If you’re here, we assume you already know what lucid dreams are and why they are awesome! If not, we advise you to read our introduction article: Lucid dreams: what they are, and why they are awesome.
Learning to have lucid dreams can be a long process. You have to be motivated and to believe in yourself! You WILL have a lucid dream, at some point. Setting your intention will increase your chances to become lucid.The lucidity in dreams is a wide spectrum from simple awareness of the dream to greater degrees of thought clarity and dream control. Your first lucid dreams will probably be quite short and not so vivid; but they will get longer and clearer with practice.Finally, in the process of learning, realizing that you are dreaming will often wake you up, thus breaking your precious sleep cycles. Remember to find a healthy balance between your sleep and your training to achieve lucid dreams!
So how do we have lucid dreams? Well, there are a lot of different techniques out there. Some imply meditating to directly enter a lucid dream while falling asleep; others rely on realizing the dream and turning lucid during it. But first, let’s start the preparations! You have to make the idea of lucid dreaming grow in your mind; make lucid dreams an important subject in your thoughts.
Then, the very first step of this process is to build your dream recall. What would be the point of lucid dreaming if you won’t remember it anyway? So, there are many ways to do so, but the better way is by writing your dreams in a journal: we tell you all about it in our article “How to keep a good dream journal.” That way, you will practice remembering details of your dreams, grow interested, and make your dreams more important in your mind. Of course, you can grab a pen and a paper, or you can download Oniri, the dream journal app we made on iOS, which might be very helpful.
As a second step, we suggest that at least the first week of your training, you start with a very basic technique to perform while keeping your dream journal: reality checks. This technique is based on a simple yet powerful idea: becoming able to tell if you’re in a dream or in reality by remembering to actually check for it.You may be thinking, “I CAN tell the difference between reality and dreams!”. But the fact is, we only realize we were dreaming when we woke up. When we are immersed in a dream, things seem normal, and we don’t question the nature of our reality.Therefore we need a test that will always tell us if we’re dreaming or not, and yes, even during the day. By making the reality checks a habit, you increase the chances of remembering to do one in your dream. The point of reality checks is that while your brain is building a dream world and trying to fool you, you will try to find the mistakes in this “fake world.” To do so, there are a few effective ways (The palm press, Interact with objects, etc.) that we explain in our tutorials in our app Oniri.
Then, there are a lot of techniques to learn to actively control your dreams, once you gain your lucidity. To learn more about them, you can find dedicated tutorials in our app Oniri, that explain the most popular techniques in the lucid dreaming community linked to different features in the app.
