZATION
Dreams are very picky and it can be frustrating trying to do something in a dream, only to get
kicked out. However, with experience, you can learn the social etiquette and mindset of the
dream world and manipulate it to your will.
When a dream collapses, the first sense to go will almost always be visual. The dream

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can become fuzzy, spinning, dim, fading, or feel strange. A stable dream is almost always clear
and realistic. As a lucid dreamer, you need to learn what stable and unstable dreams feel like and
how to respond to them; this will become easier as you have more lucid dreams.
The first step in stabilization is to relax and be calm. Especially for beginners, having a
lucid dream can be a very exciting experience. This extreme excitement can sometimes cause the
dream to collapse in on itself, so it is important to remain calm and relaxed at all times. Another
mistake that beginners often make is trying to do everything at once. The brain is concerned
enough about being lucid in the first placeflying, time-traveling, and conjuring up objects and
people all at once will quickly collapse a dream. Of course, you can still do these things, just not
in your first few lucid dreams. Maybe try a nice relaxing walk in the park on your first lucid
dream just to feel what its like to be aware in the dream-world.
Secondly, after you are relaxed and calm, you need to establish your lucidity (unless the
dream is already collapsing, in which case, tend to that). If you dont do this, you could easily
lose your lucidity or be tricked by a false awakening. To do this, perform a reality check first
this is to remind you that you are still dreaming and give you solid proof, and then repeat to
yourself Im dreaming, Im dreaming, Im dreaming or some other similar mantra.
Beginners should do this frequently throughout the whole dream. This not only establishes your
lucidity, but also gives you more power to do more things without the dream ending, much like
continued practice does.
If the dream is collapsing already, or if you just want it to be more stable, use one or
more of the following tricks to stabilize it. Note that almost all of the stabilization techniques
engage you in the dream and often focus on non-visual senses.

Rub your hands together. Not like youre washing them with soap, but like youre trying
to warm up. Do this rapidly. This and other techniques work because they stimulate the
conscious mind and anchor you to the dream with physical sensation.
Spin around in circles like youre trying to get dizzy. This will often lead you to a new
dream scene as well. Feeling yourself move in general can stabilize the dream. This has
been known to be very successful, however it can cause false awakenings.
Do math/spelling. Although mathematics in a dream sounds more like a nightmare, it
stimulates the logical portion of the brain when you spell something out or solve an easy
math equation.
Focus on wanting to be in the dream. This is only a little effective by itself, but it can be
easily combined with others to make it more effective.
Focus on your hands, specifically the palms. Anchor your awareness and attention to
your hands and keep the intention of wanting to be in the dream.
Sense the world around you in an intimate and close way. For example, lick the floor.
Yes, kneel down and lick the floor. There arent germs in the dream world, so theres
nothing to be afraid of. Alternatively, you could walk around and feel as many things as
possible to hold you into the dream or speak to dream characters around you.
Trick the dream without tricking yourself. This is difficult, but it works well. Go along

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with the dream as it was unfolding before you became lucid, following its plot and
staying in its non-lucid boundaries as if nothing had ever happened. Unless you are
totally concentrated, this could easily get you back to a non-lucid state.
Take command. Command the dream to do something for you. For example, shout out
increase lucidity! or clarity now! or try to convince the dream that you will remain
lucid and the dream will be stable by some other mystical means such as drinking a
potion. This can also be used to keep the dream vivid and clear.
Focus on a random object in the dream scene. This can be the floor, a building, a flower
pot, or anything else you see. Focus on the object until the dream feels stable. You can
also do this with hearing or smell, if that applies in the particular situation.
Fall backwards flat on the ground and/or hold on. This can work for some people, but not
others. I recommend focusing on the dream intently as well.
Remember details from waking life. This is best done while doing a physical stabilization
technique. Remember not to focus on your physical body, just your memories.
Repeat the next scene will be a dream as you try to stabilize the dream. This doesnt
help you to keep yourself from waking up but it stops you from becoming non-lucid due
to false awakenings or new dream scenes.

The above list is indispensable for a beginner lucid dreamer, but keep in mind that dream
stabilization is a personal experience and that not all techniques will work for you. Also,
remember that the more you have lucid dreams, the more stable they will become and the easier
it will be to stabilize them. In general, dream stabilization is based upon being subtle in your
entry to lucidity and not making any radical changes until you have achieved stability. If your
dream does collapse before you can do anything to stop it, when you wake up, stay completely
still. This way, sleep paralysis can return very quickly and you may soon find yourself having a
WILD.
If you are having trouble with dream stabilization, remember that it will become easier and
that all dreams have to end eventually. With practice, your dreams will become increasingly
more vivid and easier to control. The spinning unstable sensation that you get when you become
lucid will only last a few seconds to a minute and after enough experience it will not be even
present.
FALSE AWAKENINGS
As mentioned several times before, a false awakening (FA) occurs in a dream as a means of
tricking you into a non-lucid state. It is when you are off having a lucid dream when suddenly it
seems like youve just woken up, but really the dream has created your dream bedroom around
you to try to make you think that youre in reality again. This way, you return to being non-lucid
and move on in whichever way the dream directs you.
For example, you wake up one morning to do the FILD technique. You do everything
youre supposed to, but when you open your eyes and get up it turns out youre still awake and
havent dreamt a bit. Rats!
If you had done a reality check instead, you probably wouldve noticed that you were

