Lucid dreaming exercises are things you can do to train your mind to become self aware. Chances are you know a little bit about Lucid Dreaming, so we’ll start from here.
Let’s assume for the purposes of this article that you –
- Know how to lucid dream and how it’s supposed to work
- Have a basic dream recall skill level and can remember your dreams
- Meditate every morning or at least every week
That will just make this a lot easier, and I can speak in a more concise way. I’m going to share some Lucid Dreaming exercises and techniques that can help you get the most out of your dreaming life.
What exercises are they? Well, they’re things I personally do on a semi-daily basis to just get more Lucid Dreams! It’s as simple as that. I’ll start with the first lucid exercise so hopefully you can see what I mean.
Exercise 1 – Reality Check anchoring
This is something that will help you get your reality checks in but also ANCHOR the thought of doing a reality check to a specific action, time, event, person, place or feeling. What does this mean?
Let’s say you have trouble remembering to do reality checks, what you could do is tell yourself to do a reality check every time you go into a certain room. If it’s hard to remember this at first, write out a little note and stick it to the doorframe of that room.
Whenever you go in the bathroom, for example, do a reality check. You could also anchor reality checks to things like specific actions such as the following –
- Whenever you hear laughter
- Whenever you see a flower
- Every time you see your reflection
- Whenever you handle money
- Each time you have a shower/bath
- And so on..
Practice anchoring reality checks to little things like this every day. Things that happen a few times throughout your week, but not TOO often that it becomes a burden and stops you doing things in your day.
Why do this?
It trains your ‘prospective memory’.
This means your memory for things that you need to do in the future. This is important because by remembering to do reality checks in the future when ‘triggered’ by something, you’ll also remember to do them in the dream.
In fact, this is probably THE cure for people who find it hard to get reality checks to show up in their dreams. Just anchor the reality check to something that happens fairly regularly in a week, and you’ll find that the reality checks start showing up in the dream.
Reality checks are the most common problem people have when trying to lucid dream. I’ve created a complete troubleshooting guide to reality checks for exactly that reason, and it guarantees that your reality checks will work and you’ll lucid dream!
Exercise 2 – Imagine what the Lucid Dream will be like
Spend time each day thinking about what you would do if you were in a lucid dream. This Lucid dreaming exercise works by preparing your mind for the experience.
If you’re not having many lucid dreams, this exercise is probably the most important. You need your mind to prepare for the experience, and invite it. As in waking life, what you focus on tends to expand, or in other words – What you focus on, you get more of.
If you want to have more lucid dreams, then spend time imagining what they’ll be like.
Exercise 3 – Practice Superpowers
Let’s say you want to fly in a lucid dream. Spend a little bit of time maybe every day, or every other day imagining what it will feel like. Literally spend 20 minutes just sitting there with your eyes closed and imagine how it would feel to have that superpower.
Read that again, and please don’t confuse it with the exercises before it. What I’m talking about with this one is to vividly imagine the feeling in waking life, and imagine and see yourself acting out the things you want to do.
Imagine the feeling of flying through the air at great speeds, feel the air rushing through your hair and feel the power within you as you soar through the sky.
- What can you hear?
- What can you see?
- What do you FEEL?
Imagining it vividly like this will make it so much more likely that you’ll be able to do it in the dream, when you become Lucid. Oh, also when you’re imagining it, don’t imagine any negative situations. Don’t imagine yourself flying and then looking down and ‘doubting’ your ability, or falling. This is not going to be good when you recreate the scene in a lucid dream!
This and many more superpowers like teleporting, dream hacking and time travel are all covered here in the superpowers manual.
Exercise 4 – Meditate before bed
Even just ten minutes’ meditation before going to sleep can seriously improve your chances of having a lucid dream. Did you know that?
Maybe you’ve heard it before but just haven’t tried it yet. Well, today I’m inviting you to try it for 10 days. Every night before bed, meditate just for 10 minutes. That’s a short time that most people can manage to fit in somehow.
Even that small meditation session repeated for 10 days will give you improved dreams and a better mental state. (You’ll notice that you feel better throughout the following day as well, as a side effect).
Exercise 5 – Think about Lucid Storylines
Here’s something I like to do before bed and the next morning.
I think up advanced complicated storylines and adventures that I could go on.
I lay there and think up all the possible things that could happen.. For example –
Maybe I’ll start off as an ant, and then there will be an attack on our colony, and I have to step up to defend our nest from attacking hornets.. And then as I stand up ready to fight them off, the hornets tell me they’re trying to improve our way of life.
They want to improve our technology and work together. The next thing I know, I’m in human form again, but aliens are invading us! I use what I learned from the hornets and tell people that it will all be okay, and that the aliens are probably trying to help us.
And so on.. You get the idea. See how complex you can think up the storylines, and then just get lost in it.
I have found actually that doing this resulted in random unplanned Wake Induced Lucid Dreams. Letting your imagination run like this can give you surprising results!
Tips and tricks
These lucid exercises won’t do anything for you unless you try them. It’s like most of the techniques on this site and in my lucid dreaming guide – Unless you practice them not much will happen. Here are some more tips:
- Try the mirror experiment or read about other lucid dreaming experiments and ideas you can explore
- These exercises and many more are laid out in a 3 day printable template for you to follow. This is the most effective way to lucid dream because it tells you what to do on each day!
