You want to lucid dream, but you DON’T want to have that crushing, awful sleep paralysis experience, right? I’ve got you covered.
In this guide, I’m going to explain how you can lucid dream without ever needing to experience sleep paralysis, and how it all works. Sit back, get comfortable and pour yourself a drink (Lots of bloggers say that now, so apparently it’s the done thing?).
How sleep paralysis works
So before we get started, let’s just think a little bit about how sleep paralysis actually works. It’s what your body does in order to STOP you acting out your dreams and hurting yourself. It’s a good thing, and most of us don’t experience it, because we’re already asleep when it happens.
You see, lucid dreaming is something that gets inside of the natural process of falling asleep (IF you use certain techniques which we’ll explain shortly). So for some lucid induction methods, you’re stopping your mind going to sleep naturally, and therefore you experience sleep paralysis.
So it’s the act of KEEPING our minds awake that makes us experience scary sleep paralysis, but the good news is that we don’t need to keep our mind awake in order to lucid dream! Now, this is where it really depends on HOW you’re trying to lucid dream.
If you’re trying to lucid dream with certain techniques, you’re GOING to get sleep paralysis and in fact, it’s one of the steps of the technique! We’ll get into techniques you can use that don’t invovle this paralysis stage in a minute.
Before we go on, bare in mind that sleep paralysis is a good thing because it stops you kicking around and hurting yourself while you’re dreaming. You don’t want to be dreamnig about flying and then suddenly wake up to find you’ve kicked your partner in the thigh!
Why you experience sleep paralysis when trying to lucid dream
So as we’ve said, SP happens when you use a lucid dreaming technique that involves keeping your mind awake while your body falls asleep, so this includes:
- The WILD technique (And variants of it like the CANWILD and others)
- The WBTB technique
Because those methods involve waking up in the early hours of the morning, then going BACK to sleep with the intention of lucid dreaming. This means you’ll almost certainly experience sleep paralysis, because you’re TRYING to keep your mind awake.
Everyone HAS sleep paralysis every night (unless you have a sleep disorder and sleep walk etc). If we didn’t, we’d be walking around in the night as well! It’s just a case of whether or not you’re AWARE of it. Now, there are lots of techniques you can use to lucid dream that DON’T involve keeping your mind awake throughout sleep paralysis.
How to lucid dream without sleep paralysis
Here’s some methods you can use to lucid dream without sleep paralysis that you can try tonight. These should work for everyone, because the reason we experience sleep paralysis is because we try and keep our minds awake while our bodies fall asleep, but these techniques don’t do that.
To avoid having loads of blog posts talking about and containing the same words and techniques, I’m not going to explain how to do these methods here, but I will link to them. WHat you’re aiming for here, is to induce a lucid dream as naturally as possible.
So you want to build up habits like:
- Reality checking every day until it becomes second nature
- Writing your dreams down every morning in detail
- Improving how much you remember about your dreams (dream recall)
- Meditating once in the morning and once in the evening
Lucid dreaming techniques that don’t involve sleep paralysis
So once you’ve got those habits down and they’re part of your daily routines, there are some techniques you can use to lucid dream that don’t involve sleep paralysis:
- The MILD method: An easy beginner friendly method to lucid dream without having to induce it directly.
- Using video gaming to induce lucid dreams naturally using the Tetris effect (essentially by playing lots fo video games, you just become that much more likely to lucid dream randomly)
- Writing induced lucid dreams (This is about setting your INTENTION to lucid dream so that it happens on its own)
Final words
So although this hasn’t been the longest post, it’s hopefully showed you a few things about lucid dreaming with no sleep paralysis. You don’t have to experience that scary crushing feeling just to lucid dream! I certainly don’t and I know you don’t want to either. Here are some useful tools for you:
- MY UDEMY COURSE: This is a brand new Udemy course on lucid dreaming including HOURS of video content and you can get an exclusive discount on it with the code ‘HOWTOLUCID’ (If you click on this link).
- The 30 Day Lucid Dreaming Bootcamp: Our own unique 30 day lucid dreaming bootcamp (downloadable course) which has grown into the most effective course on the internet! It tells you exactly what to practice every day for 30 days.