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actually dreaming. This is a false awakening and is common in certain lucid dreaming techniques
like FILD or SSILD. This may sound complicated, but it is actually quite possible to have four or
five of these in a rowwhich really takes an iron-strong lucidity to overcome each time.
It is important to realize just what false awakenings are. They are not a new dream, but
rather when you are put in your bedroom in the same dream. Unlike the motion picture
Inception, false awakenings are not a dream within a dream, as much as they seem to be. They
are simply a continuation of the same dream that has very realistically replicated waking life.
False awakenings can be even more extensive than just waking up, perhaps making you get up,
brush your teeth, and eat breakfast. False awakenings like these usually correspond to lucid
dreaming, but everyone has false awakenings from time to timemost people just dont
remember them.
There is no known method of completely preventing them from happening, as they are a
natural process of dreams, but you can stop them from taking away time to lucid dream by
keeping habits and learning to question your reality. I previously mentioned Lucid Living, and
dont forget to do a reality check every morning as soon as you wake up so that this habit will be
carried over into your false awakenings. You can also get lucid from false awakenings if you
have many in a row. For example, if you have a few false awakenings in a row, in the second one
you have you might be a bit more suspicious, and the next one you will be even more doubtful
because you have just experienced two false awakenings in a row.
Once you do become lucid after a false awakening, do not try to do any heavy lucid
dreaming things just yet like flying or transformation as this can easily put you back into another
false awakening. One way to get out of a loop of false awakenings is to change the dream scene,
especially to a very abnormal dream scene. This may be difficult for a beginner, but it can be
done easily at times. For example, try spinning and you might find yourself in a new location.
The only problem with doing this is that if it is not done subtly you could find yourself in another
false awakening. If youre really sick of having false awakenings, you can even try to wake up
from the dream into waking life, but this may result in another false awakening (Ill explain how
you can wake up from dreams in the Nightmares section).
Controlling the Dream
For a lucid dreamer, a dream is no more than a canvas on which he or she can paint their
emotions, ideas, and perceptions. It is a place to experiment with the dream reality and to have
fun. For many people, this is the reason that lucid dreaming is interesting. It takes time and
practice, but eventually you can develop a kind of superpower in the dream that will allow you to
sculpt the dream to your will.
There are several concepts that reappear in dream control. Several means of manipulating
the dream will not be covered because they are usually self-explanatory and can be understood
using these concepts. These concepts are: visualization, using objects creatively to help you,
feeling the dream, simply willing something to be done, setting an intention, belief, and focus
(but not too much).

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TRANSFORMATION
There are two types of transformation: internal and external. Internal focuses on transforming the
dreamers perception of the dream without actually changing the dream itself while external
transformation focuses on changing the dream environment. Both types require a high level of
stability and lucidity, so make sure that you have stabilized the dream before trying them.
For internal transformation, you need to take control of your senses. I have already
alluded to making the dream more vivid and clear by commanding clarity now! to the dream,
but before you get further into internal transformation you need to feel yourself in the dream.
Focus on what youre experiencingwhat does it feel like? What can you see, hear, smell, etc.?
What emotion(s) are you feeling? Once you can feel yourself in the dream and gain a sense of
awareness, you can then start changing your senses and outward appearance. For example, make
yourself see farther or clearer. There isnt really a step-by-step guide for thisyouve just got to
feel it yourself. It will help you to try to feel the intention of the transformation, and dont forget
that there are no rules in a dream other than your preconceived notions of reality.
You can also change your body in a dream; this qualifies as internal transformation. Hold
your hands out in front of you and try to morph them into something else. Maybe you could
grow long fingernails or turn your skin green. You can do this by visualizing what your hands
would look like this way or try to form it with your other hand. Similarly, you can also change
your whole body using a mirror (be careful because you can see frightening images in mirrors).
First, find a mirror or create one (Ill explain how to create one in this chapter). Set the intention
to change your appearance as you look at yourself in the mirror and visualize what you would
look like. It might help to have a mental image prepared beforehand so you can imagine what
you want to look like quickly and easily (remember that you dont have to look like a human).
Remember that dreams are controlled by our own subconscious perceptions, meaning that if we
can perceive ourselves to be one way or another, we will be that way. Be careful when doing this
kind of transformation as it requires stability.
External transformation is similar, but it can be difficultyou have to visualize your
surroundings changing into what you are imagining; this is most easily done with one small
detail at a time. You can change scenes or just small objects by slowly morphing themit may
help to close your eyes briefly during this process and dont forget to fully expect it to happen. It
may be easier to start with simple objects. For example, change a candle into a rose. First you
would want to focus on the candle and visualize it forming into a rosethis sounds like a very
vague description but you need to feel it for yourself. If you have never experienced what it is
like to just imagine something and see it there in a dream then you will not understand this. In a
lucid dream, do not be bound by your waking life sense of reality. In a dream, anything is
possible.
TELEPORTATION
Previously, I mentioned spinning in the dream as a means of teleporting to another location as
well as stabilizing the dream. If you want to go somewhere specific, visualize this place as you
spin. You can do this with eyes closed or not, but be careful closing your eyes because it could

