I’ve got a lot of guides on here about how to lucid dream, but not really any specifically for beginners.
This is the post that’s going to change all of that. If you know NOTHING about lucid dreaming, you should read this post and try it for yourself.
Here we go.. Lucid dreaming for dummies. (Please don’t take offense to this title, I simply mean ‘beginners’ when I say dummies).
What actually is lucid dreaming?
Lucid Dreaming is the ability to control your dreams. It’s as simple as that. It’s where you ‘wake up’ your mind, while you’re sleeping. This means you can walk around the dream as if you were awake.
It feels very real, and you can use this ability to do all kinds of awesome stuff. You can create dream scenes, stop having those annoying nightmares, and improve your confidence. I won’t go too much into what you can do with it, because I have other posts for that.
The easiest way to explain what it’s like, is to imagine yourself where you are right now. You’re probably sitting at your computer, or on your phone. Now look up and look around you. Imagine for a second, that everything you can see is just a dream. You KNOW it’s a dream.
You can still decide what to do. If you want to stand up, you can. If you want to explore the room next to yours, you can. If you want to go outside and talk to random people, you can. Exactly like real life, EXCEPT, it’s a dream.
This means you can do WHATEVER YOU WANT. If you want to climb up the side of a skyscraper, punch your boss, have sex with a celebrity, or fly around like superman you can.
You can do anything you can possibly imagine.
It might be a little difficult to imagine before you actually have one. That’s normal. The reason this post is called lucid dreaming for dummies is that I want to explain to ANYONE who wants to learn, how to get started. It doesn’t have to be confusing and difficult.
Can anyone do it?
Yes. You don’t need to have a certain IQ, or have studied psychology. Anyone can do it, almost regardless of age as well. Of course, the very young people like, 6 and below might find it a bit difficult, simply because they’re not fully aware of themselves in waking life yet.
If you can look around you in waking life, decide what to do and be aware of the fact that you’re awake, you can lucid dream.
That’s the beautiful thing about this, is that anyone can do it. Not only can everyone do it, but everyone SHOULD do it, because it has the potential to improve your life. You’ll have so much fun lucid dreaming that you’ll wonder how you ever just had a ‘normal’ nights sleep in your life! You’ll want to do this every night for the rest of your life.
How do I have a lucid dream?
To get started, you need to understand a few things.
1 – Lucid Dreaming is all about making your mind ‘wake up’ in your dreams. You can do this a number of ways. (I’ll go over some basic ways in a minute)
2 – You need to be able to actually remember the dreams you have. If you can’t do this, you won’t even know if you’ve had a lucid dream, so this is an important step. Luckily for you, it’s easy to start remembering more of your dreams.
3 – It’s as much about belief as anything else. You need to really believe that you can do this, because your mind can seriously hold you back. I learned this the long and hard way.
Sleep properly
So, without any more delay let’s get right into it. The first thing you should try and do is to make sure that you’re sleeping properly. Try and get at least 8 hours of sleep a night, so that your body can heal itself and do all the other important things it does while you’re sleeping.
You need to be in tune with your bodies natural sleep pattern. This isn’t hard to do, just set an alarm for the same time every morning, for example 8AM.
Every morning when the alarm goes off, get out of bed and start your day. After a few days, no matter what you sleep habits were like before, you’ll start to feel really tired in the evenings at the right time. Your body will be crying out for sleep because it knows when it needs to rest. Listen to it, and start going to bed and getting up at roughly the same time every day, even on weekends. do this, and everything else becomes a lot easier for you.
Do reality checks
Next, we’re going to start doing these things called ‘reality checks’.
Now this isn’t the same sort of reality check you have when you’re stumbling home after a drunken night out and you realise you’ve got work in the morning and you need to sort your life out, these are different.
A reality check is where you question whether you’re awake or asleep.
It might sound silly, but this is what you need to do in order to start having lucid dreams.
You should aim to do this about 5 or more times a day, every day. It’s important, so please don’t skip this or assume you don’t need to do it. It really will give you results if you keep with it. Now, what is a reality check and how do they work? Let’s explain it..
At the same time as asking yourself ‘Am I dreaming?’ you’re going to do a physical action. You’re going to do something physical that has a SPECIFIC outcome in the waking world.
Something that you KNOW what’s going to happen, every time. If you throw an apple up in the air, what’s going to happen? It’s going to fall down – Or at least, it will in WAKING life. Let’s look at an example. To do a reality check, hold your hands out in front of you right now.
Now, with one hand, try to push your finger through the palm of your other hand. It won’t go through, will it? Of course not. Now, this is the important part, when you try and push it through, REALLY imagine it going through.
