If you’ve never experienced it before, you may wonder what lucid dreaming feels like.
What’s it really like? How is it different from a normal dream?
What if someone stabs me or kisses me in the dream? Is it gonna feel as real as in waking life?
I made a video, I think about five years ago, about what lucid dreaming feels like.
The problem is that a lot has changed since then and to be honest, that video was not very good.
So in this blog post, I’m going to explain exactly what lucid dreaming feels like in different categories.
For example, pain, pleasure, mind-altering experiences, and more.
Let’s dive in!
What Lucid Dreaming Feels Like
To many people, lucid dreaming is still a very mysterious subject. If you’ve never experienced it, you may wonder what it feels like. What if someone punches you in the dream? Is it gonna hurt too?
What Does Lucid Dreaming Feel Like?
In general, pain and pleasure when lucid dreaming feels similar to that of waking life but it’s not as intense. Time would also feel a bit longer and you may experience mind-altering experiences that are impossible to describe.
What do I mean by this? I will explain it to you later but let’s talk more about lucid dreaming.
Lucid Dream Definition
A lucid dream is one in which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming while still dreaming.
The dreamer can control what happens in the dream if he/she has practiced it enough. They could dictate the dream characters, storyline, or surroundings during a lucid dream.
This is not required for a dream to be regarded as lucid but it would be very cool if you know how to do it.
If you want to learn how to do that, I have this lucid breakthrough program that guarantees that you will be able to control your dreams within 2 weeks.
I’ve put a lot of effort into the program. It’s a summary of my over 10 years of experience researching, studying, practicing, and teaching lucid dreaming. If it doesn’t work, it’s free so there’s really no downside for you.
Dangers Of Lucid Dreaming
With the rise of its popularity on the internet in the last 5 years or so, lucid dreaming has been the subject of great controversy.
Lots of people are doing it but are there dangers to it?
Long story short, lucid Dreaming is not really dangerous.
Although some individuals would have you believe otherwise, it’s possible that they’ve had a horrible experience, or that they weren’t in control of their dreams, to begin with.
Maybe they watch too many horror movies or they just scare easily. You have nothing to fear if you want to try to Lucid Dream.
Having said that, neither Lucid Dreaming nor Astral Projection should be considered dangerous.
It’s all in your head. Whatever you think or believe will become reality in the dream, therefore the only thing you should think about is how much power you have over your mind.
There are a few minor dangers, but they are not as dangerous as diving with sharks, climbing a tree, or train surfing.
It’s a pretty little risk/danger, but if you’re curious about what these are, here’s a blog post about the 4 dangers of lucid dreaming.
How To Lucid Dream Step By Step
If you’re serious about learning to control your dreams and truly want them to happen, you’ll need to develop the habits you’ll need to lucid dream in the long run.
These are crucial because learning the incorrect things will cost you to not be able to lucid dream.
I wrote this blog post about the incorrect things people usually do that prevent them from lucid dreaming. You can do all the steps right but if you’re doing these wrong things, you won’t be able to lucid dream.
So that’s also important. In fact, I recommend reading that first before actually going through the full tutorial.
Again, I have a detailed step-by-step in the breakthrough course I just mentioned but if you just want a quick run-through, I also have this 6-step guide on how to lucid dream for beginners.
What Lucid Dreaming Feels Like
1: What Pain Feels Like
First, let’s talk about pain. Now the pain in a lucid dream feels very different from the pain in real life.
When you have a painful experience in a lucid dream, let’s say somebody throws a box at your head, or you get punched. You’re still going to feel that pain.
It’s gonna hurt but it won’t be the same type of intensity as it is in waking life.
In waking life, you’re going to feel the effects of the pain in two different ways: physically and mentally. Thinking about the pain also kind of reinforces the physical pain you’re already feeling.
In a dream, you don’t have physical pain. You just have the mental pain so you only have one side of what is normally a two-part pain equation.
Long story short, it doesn’t hurt as much because you only have the perception of pain instead of the actual nerve signals firing which they do when you have physical pain.
So what that means is there’s a limit and it’s not as bad when you experience pain in a dream compared to waking life.
You don’t have the physical pain.
2: What Pleasure Feels Like
Now let’s talk about pleasure. So we’re talking specifically about more sensual experiences in a dream.
What if someone kisses you? What if someone holds your hand or hugs you while whispering to your ear that you’re the most gorgeous human they’ve ever seen?
Okay, this is starting to sound like a Wattpad novel.
What if you fly or you eat a bar of the best-tasting chocolate in the world?
When you’re in a dream, they can tend to feel more pleasurable than waking life but the memory of them is of course not as pleasurable and the memory of them is not as good as the memory of real life.