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make you wake up if done for more than a couple of seconds. Alternatively, you could also start
flying and imagine the destination that you want to arrive at in the direction in which you are
flying. This is typically easier than willing yourself to the destination that you are seeking. I
should mention now that teleportation in a dream does not actually mean that youre going to a
different place in the dream, and that is not what I mean by destination, because all that
teleportation really means is restructuring the dream around you. Technically, you dont move in
a dream; the dream moves relative to you.
Another technique uses doors or portals in dreams rather than spinning or flying. First
you must find or create something to walk through and then focus on getting to where it is that
you want to go as you prepare to walk through it. This is based more on expectation than
visualization. Once you walk through the door or portal, you could find yourself in a place that
you didnt mean to go to, but if your intention was strong enough you should have gotten to the
place that you imagined. It may help you in teleportation techniques to introduce and create one
sense at a time as you are going there; for example, see it, smell it, feel it, etc.
When you become more experienced at teleporting in dreams, you will be able to teleport
just by thinking about it.
FLYING
Flying in a lucid dream is generally easy. Most of the time, all you have to do is jump up with
the intention to fly and soar through the sky. However, you can have problems with flying
because of waking life associations of flying with falling. If this happens to you, there are several
ways of overcoming it. Because I like lists (you should know this by now) this is a short list of
them:

Trick your brain into forgetting about gravity. Take your focus off of objects on the
ground and shift your attention up to the sky, clouds, or other objects high above you. Try
to push yourself up using this new perspective.
Use objects. If you convince yourself that certain objects can help you fly or gain other
special powers in a lucid dream, they can. For example, drink a potion that you believe
will allow you to fly or ride on a broomstick or flying carpet. Similarly, you could sprout
wings from your back or heels.
Swim in the air. Anyway you like, you can simply float around in the air as if you were
underwater. Alternatively, you could flap your arms like a bird, although this is a lame
way of getting around.
Remove subconscious burdens. Emotions can psychologically pull you down in waking
life, much like they can in a dream. If you are having trouble getting off of the ground, it
may be because you are feeling a certain emotion in general or in the dream that limits
you. Although this perspective doesnt seem very scientific, recall that subconscious
thoughts and emotions are literally what form most, if not all of your dreams. To
overcome this, do what you think you can do in the dream or in waking life to rid
yourself of this emotion. Be sure that you are not over-thinking or fearing anything in the
dream.

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Run and jump. This could subconsciously prepare you for flight, although it is not
needed. You could just take off like a bullet if it suits you.
Start sprinting very quickly. Turn your steps into bounds, and make these bounds
progressively larger until they become vast leaps. Then, start to suspend yourself in the
air in these bounds until you are able to fly without having to touch the ground.
Superman Style. Just take off from the ground and use your arms, outstretched in front of
you, to guide you through the air.

You can jump off of a tall building or cliff to help you practice flying if you are having
trouble starting at the ground. Like many other skills that you can develop in a lucid dream, the
more conscious and focused you are in a lucid dream, the better you will be able to fly.
CREATION/MANIFESTATION
Creation in a lucid dream simply means creating something yourself or making something
appear, whether it is an object or a person. It is similar to transformation in this way, but creation
can take more practice to get used to because you essentially have to create something using your
mind alone instead of changing something already created.
In a dream, everything or nearly everything is caused by your subconscious mind
(sometimes things can be caused by external sensations during sleep). This means that your mind
can easily create the dream with belief alone. For example, if you were walking down a dark
alley in a dream and you thought you heard a noise, you might become afraid of a potential
attacker. Although the dream had not originally planned this, an attacker could appear in the
dark alley just because of your fearful belief that you would be attacked. In this way, you already
know how to create things merely by belief, however you have probably never done this
consciously. Learning to do this consciously is a more advanced way of creating things for most
people, but there are easier techniques. One that works well is called the Behind-This-Door
Technique.
You start by finding a door or willing it into existence through belief and visualization
(done through the technique explained above. Yes, you might have to use the hard technique to
use the easy one, but a door is relatively easy to create). After that, decide what you want to
create. For this example, Ill use a personAbraham Lincoln (although you could always create
an object). Note that people are generally harder to create than objects in a dream. After youve
got a door, start repeating behind this door is Abraham Lincoln out loud in the dream or in
your mind. After youve done this for a few moments, start to visualize Abraham Lincoln behind
the doorwhat does he look like? Is he wearing a suit? Does he have a top hat? Continue
visualizing and repeating this until you feel like youre ready to open the door. If Lincoln is
there, congratulations. If he isnt, or if something else is replacing him, remember that this is a
difficult skill to master, and you should be patient.
Another technique you can use specialized for spawning dream characters is in three
steps. First, you think about who you want to spawn into your dream before the dream in waking
life and in the dream as well if you want to. Then, you attach an emotion to that person. For

