How to Lucid Dream: A Step-by-Step Guide

About half of us have had at least one lucid dream, a dream in which you know you're dreaming while it carries on around you.^[1] Having them on purpose is a skill you can learn. But most guides on how to lucid dream hand you a dozen techniques in no particular order. And they usually start with the one that did the least when it was put to the test. Here is the method that has worked best on real sleepers, step by step, and what to do in the few seconds after you realize you're dreaming.

Can anyone learn to lucid dream?#

Yes, and you may have more of a head start than you think. Children have lucid dreams more often than adults do, and the dreams become rarer from about the age of 16.^[2] As an adult, you can bring them back with practice. In one of the largest tests of lucid dreaming techniques, 355 people aged 18 to 84 practised at home for a week. The ones who had never tried a technique before did about as well as those who had.^[3]

The skill underneath is closer to remembering to buy milk on the way home than to anything mystical. Psychologists call it prospective memory, the kind of memory that reminds you to do something later. How do you remember to do something when you're asleep? The technique with the best results plants one intention before you fall asleep (notice that I'm dreaming), so that it comes back to you in the middle of a dream.

How to lucid dream in 5 steps#

The five steps below are built around the one combination that has held up in real tests. You wake up in the night, then use MILD (short for mnemonic induction of lucid dreams) as you fall back asleep. Steps 1 and 5 are for every day. Steps 2 to 4 are for the nights you try, and you don't need to try every night, since the alarm takes a bite out of your sleep. Weekends, or any night you can sleep in a little, are a good place to start.

1. Remember your dreams first#

We all dream several times a night, but you can't notice you're dreaming in a dream you won't remember in the morning, so dream recall comes before everything else. In that study of 355 people, the ones who remembered more dreams also had more lucid dreams. On the mornings they had one, they recalled 2.8 dreams on average, against 1.7 on the others. Keep a notebook or your phone by the bed and write down whatever you remember before you get up, even if it's only a feeling or a single image. If you usually wake up with nothing, start with how to remember more dreams and give it a week or two before you go further.

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A dream journal also shows you your dream signs, the people, places and situations that keep coming back night after night (your old school, a sister, a car with brakes that don't work). Those are the things most likely to make you stop and wonder if you're dreaming, and you'll use them in step 3. A dream journal app lets you record a dream by voice with your eyes still half closed, which makes it much easier to keep the habit going at 3am.

2. Set an alarm for five hours after you fall asleep#

Our dreams get longer and more vivid as the night goes on, because most REM sleep, the stage when vivid dreams happen, comes in the last few hours before morning. Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) makes use of that. You set an alarm for about five hours after you fall asleep and get up for a short while. Then you go back to bed right into the part of the night when our dreams are longest. The studies with the best results woke people after four and a half to five hours, so if you fall asleep at 11pm, that's an alarm somewhere around 4am.

When the alarm goes off, get out of bed, but keep the lights low and stay off your phone (it's the fastest way to be wide awake for an hour). Write down the dream you just woke up from, if there was one, and go over the next two steps in your head. You want to be properly awake, but not so awake that falling back asleep becomes a problem, and that balance is what step 4 is about.

3. Repeat the MILD phrase as you fall back asleep#

Back in bed, go over the dream you just woke up from, or a recent one. Find the moment that should have told you it was a dream (a dead grandparent at the table, a house with one room too many, one of your dream signs). Then imagine yourself back in that dream, but this time you spot it and say to yourself "I'm dreaming". While you picture it, repeat a phrase in your head, and the one used in the studies is "Next time I'm dreaming, I will remember I'm dreaming." Keep the picture and the phrase going until the intention feels settled, then let yourself drift off.

In the first large test of MILD, Australians who combined it with the night-time alarm had a lucid dream on about one morning in six over the week they tried it.^[4] That may not sound like much, but it's one lucid dream for every six tries, from a routine that costs you a few minutes in the middle of the night.

4. Fall back asleep within ten minutes#

This is the step most guides leave out, and it's one of the few things the studies found to make a clear difference, and it's the easiest one to get wrong. In the Australian study, people who fell asleep within five minutes of finishing MILD had a lucid dream on 46% of those nights. The larger international study found a smaller gap with a ten-minute cutoff, but the direction was the same.

