So to save you the trouble of researching and looking up all the awesome things you can use lucid dreaming for, we’ve complied a giant list of the REAL, practical uses for lucid dreaming. If this doesn’t convince you, nothing will!
This is sort of related to our list of 40 things to do in a lucid dream, but this list is more focused on what you can use lucid dreaming for in the real world, in terms of what you can achieve or improve in your waking life by lucid dreaming. It’s a collection of practical, real life uses for this skill.
1. Removing fears and phobias
One of the coolest things lucid dreaming can be used for is to remove fear from your life. Fear is all in the mind, as explained in ‘After Earth’ Fear is a choice. It’s a product of the thoughts WE CREATE.. therefore, through controlling your dreams you’re able to understand your fear and remove it. Here’s a little video clip of that idea:
2. Emotional healing of past pain
Everyone’s been hurt, or experienced some sort of hurt throughout their life, but it’s important to let it go and move on, become stronger through the experience. Lucid Dreaming can be used to heal yourself from these past pains. In a dream you can conjure up the bad situation you experienced, whether it’s a bad breakup or losing someone close to you, and you are able to get closure on the situation by expressing how you truly feel to the situation in the dream.
3. Smashing job interviews
Job interviews are tricky! They can be very nerve racking and some people find it much easier when they’re practiced, BUT you can never practice the entire interview in real life, because unless you can hire actors to play the part of the interviewer, you’re going to have to use friends or family. This makes it less realistic and you don’t practice as effectively. With a Lucid Dream, you can create the entire interview situation, and practice how you’re going to act.
4. Getting ‘used to’ bad situations
Kind of related to the one above, but you can use a lucid dream to get used to bad situations so that when they actually happen, (they probably will at some point) you’re more equipped to deal with them! I know this is a slightly morbid one, but for example, if you practice escaping a sinking car, or fighting off an attacker trying to mug you, you’ll be more ready to deal with it than if you didn’t practice it.
It’s like training your mind to be ready for such situations, because that’s the main thing you’ll need to have is a strong mindset. Practice surviving on desert islands, hunting for food, fighting off attackers and running to escape people in your lucid dreams, and your mind will be ‘practicing and training’ for these types of situation should they ever arise.
Studies have shown that by ‘thinking’ about a certain thing you activate the same pathways in your brain as if you were actually doing it, meaning that there are measurable and physical benefits to practicing things in a dream or even just thinking about them.
5. Acting out wild story lines
If you’ve ever had a crazy idea for a fantasy, like maybe you want to be a superhero and ride a giant bunny around the city hunting bad guys then you can do this! Lucid Dreaming can be used to do almost anything, the only limitations are your own mind and what you want to do or what you believe you can do.
6. Practicing skills and really improving
You can activate the same pathways in your brain by thinking about things or by dreaming about them, meaning that you literally become better at things by thinking about them or dreaming about doing them. You can use this to improve at a skill while dreaming.. Pretty cool, right?
7. Writing music and getting inspiration for art
Many famous musical tracks have been written in a lucid dream. These types of dreams have been used for many years to inspire music, art, poetry, scientific and even mathematical problems! The famous melting clock was inspired by a lucid dream!
8. Learning to drive faster
If you’re just starting to learn to drive, you can practice things like clutch control and driving around in a dream! When I first started learning to drive, I sped up the process by honing my clutch control skills in my dreams. Because your mind has experienced the clutch and how it works in the car, you’re able to emulate this in a dream because you know how the clutch SHOULD behave. Try it out!
9. Improving your confidence
Confidence is something which can be built up with just a few easy techniques. Practice the aspect of confidence you wish to build in your dreams. If you’d like to become better at talking to the opposite sex, go and find a dream nightclub and start talking to them! If you’re lucid, you’ll likely have no limitations and you won’t be bound or limited by social conventions and your perceived confidence.
10. Fulfilling wild sexual fantasies
Dream sex can be great fun, and there are all sorts of things you can do with it in a lucid dream. As explained before, your mind creates a feeling in your dream that emulates the real life version of it, except you’re able to amplify the good bits, meaning you can experience powerful lucid orgasms and sensual experiences. You could also have this type of experience with anyone you want, while dreaming.
11. Releasing anger that’s been built up
If you’ve got some anger built up inside you and want to release it, you can do this in a dream. Simple call up a horde of zombies or random people to fight you and observe how much kung fu you really know! All those action films and martial arts videos you’ve seen can actually be put to use here!