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example, imagine the emotion you feel when someone you love makes you laugh or someone
you hate makes you annoyed. Finally, imagine them in a specific environment and visualize what
they are doing in that environment. Hopefully, they will appear in front of you.
Another technique used to spawn an object or a person is to imagine it around the corner
or behind you, expect it to be there, and see if it has appeared. You can also find a large
television screen, change the channels with the intent to see a certain scene appear, and then
jump into the television when you do see that scene. If youre more of a traveler you can even
ask dream characters where one thing or another is.
CONTROLLING TIME
Once again, this can be split up into internal control and external control. Internal time-control
means that you are changing your perception of time in the dream, making it seem longer in most
cases, while external can be seen as time-traveling or pausing time within the dream.
From our perspective, time passes generally the same way in a dream as it does in real
life. You may feel like time has been slowed down or sped up in a dream (especially when nonlucid), but time usually only feels as long as the dream cycle. Understand that time in waking life
can seem to go by slowly or quickly too, as in the difference between working on a Monday
morning and relaxing with friends on a Saturday night. Also, understand that by prolonging your
dreams you will not be put in any sort of a coma. All dreams have to end eventually as the dream
cycle ends or if you are woken up; internal time control simply means making the dreamer
perceive that time is passing slowly. Still, your dream does have to end, even if it feels like it will
not.
The first step in making your dream seem longer is making sure it doesnt end
prematurely. Review the techniques of maintaining stability in dreams. After that, a good
technique for beginners to use is to take advantage of objects in the dream. You should have
noticed by now that using objects in dreams can often help you achieve something. The goal of
this technique is to let this object control your perception of time, much like riding a broomstick
can help you learn to fly. You can use basically any object for this, but it is best to choose one
with which you associate time, like a clock or wristwatch. Then, make the object stop or slow
time by pressing a button on it, holding the hands of a clock, programming into it how long the
dream should last, or anything else that involves the manipulation of the object. Once again, you
have to believe and set the intention that this will work. After this, keep the item with you,
perhaps in your pocket or on your wrist. Once youve done this, simply remember the object and
hope that it works; in fact, convince yourself that it will work. Other than using the above
technique, you can also try to change your perception of the dream by commanding your
subconscious mind, perhaps saying longer dreams now!
External time control can either mean traveling to the future, the past, or pausing time.
When traveling to the past or future in a dream, you may end up in a different place, earlier in the
dream (not that likely), or in your perception of what the past or future was/will be like. This is
not true time-traveling, but it can still allow you access to new places to explore, so it is worth
mentioning. To do this, create a time-traveling machine, whatever it may look likea tiny room

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or a DeLoreanand get in it. You can tell by now what the rest will bevisualize your
surroundings after time travel, imagine what you want to see, believe it, etc. All of the dream
world is governed by its own sense of physics based on belief and intention.
In one of my first lucid dreams, I was sitting around a Christmas tree with a group of
people and time would periodically pause itself, leaving just me and one other dream character
un-paused while everyone else was temporarily frozen. After a few moments, I slowly became
lucid after sensing something a bit odd about the pausing dream, then stopped the dream from
pausing and teleported away. As soon as I teleported I started losing my lucidity, most likely as a
result of trying to pause time and teleport all at once. I didnt use any objects to control time in
the dream, just a strong concentration. In this way, pausing time is similar in philosophy to other
dream control techniques. You can find an object to help you or just will time to pause.
EXPIRIMENTATION
Our dreams are inherently fascinating. They possess a vibrant quality of realism, a unique sense
of nature and physics, and an environment in which thought can manifest into reality. It is the
lucid dreamers calling to experiment with this dream world with curious adventure. I have left
out many skills to develop in the dream world because you should understand now that the same
concepts often repeat in dream control. Some of the disciplines that I have left out include:
breathing underwater, super strength, telekinesis, mind control, walking through walls, and,
because you cant avoid mentioning it: sex (lucid dream orgasms are actually possible and the
dreamer orgasms in real life, although this can make the dream unstable).
As a lucid dreamer, or an oneironautsomeone who sets out to explore their dreams
(pronounced oh-NIGH-row-naught)you will be able to and should experiment with lucid
dreaming. For example, find out what happens when you jump through a mirror or see if you can
create your own reality checks. In dreams is a whole new world, a whole new life, an entire
reality, and if that doesnt make you curious, I dont know what will.
Nightmares
Obviously, nightmares can be regarded from a new perspective when one learns and
masters lucid dreaming. Simply, if you can become lucid in a nightmare, you can change the
dream or end it. Fear is your worst enemy in nightmares, and lucid dreaming can eradicate much
or all of that fear. However, nightmares can often be more complicated and deep than this, so I
feel I need to explore them more. They can happen randomly or be caused by a lack of sleep,
strange diet or lifestyle, stress, drugs, depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or other sleep
and/or emotional disorders.
I have organized nightmares into two separate types for convenience. They are: passive
nightmares in which you feel like you are being watched, stalked, humiliated, or you have an
anxious feeling, and active nightmares in which youre in a direct conflict, running from or
fighting something. Although the techniques used to escape and prevent them are the same, it
provides an easier reference to them.

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ESCAPE
There are several techniques used to escape nightmares if you find yourself lucid in them. Even
in a non-lucid state you may be able to escape a nightmare by remembering how (this qualifies
as a Layer 0 Major lucid dream and can happen at times). After you do become lucid in a
nightmare, remember to tell yourself that you are only dreaming and that the dream cant hurt
you. This should diminish any feelings of fear or anxiety and sometimes it can completely
reverse the nightmare, but for the times that you still are left afraid or needing to get out, this is
how you can wake up or end the nightmare:

Shut your eyes hard. This works for many people. A similar technique uses rapid
blinking.
Collapse the dream. This may be your easiest option because the stability of the dream is
already weakened due to your lucidity. To further weaken it, you can try to take control
of the dream while still holding onto your lucidity.
Leave the scene. To preserve the lucid dream but end the nightmare, you obviously can
fly, swim, jump, or teleport away.
Defeat the dream. This can help you overcome recurring nightmares. It involves facing
the nightmare and fighting it or directly challenging it.
Focus on your body in bed. Ignore the dream and put your focus on where your physical
body is. This should collapse the dream quickly.
Yell out. This doesnt work as well but you can shout wake up! or something similar
while trying something else to help you. The purpose of this is not to actually yell out in
waking life but to focus your mind on waking up.
Breathe deeply and irregularly. Much like sleep paralysis, this can cause you to wake up
because youre actually breathing in the same manner that you are in a dream.
Call out to someone in waking life. This shifts your focus away from the dream, even if
they cant hear you.
Go to sleep in the dream. This will almost always get you out of the current dream scene,
although it can cause false awakenings.

