Lucid Dreaming: Methods & Uses

We’ve written about dreaming more generally before:

How Useful Are Our Dreams?

Today we’re going to be talking more about a subject we’ve only touched on previously: lucid dreaming

What it is: lucid dreaming is the practice of being mentally awake while dreaming, with awareness that it is a dream, and control over the dream.

Why is it useful? Beyond simply being fun, it can banish nightmares, it can improve one’s relationship with sleep (always something to look forward to, and sleep doesn’t feel like a waste of time at all!), and it can allow for exploring a lot of things that can’t easily be explored otherwise—which can be quite therapeutic.

How to do it

There are various ways to induce lucid dreaming, but the most common and “entry-level” method is called Mnemonic-Induced Lucid Dreaming (MILD).

MILD involves having some means of remembering what one has forgotten, i.e., that one is dreaming. To break it down further, first we’ll need to learn how to perform a reality check. Again, there are many of these, but one of the simplest is to ask yourself:

How did I get here?

• If you can retrace your steps with relative ease and the story of how you got here does not sound too much like a dream sequence, you are probably not dreaming.
• If you are dreaming, however, chances are that nothing actually led to where you are now; you just appeared here.

Other reality checks include checking whether books, clocks, and/or lightswitches work as they should—all are notorious for often being broken in dreams; books have gibberish or missing or repeated text; clocks do not tell the correct time and often do not even tell a time that could be real (e.g: 07:72), and lightswitches may turn a light on/off without actually changing the level of illumination in the room.

Now, a reality check is only useful if you actually perform it, so this is where MILD comes in.

You need to make a habit of doing a reality check frequently. Whenever you remember, it’s a good time to do a reality check, but you should also try tying it to something. Many people use a red light, because then they can also use a timed red light during the night to subconsciously cue them that they are dreaming. But it could be as simple as “whenever I go to the bathroom, I do a reality check”.

With this in mind, a fun method that has extra benefits is to try to use a magical power, such as psychokinesis. If (while fully awake) whenever you go to pick up some object you imagine it just wooshing magically to meet your hand halfway, then at some point you’ll instinctively do that while dreaming, and it’ll stand a good chance of working—and thus cluing you in that you are dreaming.

How to stay lucid

When you awaken within a dream (i.e. become lucid), there’s a good chance of one of two things happening quickly:

• you forget again
• you wake up

So when you realize you are dreaming, do two things at once:

• verbally repeat to yourself “I am dreaming now”. This will help stretch your awareness from one second to the next.
• look at your hands, and touch things, especially the floor and/or walls. This will help to ground you within the dream.

Things to do while lucid

Flying is a good fun entry-level activity; it’s very common to initially find it difficult though, and only be able to lift up very slightly before gently falling down, or things like that. A good tip is: instead of trying to move yourself, you stay still and move the dream around you, as though you are rotating a 3D model (because guess what: you are).

Confronting your nightmares and/or general fears is a good thing for many. Think, while you’re still awake during the day, about what you would do about the source/trigger of your fear if you had magical powers. Whatever you choose, keep it consistent for now, because this is about habit-forming.

Example: let’s say there’s a person from your past who appears in your nightmares. Let’s say your chosen magic would be “I would cause the ground to open up, swallow them, and close again behind them”. Vividly imagine that whenever they come to mind while you are awake, and when you encounter them next in a nightmare, you’ll remember to do exactly that, and it’ll work.

Learning about your own subconscious is a more advanced activity, but once you’re used to lucid dreaming, you can remember that everything in there is an internal projection of your own mind, so you can literally talk to parts of your subconscious, including past versions of yourself, or singular parts of your greater-whole personality, as per IFS:

Take Care Of Your “Unwanted” Parts Too!

Want to know more?

You might like to read:

Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life – by Dr. Stephen LaBerge

Enjoy!

Always look on the bright side for life

❝I’m not a pessimist; I’m a realist!❞

~ every pessimist ever

To believe self-reports, the world is divided between optimists and realists. But how does your outlook measure up, really?

Below, we’ve included a link to a test, and like most free online tests, this is offered “as-is” with the usual caveats about not being a clinical diagnostic tool, this one actually has a fair amount of scientific weight behind it:

❝Empirical testing has indicated the validity of the Optimism Pessimism Instrument as published in the scientific journal Current Psychology: Research and Reviews.

The IDRlabs Optimism/Pessimism Test (IDR-OPT) was developed by IDRlabs. The IDR-OPT is based on the Optimism/Pessimism Instrument (OPI) developed by Dr. William Dember, Dr. Stephanie Martin, Dr. Mary Hummer, Dr. Steven Howe, and Dr. Richard Melton, at the University of Cincinnati.❞

Take This Short (1–2 mins) Test

How did you score? And what could you do to improve on that score?

