What Are Lucid Dreams? What They Really Feel Like

Most descriptions of lucid dreams promise a world you can bend at will, where you fly over cities and summon anyone you like. The real definition is much smaller, and more interesting for it: a lucid dream is a dream in which you know you're dreaming. Control sometimes comes along with that knowledge and often doesn't, and the first lucid dreams most people have are over in a few seconds. Here's what lucid dreams are, what they feel like from the inside, and how much of them you can actually steer.

What are lucid dreams?#

A lucid dream is a dream in which you become aware that you're dreaming while the dream is still going on.^[1] You're still asleep, usually in REM sleep, the stage of the night when most vivid dreams happen (what REM sleep is explains it). But part of your mind has caught up with the situation. It can be a brief flash of "wait, this is a dream". Or it can be a long stretch of clear thinking, in which you remember who you are, that your body is lying in bed and what you'd planned to try.

Lucid here means clear-headed, as in a lucid moment, and has nothing to do with brightness, which is the first thing worth knowing about the lucid dream meaning. The dream doesn't have to look any sharper than usual. What makes it lucid is that you've noticed, but the scenery, the people and the plot can carry on exactly as before.

It's also more common than people tend to think. About 55% of people have had at least one lucid dream, and 23% have one a month or more.^[2] So if you're wondering whether that odd dream last week counted, the test is simple. Did you know, at the time, that you were dreaming? If yes, it was a lucid dream, however short or blurry it was. And most of us start young, because lucid dreams are more frequent in children and teenagers than in adults (the FAQ about lucid dreams goes into how often they happen and to whom).

What does a lucid dream feel like?#

Ask people about their first lucid dream and you'll hear the same story many times over. Something in the dream was off, they realised it was a dream, they had a moment to look around, and they woke up. The lucid dreams of beginners tend to be fleeting, but not because anything went wrong, since the excitement of realising is often what ends them. People who have lucid dreams regularly put their average length at about 14 minutes, though that's their own estimate.^[3]

Inside, the dream doesn't switch to high definition, whatever the forums promise. When psychologists built a questionnaire to measure lucidity, the feeling that the dream looked real didn't separate lucid dreams from ordinary ones at all, and neither did fear.^[4] What changes is you. You can think in full sentences, remember your waking life and decide what to do next, and that's what makes the experience so strange and, for most people, so much fun.

Frederik van Eeden, the Dutch psychiatrist who named lucid dreams in 1913 after recording 352 of his own, tested the edges of his dream world like an experiment.^[5] In one dream, fully aware that he was dreaming, he hit a fine wine glass with his fist as hard as he could. It stayed whole, and when he looked at it again a moment later, it was broken.

He came away with the impression of a fake world, cleverly made but with small failures. Then he tasted the wine in the same dream and noted, quite calmly, that it tasted of wine. Does time in a lucid dream have the same small failures? It does, a little. Lucid dreamers in one lab counted, walked a set number of steps or did a short gymnastics routine in a dream, signalling with their eyes at the start and the end. Every task took longer than it did awake.^[6]

Walking took about half as long again as it would have in your bedroom, while counting came out closer to waking time (with only five people counting, that difference may even be chance). So time in a lucid dream runs roughly as it does awake, but a little slower for anything that involves moving your dream body.

Can you control a lucid dream?#

Sometimes, and less often than the promises suggest, because knowing you're dreaming and changing the dream are two separate skills. In one study only 37% of lucid dreamers said they could manipulate their dreams. And among people who have lucid dreams regularly, the easiest thing to control is their own dream body, which works about two times in three. Changing the scenery, or simply staying lucid once you're there, works less than half the time.^[7]

Plans fail in their own ways, too. Lucid dreamers set out to fly, talk to a dream character or have sex, but what stopped them most often was waking up, or the dream itself getting in the way (the door that won't open, the character who walks off). Control does grow with practice, though. People who have lucid dreams more often have more of it, and so do people who score higher on mindfulness.

Sergey Babenkov, Unsplash

If the dream keeps slipping away from you, the guide to stabilising a lucid dream has ways to hold on to it. And for when you can, things to try in your next lucid dream has ideas. Start with small things, like looking at your hands or walking through a door, before you try to change the sky.

What happens in a lucid dream?#

For a long time scientists doubted that lucid dreams existed, since nobody could check from the outside what a sleeper claimed. That changed when lucid dreamers in sleep labs moved their eyes in a pattern agreed before bed, left-right-left-right. The recordings showed them in REM sleep at the very moment they said they had become lucid (are lucid dreams real tells that story).

Researchers in four labs later went one step further and talked to dreamers while they slept.^[8] One of them was a young man who had only had two lucid dreams before. During a daytime nap he signalled with his eyes that he was lucid, and a researcher read out a sum, 8 minus 6. Within three seconds he answered 2, with two left-right eye movements, and did it again when the question was repeated. When he woke, he said he'd been dreaming about his favourite video game.

It didn't always work. Over 158 attempts, dreamers gave a clearly correct answer 18% of the time and a clearly wrong one only 3%, and the rest were unclear or got no answer at all. A participant in Germany said the questions came through like a radio playing in the car he was dreaming about. Both are signs that a lucid dreamer is still dreaming, with one channel open to the outside, and the neuroscience of lucid dreams goes into what the brain is doing while it happens.

Why lucid dreams are worth having#

Most people who try lucid dreaming want the experience itself, and that's reason enough. Few things we can do in bed are as surprising as realising we're in a dream and getting to look around. Some people go further, and use lucid dreams to rehearse a skill or to face a recurring nightmare (what lucid dreams can be used for goes through them). Others simply want to see what their own mind comes up with when they ask it. For most people they're also harmless, and can lucid dreaming harm you covers the few exceptions.

Ed Vázquez, Unsplash

If you'd like to have one on purpose, the method with the best evidence is laid out in how to lucid dream. Oniri's lucid dreaming app also walks you through it one night at a time. The first success is rarely what people picture. Van Eeden's own first glimpse, in 1897, wasn't flying or control at all. He was floating through a landscape of bare trees and noticed how naturally the branches shifted as he moved past them, and he realised that his imagination could never have invented anything so detailed.