Of course, these techniques will not work in the nightmare if you are completely non-lucid,
but you may find yourself lucid or at least somewhat aware, which will allow you to use these
tips.
PREVENTION
There isnt much of a method to prevent random nightmares other than to have a regular sleep
schedule. If you have frequent nightmares, you should speak to your doctor, but do not forget
that recurring nightmares can be stopped with lucid dreaming.
Recurring nightmares themselves can be a dream sign. This can be very helpful in
stopping them because a lucid nightmare can be easily manipulated and controlled when the
dreamer is lucid enough. If you want to stop recurring nightmares, or if you find yourself in any

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nightmares at all, it is best to not try to escape it using the techniques above but rather try and
understand it and control it. You cannot conquer nightmares from a waking stateyou need to
face them in their own territory. Once you are lucid, there is truly no need to escape, either from
a dream character pursuing you or from the dream itself.
Upon reaching lucidity in a nightmare, face the dream and honestly try to understand it.
Although it may help to attack dream characters (lions, monsters, or other people are all dream
characters), you would really be attacking and trying to disown a part of yourself. What works
often is to speak to dream characters, treating them as an equal, but firmly taking control. Ask
them questions like who are you?, why are you here?, why are you acting that way?, can
I help you?, what do you have to tell me?, or what do you want from me? Be open to the
dream characters, but not defenseless. Do not act under-confident or run from them either. Mere
acknowledgement of the dream characters can sometimes stop them.
When constantly thinking about a nightmare and trying to avoid it, we can often become
so engulfed in it that it repeats itself frequently throughout our dreams. In this way, the first step
to stop recurring nightmares is to place less attention on them, if possible. If, after using the
techniques above, you saw no resolution in your nightmares, you may need to repeat the exercise
again or use a different technique. To do this, you can wait for your next nightmare or induce it
yourself through a process called dream reentry. This is a form of dream incubation and is done
by reimagining any dream you want to dream again in waking life (especially before going to
sleep) and then thinking of alternative ways to end the dream. It may also help to write about the
dream (with its new ending) as if it had actually happened. This can be used to re-experience
pleasant dreams as well as nightmares. This can create the dream that you wish to change, giving
you the opportunity to change it, but by simply confronting the fear in waking life you may have
resolved some emotional problems related to the dream. Many lucid dreamers make their reentry
into the dream smoother by imagining themselves spinning into the dream.
Nightmares are very much of a psychological nature and should be treated accordingly.
To escape a dreamto run from your problemswill do you no good, but to face them,
understand them, and resolve them would most likely stop the nightmare. Remember that the
only thing to fear in dreams is fear itself.
PART 3IN SUMMARY
Negative Effects
For the most part, lucid dreaming is completely harmless and even can be used for selfimprovement, self-exploration, and learning (explained in the next chapter). However, there are
still three main negative effects of lucid dreaming. Two of them only are present using the WILD
method while the third one seems to be only caused by extensive lucid dreaming.
NIGHTMARES
Lucid dreaming by itself will not give you nightmares. However, if you are using techniques like
WILD, FILD, or DEILD you could disturb your sleep cycle enough to cause a nightmare. Also,
if you take a lucid dreaming supplement you could experience a heightened possibility of

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nightmares, depending on the supplement.

To review the difference between the WILD method and the DILD method, the WILD
method involves staying conscious while falling asleep and usually takes place after waking in
the morning and then going back to sleep. This sleep disturbance is what can cause nightmares.
The DILD method typically involves practices done before going to sleep, but does not often
involve waking up in the morning.
It has been said that nightmares are to the WILD technique and similar techniques as
injuries are to sportsthey can happen occasionally and theyre usually a terrible experience, but
would you avoid an entire sport just to avoid the possibility of an injury? Even if you are too
afraid to have nightmares, you can still have lucid dreams using the DILD method and WILD
method techniques that do not interfere with sleep.
Lucid dreaming helps you overcome nightmares, so even if you do experience
nightmares as a result of the WILD techniques you will have a higher chance of becoming lucid
in them and therefore overcoming them. In this way, lucid dreaming prevents nightmares more
than causes them, but it is still important to recognize that there is a chance of nightmares.
SLEEP PARALYSIS
If you know enough about lucid dreaming, this is obvious, and clearly avoidable by using the
DILD method and some WILD techniques.
To review, sleep paralysis is when your body paralyzes itself while you dream so that you
do not act out your dreams. It happens around 5 times every night and without it you would
sleepwalk and move around in your sleep. This makes sleep paralysis very useful. However, if
you are in sleep paralysis while you are mentally awake and conscious, you will be completely
paralyzed and you will often experience hallucinations such as a shadowy figure or loud
footsteps. This is because you are still half-dreaming and the hallucinations are projections of
your dreams.
When you fall asleep consciously, you will experience sleep paralysis, which is why it is
emblematic of the WILD method which involves falling asleep and entering a dream
consciously. But remember that the DILD method does not use sleep paralysis. Although sleep
paralysis is often used as the gateway to lucid dreams, it is not required that you must experience
it. Lucid dreaming can actually teach you to see sleep paralysis as an opportunity to lucid dream
rather than a frightening phenomenon. Furthermore, through practice having WILDs you can
become nearly fearless of sleep paralysis.
FALSE MEMORIES
Although this still hasnt been researched at length, lucid dreaming is known for causing false
memories, especially childhood memories. These seem to take on the form of random fragments
of memory, such as a fight you had in kindergarten that you can remember vividly, but never
happened. This is probably due to memories activated by stimulation in the brain during lucid
dreaming, which is different from regular dreaming in which the rational part of the brain is not
active.