We said before that we’d do a main feature on this sometime, and today’s the day! Fits with the theme of Easter too, as for those who observe, this is a time for a celebration of hope, new beginnings, and life stepping out of the shadows.

On which note, before we go any further, let’s look at a very big “why” of optimism…

There have been many studies done regards optimism and health, and they generally come to the same conclusion: optimism is simply good for the health.

Here’s an example. It’s a longitudinal study, and it followed 121,700 women (what a sample size!) for eight years. It controlled for all kinds of other lifestyle factors (especially smoking, drinking, diet, and exercise habits, as well as pre-existing medical conditions), so this wasn’t a case of “people who are healthy are more optimistic as a result. And, in the researchers’ own words…

❝We found strong and statistically significant associations of increasing levels of optimism with decreasing risks of mortality, including mortality due each major cause of death, such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, and infection.

Importantly, findings were maintained after close control for potential confounding factors, including sociodemographic characteristics and depression❞

Read: Optimism and Cause-Specific Mortality: A Prospective Cohort Study

So that’s the why. Now for the how…

Positive thinking is not what you think it is

A lot of people think of “think positive thoughts” as a very wishy-washy platitude, but positive thinking isn’t about ignoring what’s wrong, or burying every negative emotion.

Rather, it is taking advantage of the basic CBT, DBT, and, for that matter, NLP principles:

• Our feelings are driven by our thoughts
• Our thoughts can be changed by how we frame things

This is a lot like the idea that “there’s not such thing as bad weather; only the wrong clothes”. Clearly written by someone who’s never been in a hurricane, but by and large, the principle stands true.

For example…

• Most problems can be reframed as opportunities
• Replace “I have to…” with “I get to…”
• Will the task be arduous? It’ll be all the better looking back on it.
• Did you fail abjectly? Be proud that you lived true to your values anyway.

A lot of this is about focusing on what you can control. If you live your life by your values (first figure out what they are, if you haven’t already), then that will become a reassuring thing that you can always count on, no matter what.

Practice positive self-talk (eliminate the negative)

We often learn, usually as children, to be self deprecatory so as to not appear immodest. While modesty certainly has its place, we don’t have to trash ourselves to do that!

There are various approaches to this, for example:

• Replacing a self-criticism (whether it was true or not) with a neutral or positive statement that you know is true. “I suck at xyz” is just putting yourself down, “Xyz is a challenge for me” asks the question, how will you rise to it?
• Replacing a self-criticism with irony. It doesn’t matter how dripping with sarcasm your inner voice is, the words will still be better. “Glamorous as ever!” after accidentally putting mascara in your eye. “So elegant and graceful!” after walking into furniture. And so on.

Practice radical acceptance

This evokes the “optimistic nihilism” approach to life. It’s perhaps not best in all scenarios, but if you’re consciously and rationally pretty sure something is going to be terrible (and/or know it’s completely outside of your control), acknowledging that possibility (or even, likelihood) cheerfully. Borrowing from the last tip, this can be done with as much irony as you find necessary. For example:

Facing a surgery the recovery from which you know categorically will be very painful: with a big smile “Yep, I am going to be in a lot of pain, so that’s going to be fun!” (fun fact: psychological misery will not make the physical pain any less painful, so you might as well see the funny side) ← see link for additional benefits laughter can add to health-related quality of life)

Plan for the future with love

You know the whole “planting trees in whose shade you’ll never sit”, thing, but: actually for yourself too. Plan (and act!) now, out of love and compassion for your future self.

Simple example: preparing (or semi-preparing, if appropriate) breakfast for yourself the night before, when you know in the morning you’ll be tired, hungry, and/or pressed for time. You’ll wake up, remember that you did that, and…

Tip: at moments like that, take a moment to think “Thanks, past me”. (Or call yourself by your name, whatever works for you. For example I, your writer here, might say to myself “Thanks, past Nastja!”)

This helps to build a habit of gratitude for your past self and love for your future self.

This goes for little things like the above, but it also goes for things whereby there’s much longer-term delayed gratification, such as:

• Healthy lifestyle changes (usually these see slow, cumulative progress)
• Good financial strategies (usually these see slow, cumulative progress)
• Long educational courses (usually these see slow, cumulative progress)

Basically: pay it forward to your future self, and thank yourself later!

Some quick ideas of systems and apps that go hard on the “long slow cumulative progress” approach that you can look back on with pride:

• Noom—nutritional program with a psychology-based approach to help you attain and maintain your goals, long term
• You Need A Budget—we’ve recommended it before and we’ll recommend it again. This is so good. If you click through, you can see a short explanation of what makes it so different to other budgeting apps.
• Duolingo—the famously persistence-motivational language learning app