So if you're still lying there twenty minutes later, repeating the phrase like a mantra, it's fine to stop and just go to sleep. Spending longer on the technique didn't help either. People in the international study spent about nine minutes on it on average, and those who spent more time had no more lucid dreams than those who spent less. This is also why the time you stay up after the alarm should be short, and why reading on your phone in bed is a bad way to fill it.

5. Plan what you'll do once you're lucid#

Most first lucid dreams are short, because the excitement of realizing you're dreaming is often enough to wake you up. What will you do in the first few seconds, and what with the rest of the dream? Both are much easier to decide in bed the night before than in the moment. Many lucid dreamers look at their hands or rub them together, touch a wall, or simply tell themselves to stay calm, and stabilizing a lucid dream covers the tricks that help it last.

Then have one simple plan for the rest of the dream, like flying over the roofs or asking the next person you meet who they are. Write it down before bed and think about it as you fall asleep, so it's the first thing on your mind when the moment comes. If you need ideas, there's a list of things to try in your next lucid dream.

What about reality checks?#

Reality checks are the first tip in almost every guide, and the idea makes sense. You check if you're awake many times a day (look at your hands, push a finger against your palm, read a clock twice). The hope is that the habit carries into a dream, where the clock reads differently and your finger goes through your hand. But when reality checks were tested on their own, they didn't increase lucid dreams. In the international study, adding them to MILD didn't help either, and many people found them a chore and kept forgetting to do them. An earlier review of 35 studies had already found that no technique produced lucid dreams reliably, though MILD with a night-time wake-up looked the most promising of the lot.^[5]

If you enjoy reality checks, keep them, they never hurt. They work best when they're tied to your own dream signs, so that seeing your sister or getting into a car becomes the cue to check (the guide to better reality checks explains how). Just don't count on ten hand checks a day to do the job of steps 2 to 4.

Other ways to have a lucid dream#

MILD isn't the only option, and if repeating a phrase in the dark doesn't suit you, two other techniques are worth knowing. The first is SSILD, the senses-initiated lucid dream. After the same five-hour alarm, you lie down with your eyes closed and move your attention slowly between what you see, what you hear and what you feel in your body. After several rounds, you let yourself fall asleep. In the international study it worked as well as MILD, and one participant described the moment it starts to take over.

The second is WILD, the wake-initiated lucid dream, where you try to stay aware while your body falls asleep and walk straight into a dream without losing consciousness. It's the hardest of the three, and the way in often passes through a few seconds of sleep paralysis, which is harmless but frightening if you don't expect it. The guide to lucid dreaming techniques goes through these and a few more, and meditation for lucid dreaming helps with the calm, steady attention all of them need.

There is also a pill, which matters mostly because you'll see it advertised. In one study, people took galantamine, a prescription drug for Alzheimer's disease, after the night-time alarm and then did MILD. They were three times as likely to have a lucid dream that night as with MILD and a placebo (42% of them against 14%).^[6] It's a medicine, not a supplement, and not something to take without a doctor.

How to lucid dream for the first time: what to expect#

Before they started, the people in the international study had a lucid dream on about one morning in twenty. After a week of the routine above it was one in six, which means most nights were still ordinary, even for people doing everything right. That's an average over a week, so count your attempts in weeks, not nights, and don't give up after three tries.

Your first one will probably be short and a bit blurry, and you may wake up the moment you realize. You might also have a false awakening, a dream in which you wake up and start your day before you wake up for real. That's a good place to try a reality check. And don't worry about your sleep. In the international study, people slept just as well on the nights they had a lucid dream, if anything slightly better (the guide to whether lucid dreaming is dangerous covers the rest).

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If you want to start right away, the shorter version of this routine is in how to have a lucid dream tonight. And if you'd rather be walked through it, Oniri's lucid dreaming training has night alarms timed to your sleep cycles and guided audio for MILD. It keeps your dream journal in the same place, so you can see which nights worked.

When it does work, it will feel less like flying and more like a jolt of surprise in the middle of an ordinary scene ("wait, this is a dream"). You'll probably have about three seconds before you wake up in your own bed with your heart going. That counts, so write it down.