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Again, extensive research has not been done into this, but it seems that avid lucid
dreamers are confirming this, saying that they have a few childhood memories that they
remembered clearly, but family members or friends dismissed as untrue. It is sensible that only
experienced lucid dreamers would experience this as they have had many more lucid dreams.
Lucid dreaming has never been noted as erasing memories, but rather forming new ones. Still, it
is uncomfortable to think that some of your vivid memories are false. You can decide if this
concerns you, but personally, I would say that all of the benefits of lucid dreaming are well
worth it.
Positive Effects and Usage
Besides using lucid dreaming for self-exploration through your subconscious mind or
purely to have fun, you can also use it in various ways to improve your waking life. Lucid
dreaming generally appeals to people for its superficially interesting qualitieslike flying or
dream sex. However, lucid dreaming can be used for much more after you have fun flying
around.
OVERCOMING FEAR AND ANXIETY
Before I present the method for using lucid dreaming to overcome fear and anxiety, you must
first understand how therapeutic desensitization normally works:
You have a small part of your brain called the amygdala that controls your fight-or-flight
response and decides what is dangerous in your mind. For example, if you get burned by a hot
stove your amygdala will associate hot stoves with danger and therefore stop you from getting
burned on a hot stove again. The amygdala is what makes you feel distressed or anxious about
things like giving a speech or performing in front of a crowd. However, this part of the brain can
sometimes associate things with danger that arent dangerous at all, as in the case of phobias.
To solve this problem, therapy puts you in the situation in which you feel uncomfortable,
gradually increasing its intensity, until your amygdala realizes that there is no harm in this given
situation. For example, a fear of heights could be conquered by first standing on a tall ladder and
gradually making your way up to the top of a skyscraper, and afterwards you realize that there is
no harm done and more or less drop the fear.
However, this process is easier said than done. The last thing you want to do when you
have a phobia is embrace the thing that frightens youthis is a survival instinct caused by the
amygdala. It can take decades for a person to completely overcome an anxiety disorder because
the brain will not reprogram itself easily. It is extremely difficult to fight back against an anxiety
disorder by embracing it when your palms are sweaty, your heart is beating quickly, youre
scanning around for a way out, and you would just give anything to have it all over with.
If you cant imagine yourself in a situation like that, if you cant feel that raw fear
sensation, imagine giving a speech publicly in front of a large audience or asking out the girl or
guy of your dreams. You probably couldnt even bring yourself to think about doing things like
these unless you are extremely confident. This same sensation is what keeps people with phobias
and anxiety disorders from living comfortably and doing what they want to do. But, of course,

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lucid dreaming can help.

In a lucid or non-lucid dream, your brain (amygdala included) cant completely tell that
you are not in reality. If it could, you would always be lucid and nightmares would never be
frightening. Remember also that your brain reprograms itself to let go of fears and anxieties by
using desensitizationgradually exposing yourself to the situation that makes you
uncomfortable. So if you practice desensitization in a lucid dream, you will be able to desensitize
and stop the amygdala from holding onto irrational fears just like you would be able to in waking
life, except with no conscious fear at all. This works because your amygdala sees that you are
doing the thing that it thinks will result in harm, but there is no harm caused in the real-life dream
simulation.
The best aspect about this is that there are no repercussions at all because it is merely a
dream that you will wake up from in a matter of minutes, making desensitization a completely
fearless experience instead of a fearful and dreadful experience in which there could be real
social consequencesthis makes desensitization both quicker and easier. Eventually, your
amygdala will see that no harm is done in what it perceives as reality, so it will realize that there
is nothing dangerous and as a result it will hopefully reprogram itself. Of course, this still
requires practice, but it is much easier and faster than going to a therapist and putting yourself in
conditions that are naturally uncomfortable for you.
This can be used for common fears like asking for a promotion or dancing in front of
others to intense fears like social anxiety. An example of how you would conquer this fear is as
follows: you have a fear of drowning. In a lucid dream, you first submerge yourself in a kiddie
pool and swim around until you are comfortable, then in a small swimming pool, then in a larger
swimming pool, then in a lake, and then you drop yourself deep in the middle of the ocean and
every time you are able to swim out without breaking a sweat. Your amygdala senses this and
you get a rewarding sensation having overcome a phobia, eventually losing the fear of drowning.
PRACTICE AND REHEARSAL
When we practice something, from an instrument to a sport, neurological pathways light up in
our brains as we move and think about moving. Interestingly, these same pathways light up when
we dream about doing the same thing; indeed, the only thing stopping us from actually acting it
out is sleep paralysis. As we strengthen these neurological pathways either through practice in
waking life or practice in dreams, we get better at what we are doing. In this way, once a skill is
more or less understood, it can be perfected in lucid dreams through practice, with no
repercussions such as injuries or losing in a sports game.
Lucid dreaming also provides an incredible environment in which to practice and
rehearse. For example, if you are a basketball player, you could play on any court you wanted to
with any amount of people and even make the game easier or harder by manipulating the
environment.
To practice your sport or skill, think about the skills you need to practice during the day,
set the intention to practice them in your dreams at night, and induce a lucid dream in which you
can practice these skills. You can even try advanced skills. Once you can do this, you can try