12. Exploring interesting alien worlds
ou have the ability to explore alien worlds and it’s something lucid dreaming can be used for if you’d like to get inspiration for things like stories or music in this way. The mind can create amazing other worlds for you to discover and experience, and it’s going to feel like you’re discovering them, even though your mind is really ‘creating’ them. I share a lucid story about a time when I did just this.
13. Getting higher levels of inspiration
Inspiration can be hard to come by sometimes, it’s even referred to as writers block by people trying to get ideas for a story, but can’t seem to find any. Lucid Dreaming can be used to get awesome amounts of inspiration for things like this. The nature of dreams allows you to see things in ways which you would not normally see them. Ideas, people, places and feelings are mixed together in an explorable dreamworld.
14. Re-visiting old long relatives or friends
Death is a part of life, it’s all natural. We’ve all lost someone close to us at some point, either through death or just through them moving away or just from them becoming distant. Lucid Dreaming can be used to reconnect with these people, using your memory of them. Your mind can construct a lifelike and very vivid/real version of them in your dreams, allowing you to experience more time with them or say things you maybe never had the chance to say when they were around.
15. Talking to your subconscious mind
Your mind is divided into two basic sections, (there are more, but for the purposes of this article..) and those are the CONSCIOUS mind and the SUB-CONSCIOUS mind. The conscious part is the one that we use to make our decisions. It’s the part of you that’s aware and can decide what to do, where to go and what to say. The other part, the sub-conscious mind is the larger much more powerful part of your brain.
This part of you is used to control things like your breathing, internal temperature, interpreting all the millions of signals your mind receives every second, your organs, hormones, muscles and a lot more. It’s the part of your mind that you don’t have much control over, and it is in charge of things like your fears, love, your feelings, emotions and almost everything that makes you YOU.
In a lucid dream, you’re able to TALK to this part of your brain, as if it were a person! The dream characters in your lucid dreams are projections of parts of your subconscious mind and each one represents something different. Go and talk to them, ask them questions, and learn more about yourself!
16. Lucid dreaming can be used for escapism
Life can get too much sometimes, but you can use lucid dreaming to escape it all and experience what you WANT to experience. If you want to lay on a beach and relax, then you can! Sure you could just book a holiday in real life, but you’re still not escaping from life, as such. There are still bills to pay, you’d have to pay for your flights etc.. In a dream, you get pure escapism to a deserted island if you wish, where everything is free and the weather is always perfect.
17. Question your reality
From a young age, I questioned everything around me. I would ask my father how things worked, and car journeys were a long series of random questions like why do we drive around in cars, why do birds make noise at all etc.. This questioning is really healthy and forces you to be mindful of where you are, why you’re here and what you can do to change it.
18. Solving complex problems
Lucid Dreaming can be used to solve problems. Many problems were solved when the person ‘slept on it’ and had a vivid dream explaining what the answer was and how they could use it. The mind is able to see things in a way that they would not normally see them in a dream.
19. Learning what you want in life
Your life purpose. More often than not, your subconscious mind knows what you want better than your conscious mind, so go find a dream character, and ask him/her what you want in life. Say you’re in a lucid dream and you just want to learn more about yourself.
20. Learning how you feel about certain people
The way you feel about people is often reflected in your dream by the particular dream characters you see. We wrote a post explaining more about this, but basically you’re able to interpret the feelings you have for people by the WAY in which they show up in your dreams.
21. Discovering your true feelings
In the same way as the above benefit works, you can use lucid dreaming to find out more about yourself, and how you feel about your body, confidence, and the things you’ve done. Your ‘self image’ as it’s called, the way you feel about yourself. To try this one out, go into a lucid dream and ask the dream out loud, ‘What do I feel about myself?’.
More things lucid dreaming can be used for?
The truth is, there are so many things you can use lucid dreaming for that one list would just not be able to cover them all. You can use it for everything from playing out sexual fantasies to seeing what it’s like to drive a limo. The only limitations are those in your own mind.
Getting started with lucid dreaming
If you’ve read this, the chances are you just want to get started with lucid dreaming and actually have one, right? Even if you already know how, there are some things you can do to make your lucid dreams that much more exciting, useful, healthy and fun!
- Get our bootcamp and just go through it. We can’t stress this enough, if you follow the steps (it’s a printable 30 day calendar template with an ebook to match) you WILL lucid dream, fast
- Optimise your brain for lucid dreams by taking a dream pill and listening to lucid dream inducing soundwaves
- If you’re not convinced yet, check out another huge list of things you could do in a lucid dream