That’s because in the dream, again you only have the mental aspect of the pleasure. You don’t have the physical sensations.
Your nerves are not firing in the same way or even at all compared to physical life when you have pleasure in a dream.
Mentally, it feels and seems like it’s really intense at the moment but it’s not as intense as waking life. It’s kind of similar to pain in that regard.
3: How Time Works
Okay, so here’s where things get really interesting: time dilation.
So what does time dilation feel like in a lucid dream? Well, the perception of the passing of time is vastly different in a dream compared to waking life but there are some similarities.
When you’re in a dream and you’re doing loads of crazy things, you’re having different experiences and it’s like one thing after another.
You know you’re going from adventure to adventure. What tends to happen is that you feel like lots of time is passing when it actually isn’t. Hence, the time dilation.
This is where the experience of feeling like you were in a dream for several weeks when realistically it’s only been a few minutes.
This is a bit similar to waking life when we were kids.
When I was younger and the summer holidays came around, those six weeks of holidays from school felt like years because I would do lots of activities in those six weeks.
I would go camping, go swimming, maybe go on a little trip, and do various things. Every day felt like a week because there was, there was no schedule or routine.
It was just fun, exciting things constantly for six weeks. It’s the same thing in a dream.
When you do lots of adventurous and exciting things back to back, it feels like more time is passing or at least feels like time is passing slower.
When you’re exploring the world of lucid dreaming, time would feel longer than it actually is.
4: What Mind-Altering Experiences Feel Like
So the next one is mind-altering experiences. What do these feel like in a lucid dream?
For these again it depends on the experience. So I’m going to talk about one of my experiences, which is lucid transcendence.
I’ve made a video about this, which you can find on my channel. It’s where I basically was able to dissolve the dream scene.
So I became lucid, became aware of the fact that I was dreaming, and levitated my body up.
So I was floating while laying down and dissolved everything around me. All I could see was just white light. It wasn’t coming from anywhere, it was just filling everything I could perceive.
Every space around me was white light and I experienced several emotions and different sensations all at the same time, including pain.
So it was like pain, pleasure, excitement, happiness, all these different emotions that you can think about. I experienced them all at the same time in this lucid, transcendent experience.
So that was quite overwhelming and, to be honest. There’s no other way of describing to you what that feels like.
It’s like experiencing all the emotions at the same time.
That’s just one example. There are many things you can do in lucid dreams like lucid transcendence.
You can’t really describe how these mind-altering experiences feel in your everyday waking language. You have to actually experience it.
There are some other things that you can do. For example, you can ask the dream to show you something surprising.
Now, this is something which it’s not for beginners because what will often happen is the dream will show you something so crazy that you will not be prepared for it.
But if you want an experience something crazy, then do that.
FAQs
How To Lucid Dream Fast?
To lucid dream fast, you can use the method I call the Rocket method. So you need both the rocket which is the technique and the fuel which is your mindset. Without the fuel, your rocket will not launch and vice versa.
If you want to know what I’m talking about I have this blog post about how to lucid dream in 9.7 seconds.
How To Lucid Dream Without Waking Up?
You can lucid dream without waking up by relying on background techniques. Background techniques are the techniques that don’t require you to interrupt your sleep such as the MILD and the DILD.
If you want to know more about this, check out this blog post on how to lucid dream without waking up.
Is Lucid Dreaming Same As Sleep Paralysis?
Lucid dreaming is not the same as sleep paralysis. When we move in a lucid dream, the same neurons fire as in waking life so the body paralyzes itself to keep us safe. Sleep paralysis can happen when we wake up from REM sleep but our bodies haven’t yet caught up.
What Lucid Dreaming Feels Like
So, what does lucid dreaming feel like?
Lucid dreaming feels like real life in some way but it’s not as intense.
When you feel pleasure and pain, you only have the mental aspect of the pain and not the physical aspect.
Although when it comes to pleasure, it may feel more pleasurable when you’re in the dream. But the memory of that won’t be the same.
The sensations in real life would still feel more intense because you have both the mental and physical aspects involved.
Time in a dream could also feel longer because when so much is going on in the dream.
It’s just like the school breaks we have when we were kids that felt super long because we experienced so many things in such a short period of time.
Finally, mind-altering experiences such as lucid transcendence. There’s no way describe what it feels like.
Overwhelming doesn’t even cut it. You’d feel all the emotions at the same time.
All I can say is that you have to experience it yourself.
Now you’ve learned what lucid dreaming feels like. Have you been able to lucid dream? What did the experience feel like for you?
Let me know in the comments!