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performing in front of an audience in your dreams, but remember to let go of any fear or anxiety
and welcome the audience. If you are having trouble performing in front of a dream audience,
gradually fill it with trustworthy people that you are comfortable with, like friends or family.
You can also practice your future way of life in a lucid dream. By visualizing yourself
happy in your future you are more likely to behave in a way to increase the likelihood of that
future possibility coming true. For example, if you visualize yourself as rich you will be more
likely to accumulate wealth, or if you can see yourself free from addiction you will be more
likely to quit smoking. In a lucid dream you can intensify this visualization by making it into a
simulation of real life. For example, if you wish to lose weight, see yourself in a lucid dream as
thin and feel what it feels like to have lost weight.
LEARNING
I previously mentioned how dreams reinforced learning in a study in which people could perform
in a game better when they had dreamed about it non-lucidly. Other studies have shown that you
can imagine practicing a skill and you will initially improve at that skill at the same rate as if you
were actually doing it. This is because when you first start learning something you have to think
about it more than you actually do it so that neurological pathways can be strengthened and
ready to actually build the skill. In this way, the first stage of learning is all in the brain.
Obviously, a dream is filled with your imagination and much more vivid than a waking
life visualization. For example, if you imagine a pear in front of you, you can see it, you can
smell it and taste it, but you would have no trouble differentiating an imagined pear from a real
pear. However, in a dream, a pear tastes, looks, and smells as if it is real and in a non-lucid
dream you would never doubt that the pear actually is real. So, as you might expect, lucid
dreaming can be used to learn something new in the same way that waking life imagination can,
except it will be intensified to the point where it is less of an imagination and rather a simulation
as close to reality as it can get. This is similar to practicing in a lucid dream; all that you need to
do is set up an environment to learn in the dream and carry out your learning or studying.
THE ARTS AND LUCID DREAMING
The famous surrealist painter Salvador Dali would fall asleep in a chair holding a metal spoon
with a metal platter on the floor so that when he drifted into sleep the spoon would fall out of his
grasp and clash on the platter, waking him up. He would then write down or draw his surrealistic
dreams and hypnagogic hallucinations, providing inspiration for his artwork. (You can do
something similar by propping your arm up against a wall as you fall asleep in a position so that
it will fall down and slap your face when you drift into sleep).
In this way, images in dreams can be used for visual arts, but thats not all.
Musicians can also hear, practice, and play music in dreams (lucid dreams especially) and writers
can experience and live through fantastical worlds or breathtaking events, providing inspiration
for novels or short stories. Dreams, as well as lucid dreams, have provided inspiration for
countless artists, scientists, musicians, and writers due to their ability to create and form art out
of the subconscious mind, rather than focusing on the conscious mind. This is another advantage

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to having a good dream recall, keeping a dream journal, and lucid dreaming.
Final Notes
This is the final chapter of the book, with the exception of the Extended Learning and
Practice section. In this chapter I will provide the last helpful information and reflections on the
content of the book.
LUCID DREAMING IN THE FUTURE
The art, skill, and practice of lucid dreaming has been around since the dream yogis thousands of
years ago and has been evolving ever since. The most recent landmark was a surge of lucid
dreaming in pop culture online in forums, YouTube, and elsewhere on the internet. This revival
was probably at least partly due to the motion picture Inception, although the phenomenon of
lucid dreamingof simply being aware of the dreamis influential by itself.
Just a couple of decades ago talking about lucid dreaming was odd and emblematic of an
outcast, and just three or four decades ago lucid dreaming was unproven completely and
regarded by most scientists as completely impossible due to the nature of dreams. Now, it is
recognized as a real phenomenon and fully accepted by scientists as well as the general public.
It is hard to say where lucid dreaming will go from here, but it is surely getting more
popular and explored. Brainwave entrainment and EILD devices are undergoing improvements
every few years while new techniques for lucid dreaming continue to be created. More and more
people are learning to lucid dream and sharing their experiences online as more and more people
teach others how to lucid dream. Never has there been such a prosperous time for lucid
dreaming.
Some may even theorize that we are moving toward a perfect technique for lucid
dreaming that works for everyone all of the time. I, like most lucid dreamers, would say that is
impossible due to physiological and psychological differences between all of us. However, there
is an abundance of lucid dreaming techniques, and all of them can be tweaked to ones personal
preferences, making lucid dreaming possible for everyone. It can be difficult, and it can take
time, but if you keep trying you will have lucid dreams.
If you need somewhere to start, try one of the following techniques: FILD, SSILD,
WBTB with MILD, or DEILD. All of them have been noted as being particularly effective,
although these will by no means work for everyone all of the time.
IF YOU NEED MOTIVATION
Many people lose the motivation to learn to lucid dream after a few failed attempts, which can
ultimately cause them to abandon the subject for years. If you have reached this point, or fear
that you will soon, you must take action immediately if you still have a desire to lucid dream.
First, you should read and think about lucid dreaming often. It might help you to skim
through this book and reread sections or go online and read stories of lucid dreamers
sometimes hearing what other people can do motivates you to get up and try it yourself. Set a
specific intention to have lucid dreams and try to accomplish this goal.

