Lucid Dreaming: Can You Wake Up in Your Dreams?

We spend around one-third of our lives asleep. In the average lifespan, this roughly amounts to 25 years! While most people can recollect fragments of their dream life, very few can consciously live in their dreams the way they live in the waking state. But what if there was a way to experience the extraordinary and mysterious world of our dreams with the same lucidity we experience awake? Although scientific evidence for its possibility only emerged in the late 20th century, lucid dreaming is an ancient and popular practice for heightening awareness, creativity, self-knowledge, and healing. Today, there is extensive literature on lucid dreaming, its benefits, and tested methods that you can apply to wake up in your dream world. 

A lucid dream is a dream in which you know that you are dreaming. Essentially, it is carrying your conscious lucidity from the waking state into the dreamscapes orchestrated by your unconscious. There is a stark difference between losing yourself in passive non-lucid dreaming and waking up to yourself inside the strange and fantastical dream world. Once you wake up in a dream, you redeem your agency, becoming an active member of your cast of dream characters.  Lucidity is simultaneously becoming the director, actor(s), and audience of your dreams instead of being a passive, far-removed, observer of a story that, more often than not, is forgotten once it’s over.

To be lucid in a dream is to travel to another world, unbound by the laws of physics and the often-mundane continuity that governs our daily lives. While the first few experiences of lucidity can be overwhelming due to the unfamiliar and fluid nature of dreams, lucidity soon becomes an exhilarating and liberating experience. Imagine living in a world where absolutely anything is possible and you can do whatever you want. From flying through space to riding dinosaurs, the sky is the limit when it comes to what you can experience. But is lucid dreaming just about fulfilling the fantasies and desires that you cannot attain in the waking state or can it serve a higher purpose?

Benefits of Lucid Dreaming

The primary distinction between them and experiences in the waking state lies in their subjective nature. Although, from another point of view, all our experiences happen within consciousness. Curiously, experienced lucid dreamers often report that the dream world, when lucidly experienced, feels more real and vivid than our shared reality.

If dreaming and wakefulness are on the same continuum of consciousness, then lucid dreams necessarily have an influence on the waking state and can be utilized for our benefit. Lucid dreaming results in a heightening of awareness as you experience different states of consciousness. Historically, it has been used as a tool for self-knowledge, where one can become aware of different aspects of oneself and learn to navigate foreign states. Self-awareness and the level of lucidity in the waking state thus dramatically increase as well. Lucid dreams are also a powerful healing method as they can be used to expose suppressed traumas and consciously integrate them, resulting in the resolution of many psychological ailments.

Creative Expression

Further, lucid dreams have been used to enhance creative expression. Dr. Clare Johnson, for instance, was the first to expound on how lucid dreaming can assist creative writing in many ways, including allowing the writer to become the characters about which he writes. They can also significantly improve a skill that you are trying to learn. For example, if you’re learning Taekwondo, practicing in your lucid dream body will dramatically improve your waking practice. As for those interested in spirituality, lucid dreams are a means of having guidance, mystical experiences, and self-realization. 

How to Wake Up in Your Dreams

Keith Hearne and Stephan LaBerge are credited to establish lucid dreaming as a legitimate subject of scientific research and a learnable skill. In the late 20th century, Hearne conducted an experiment using a method called volitional eye movement signaling where participants moved their eyes in a pre-arranged pattern to signal that they were lucid dreaming during REM sleep. LaBerge later repeated the experiment, popularized research in lucid dreaming, and developed several lucidity-induction methods. 

The most famous among them is to prime your mind before falling asleep to search for lucidity triggers. This is done by making several reality checks throughout the day, noticing if anything seems abnormal or out of the ordinary, and continuously questioning if you are dreaming or awake. By force of habit, your mind will conduct the same reality checks while you’re dreaming, and once any abnormalities are detected, you will realize that you are dreaming and become lucid.

Another method is the mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD), which involves developing your prospective memory in the waking state, i.e. your ability to remember to preform a preset task. Before going to sleep, set the intention to know that you are dreaming during your dream sessions and repeat it like a mantra. The more you develop your prospective memory, the easier you will be able to accomplish the task you’ve intended to do before you sleep during your dreams. Today, there are numerous methods of lucid dream induction, but what they all have in common is that they regard awareness of non-lucid dreams as a prerequisite to lucid dreaming.

Dream Journals

If you can’t remember your non-lucid dreams, you will not be able to become lucid. Like lucid dreaming, remembering your normal dreams is also a learnable skill. The most effective method is to keep a dream journal. Upon waking up, don’t move your body or open your eyes and take some time to recall anything of your dream experience. You can ask yourself “what was I just doing?”. At first, you may only recall a feeling, a certain color, a place. However minor is your recollection, record it immediately and with practice, as your connection to your dream life develops, your memories will be more elaborate. If you follow the steps, what is the first thing you’d do once you wake up in your dream?