How to Lucid Dream: Practical Tools for Awakening Dreaming Consciousness
I just gave a talk at the Shambhala Center in San Diego on what it’s like to pursue a path of lucid dreaming, and posted the recording to Youtube. The room was mostly longtime meditators, plus people who lucid dream or are simply fascinated by it.
Whether you're curious, seasoned, or barely remember your dreams, there's something in it for you: a lucidity cheat code you can practice any time of day, how to protect your sleep, what almost made me quit lucid dreaming (and how I overcame it), and answers to the questions people actually asked.
Here are a few tidbits to whet your lucidity appetite.
Is lucid dreaming a chore?
Have you ever thought lucid dreaming would be too much work? So many people tell me it sounds like one more thing on their to-do list. They already put so much effort into working on themselves during the day, and nighttime is the one place they get to…just…turn off.
But REM sleep is already doing emotional processing and problem-solving while you sleep. What if some of the work you're doing in the daytime could be done better by tending to your dreams, and what if lucidity could amplify that? I know this is possible, from my own practice and from my work with lucid dreaming therapy patients.
You also don't have to work that hard to get there. In the talk I share a relaxed approach that protects your sleep, so you can bring lucidity into your life without spending more energy on it than you want to. Here's a hint: I take a relaxed approach to lucidity in my own life. I don't go chasing it. Lucidity comes to me!
I also guide the room through a short memory training exercise you can try tonight.
Lucid dreaming isn't about control
Most people think lucid dreaming is about controlling your dreams. But it's really about creativity and connection.
That control rhetoric is everywhere, and it leads people to misunderstand lucid dreaming and miss out on its many gifts. You end up using the state to avoid or escape things your dreaming mind wants you to face. Or you think you're supposed to have omnipotence over your dreams, when lucid dreams really don’t work that way. Western lucid dream researchers, who emphasize control (or the now trendier term, dream engineering) also tend to forget that lucid dreaming has a millennia-old context in the Tibetan yogas of dream and sleep, which do not emphasize control as the purpose of lucid dreaming.
In this talk, I share other ways to orient yourself in the state that drop the control mindset.
I also share what happened when a meditation practitioner at a retreat asked me to settle the control debate once and for all, and how my answer changed his mind.
What almost made me quit lucid dreaming
Within days of picking up Stephen LaBerge's Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, I was having my own lucid dreams. Later I tried learning wake-initiated lucid dreaming (WILD), which immensely improved my practice.
Then I met my shadow, and it was in the form of nightmares.
Stuck in sleep paralysis, night after night. A mummy under my bed. The girl from the movie, The Ring, on my floor. Knowing it was a dream didn't help at all. I wondered if this was the end of my journey as a lucid dreamer.
So I turned to Dr. LaBerge. What he coached me to do…I didn't want to hear or accept at first. I trusted his advice regardless, and it helped me stop those nightmares completely. It also began showing me firsthand why lucid dreaming extends far beyond any sort of control paradigm.
How it happened is in the talk.
Contextual dreamsigns aren’t enough
A dream sign is anything in your dream that's impossible, improbable, or just dreamlike for you. You pair these with awareness that you’re dreaming using a simple memory training strategy.
The catch is that broad dream signs (I'm in my childhood home, I'm back in high school) rarely trigger lucidity. We're just fully in it. It’s kind of like that cool lucid dream-like movie, eXistenZ with Jude Law. You're so immersed in the other reality that sometimes you just forget that you’re in the game…
In the talk, audience members share their own dreamsigns, from recurring dreams to flying that feels completely normal, and we work out what makes some cues so much better than others. One of the best might be your own thinking….my personal favorite class of dreamsign for getting lucid.
A lucid dreaming cheat code
We usually conclude we're awake without a second thought, and we have that same certainty in dreams. That's why most of us miss our chance to get lucid. How can we optimize our memory training so that we remember to notice dream-like things, and accurately assess our state?
In the talk I share a simple cheat code you can practice any time of day. It takes a few seconds, and it makes becoming lucid a lot more foolproof.
Questions from the room
The Q&A gets into the nitty gritty. The audience gave some hyper-specific questions you likely have about lucid dreaming too: alarms vs. natural awakenings, what to do if you barely remember your dreams, when you’re stuck in sleep paralysis, why the impossible feels normal while you're dreaming, and lucid dreaming with insomnia or sleep apnea.
Keep practicing
It can be easy to get started in this practice but hard to know how to sustain and nurture it. That's why I run the Lucid Dreaming Practice Group, a small monthly group for people serious about exploring lucidity. One hour a month, guided, with replays included.
Thank you to the Shambhala community for hosting.
Kristen LaMarca, PhD, DBSM is a clinical psychologist and board-certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist. She has trained with Stephen LaBerge since 2007 and is the author of Learn to Lucid Dream: Powerful Techniques for Awakening Consciousness and Creativity
Educational content, not medical or psychological advice. Always talk with your provider for any health-related concerns.
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