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If you are going to attempt an induction technique, set the intention throughout the day to
do this as well. Make yourself believe that you will practice the technique so that you are
expecting it, not merely hoping to do it. An example of how you do this normally is as follows:
in the near future, you may be expecting to go to a party or interesting event. However, when this
event is cancelled you will be disappointed because you mentally set an intention to go to that
party. You thought that it would happen, not that it might happen. This is what you need to apply
to lucid dreaming when attempting to gain motivation for an induction technique: expect it to
happen as if it is not a choice.
A more external means of stimulating your motivation is by telling a family member or
friend about lucid dreaming and what you plan to do with it in the near future. For example, tell
your husband or wife that you will try to lucid dream tonight using the FILD technique and
youll tell them how it goes tomorrow. This can motivate you because when you have to report
back to them you will have let them down by saying that you were too lazy and didnt want to go
through with it.
If none of these tricks work to improve your motivation, you may want to attempt an easy
or simple lucid dreaming technique if you are focusing on the more complex ones. For example,
try MILD, SSILD, or simply reality checking.
IF YOU STILL CANT LUCID DREAM
Many people give up at lucid dreaming after trying intensely for a couple weeks, expecting lucid
dreams fast. This is the wrong approach; if you try to take on too much at once you will most
likely give up because youve bit off more than you can chew. If youre having problems with
lucid dreaming, take a break and return to the basics. First, you need a consistent sleep schedule
and at least eight hours every night. Work on that for a week or two and then move onto your
dream recall, writing your dreams down every morning. After about 2 or 3 weeks of that, move
onto reality checks and dream signs. Progress slowly and in small steps like this. It is
understandable that you would want to have lucid dreams as soon as possible, but you will most
likely have more lucid dreams if you take it slowly.
Although goal setting helps, dont take on large goals so quickly. Instead, set one large goal
for the year and split the steps up into the months. For example, if you want to have 50 lucid
dreams in a year, work on getting 4 or 5 each month, or you could focus on your dream recall for
a month, try the DILD method for 6 months, and move onto the WILD method for the remaining
5 months. Set very specific goals by specific dates and be sure that your goals are difficult but
realistic. Remember that lucid dreaming is a challenge, but dont overwhelm yourself thinking
that it is too difficult because this could be a mental block for you.
The most important thing for you to remember when learning to lucid dream is simply, dont
give up. Much like you wouldnt walk away from a bicycle you couldnt learn to ride right away,
you shouldnt abandon lucid dreaming because you feel like you cant do it. Dont give up and
keep trying.
ARE DREAMS REAL?

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As a final note on lucid dreaming, Id like to argue that dreams deserve more credit than we give
them. Many people will wake up from a nightmare and say things like thank God that was only
a dream much like a parent would assure their child that dreams arent real and are only part of
ones imagination. However, dreams can be very real, especially while they last. If you had a
nightmare in which you were being chased by some terrifying unearthly creature, would your
fear not be real? Would the creature not be real in your mind? Would your sweat and anxiety not
be real after waking up? As the psychologist Havelock Ellis put it, dreams are real while they
last, can we say more of life?
If real is what you can feel, taste, see, and touch then real is only electrical signals
interpreted by your brain, easily simulated in a dream. If real is what can be observed or
experienced objectively, then I should point out that scientists are working on recording dreams
so that they may be played back and watched again. In fact, this has been done before, only with
very blurry video formed by a computer from thousands of collected videos online.
So the next time you or someone you know wakes up from a frightening nightmare, dont
dismiss it as only a dream, but rather take a minute to appreciate the second reality your mind
has created on its own for you and your certainty that it was real. It may be comforting to think
that you dreams are a separate part of yourself, as unreal as your own imaginations, but this view
is hardly realistic.
Extended Learning and Practice
Below is a list that I have provided of other sources of learning lucid dreaming as well as
aids to help you practice.
BOOKS
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold
A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming Dylan Tuccillo, Jared Ziezel, Thomas Peisel
Are You Dreaming? Exploring Lucid Dreams: A Comprehensive Guide Daniel Love
Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self Robert Waggoner
Counting Sheep Paul Martin
Sleep Paralysis Ryan Hurd
Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements Thomas Yuschak
YOUTUBE CHANNELS
GizEdwards
LucidDreamTricks
ReeceJones87
Lucidipedia
WEBSITES, BLOGS, AND FORUMS
LD4All.com
DreamViews.com

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Lucidology.com
World-of-lucid-dreaming.com
Lucidity.com
Lucidipedia.com
APPS
I-Doser (Brainwave Entrainment)
Yocto Clock
Sigmund
Brainwave Dream Inducer
DreamZ
Dreamer Lucid Dreaming Journal & Dream Diary