Expect that it will easily pass through your hand. When it DOESN’T, at that moment, ask yourself ‘Am I dreaming?’.
You can ask this internally or out loud, it really doesn’t matter.
Now, the way this works is that if you do a reality check like that enough times throughout the day, EVENTUALLY (And it could be tonight, it could be a week from now) you’ll do the SAME action in your dreams.
When you do this in your dream, something totally different will happen. Whatever you expect to happen, WILL happen. In this case, your finger WILL go through your palm, and you’ll know you’re dreaming.
From that moment, you’ll be ‘lucid’ and you’ll be able to walk around the dream like you’re in The Matrix. You’ll be able to do anything, and control the dream to be whatever you want it to be.
Pretty cool, right?
There are loads of different reality checks you could do, and I have a page of different reality checks you can do if you’re interested.
You should try and change the reality check you use every few days, to keep your brain ‘on it’s toes’, so to speak. Remember, whatever reality check you do, to always ask the ‘critical question’ ‘Am I dreaming?’.
Start REMEMBERING your dreams
Now, it’s all very well and good doing these reality checks every day (Remember, do them at least 5 times a day) but if you can’t REMEMBER the dreams you do have, you’re never going to be able to lucid dream. It’s pretty easy for you to start remembering more of your dreams. When I first started, I couldn’t remember hardly ANY of my dreams.
I knew they were happening because everyone dreams every night, but I just couldn’t seem to remember them in the morning.
When I used to wake up, I used to have a ‘rough’ idea of what happened, but that was it. If I didn’t think about it in the morning, often I forgot them completely. This is probably what many of you are experiencing, or at least something similar. If you can already remember your dreams, feel free to ignore this section.
To start remembering more of your dreams, you need to start writing them down.
Now this might sound a bit silly, because you’d say ‘If I can’t remember my dreams to ebb with, how can I write them down?’. And you’re right, but you’re also wrong.
You need to start writing SOMETHING down every morning.
The point is to get your brain sued to at least TRYING to remember your dreams every morning. to do this, make sure the first thing you do when you wake up, as you’re still in bed is try and remember what you just dreamed about.
If you can’t remember anything at all, not even a little detail, then write in a notebook ‘no dreams recalled’.
Now, I say notebook, but it could be anything, a phone, laptop, notepad or even a recording of you speaking your dreams out loud. I’ve found the easiest and most common way of recording your dreams is a simple pen and paper notepad.
This way, you can keep it by your bed at all times, and it’s not going to run out of battery or distract you by showing you 345346 Facebook notifications.
The reason you’re still going to write it down even if you don’t remember anything, is that it’s training your mind to try and remember your dreams. After a few days of this, you’ll find you start remembering more and more of your dreams every morning.
Anything else I need to know?
Sometimes, when you first start lucid dreaming, you can experience a thing called ‘sleep paralysis‘.
The internet is FULL of stories about this and how scary it is, but if you do this right, it’s nothing to worry about. I have a post about sleep paralysis for more detail but I’ll sum it up here.
- When you go to sleep every night, your body paralyses your muscles so you don’t act out your dreams.
- When trying to lucid dream, sometimes you end up being ‘awake’ during this process, meaning you’re ‘stuck’ to the bed and unable to move.
- Because you’re in a state where you’re half awake and half asleep, sometimes you can see ‘scary’ things like figures standing over you, shapes, and moving objects.
If you keep reminding yourself that you’re just dreaming, this won’t be a problem. In fact, it’s a good sign because it means that you’re very close to having a lucid dream.
If you see this sort of thing and find yourself stuck to your bed, don’t panic, just relax. It is totally normal and happens to everyone, you’re just awake this time. Relax and tell yourself that in a few minutes you’ll either enter a dream and be able to control it, or you’ll wake up. Either one of the two.
That’s really all you need to know to start having lucid dreams. There are of course a lot of other things like learning superpowers and doing interesting things like flying and eating dream food but these are the basics, and will give you more than enough to get started with.
Easy enough for dummies
I told you this would be a guide for dummies. If you bookmark this guide and follow the instructions, you should have a lucid dream within a few days. Here are some very useful posts for beginners which will help you out even more:
- The senses initiated lucid dreaming technique – Possibly the easiest lucid dreaming technique, and one which is great fun to do. It will usually give you a lucid dream even if you’re not very experienced, which is great for you beginners.
- The dream induced lucid dreaming technique – This is a great one because it’s one that happens ‘naturally’. No waking up at weird times and interrupting your sleep, and no complicated relaxation techniques to learn.
- If you just want to be told exactly what to do and practice on EACH day, go through this course. I created it to help beginners who’ve never had lucid dreams to easily break through the barriers!
