1

Sold to
nhemchayat@gmail.com
 Table of Contents
Table of Contents··························································································· 2

Introduction································································································· 6

I: The Rules of Lucid Dreaming············································································8

What is Lucid Dreaming?············································································· 8

R.E.M Sleep & Its Importance········································································9

Dreams & The Subconscious······································································· 13

Dream Duration······················································································ 14

Where Dreams Happen············································································· 16

II: Building a Foundation················································································· 20

Healthy Sleep························································································· 20

The Dream Journal···················································································23

Meditation···························································································· 28

III: Getting Lucid··························································································· 33

DILD vs WILD (vs SILD?)············································································· 33

Questioning & Testing Reality······································································ 35

Wake Back to Bed (WBTB)·········································································· 40

Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreams (MILD)························································ 41

2
 Finger Induced Lucid Dreams (FILD)······························································· 42

Wake Induced Lucid Dreams (WILD)······························································ 44

Dream Exit Induced Lucid Dreams (DEILD)······················································· 47

Meditation to Attain Lucidity·······································································48

Increasing Your Chances of Getting Lucid························································ 51

IV: Staying Lucid··························································································· 53

Meditation & Dream Duration····································································· 53

Chaining Dreams····················································································· 54

Excitement···························································································· 56

Dream Stabilisation·················································································· 58

Making the Most of Short Dreams·································································61

V: Dream Control·························································································· 64

Belief & Expectation················································································· 64

Spawning Objects & Characters····································································68

Changing Location··················································································· 73

Super-human Abilities···············································································76

Communication with the Subconscious···························································78

Waking Up···························································································· 80

Developing Your Own Dream Control Techniques·············································· 83

3
VI: Lucid Dreaming Tools················································································· 86

Sleep Masks & Lucid Dreaming Masks···························································· 86

Dream Herbs··························································································89

Huperzine-A & Galantamine········································································92

Hypnosis·······························································································97

Affirmations························································································· 104

Placebo······························································································ 107

VII: Trouble Getting Lucid···············································································110

The Importance of Timing········································································· 110

Performing Techniques Correctly································································ 113

Struggling with Sleep···············································································117

VIII: Beyond······························································································· 119

Sleep Paralysis······················································································ 119

False Awakenings···················································································123

Dream Analysis····················································································· 124

Dream Incubation·················································································· 127

Nightmares·························································································· 130

Lucid Sleep·························································································· 134

Lucid Dreaming Myths & Misconceptions······················································ 136

4
 Lucid Living·························································································· 143

Epilogue··································································································· 149

5
 Introduction
We spend approximately a third of our lives asleep. At the time of writing this, the average life

expectancy in the United States of America is 78.74 years. If you live that long, and sleep for

approximately 8 hours a night, then that’s 26.25 years of your life that you spend asleep.

Despite this fact, many of us pride ourselves on deep dreamless sleep, “sleeping like a log”.

When we dedicate so much time to the latest health fads, to becoming healthier, getting stronger,

and avoiding death by any means necessary, you would think that we would jump at the chance

to reclaim some lost time. The truth is, most of us would, but many of us simply aren’t aware

that such an opportunity exists.

Lucid dreaming, the art of becoming aware and conscious during your sleep, is a

practice that many people have not even heard of. Many of those who have heard of it, laugh it

off, thinking that such a thing can’t possibly exist. Thankfully as time passes, more and more

people are becoming aware of this fascinating ability, and learning to do it themselves. In the

process, people are getting to enjoy more of their lives, even if their life expectancy stays the

same.

In this book I hope to help you reclaim some of those years you will lose to sleep. By

learning to become awake and aware in your dreams, you can get a little piece of that time back,

and perhaps add a few years’ worth of experiences to your lifetime. I will try to present all the

6
information in as easy to digest a format as possible, to ensure that you’re able to apply the

techniques outlined without any difficulty.

7
 I: The Rules of Lucid Dreaming

What is Lucid Dreaming?

What exactly is lucid dreaming? A lucid dream is defined as a dream in which the dreamer

knows they are dreaming. Nothing more, nothing less. For most people, during a dream itself

there is no realisation that you are dreaming, and said realisation only eventually occurs later

after waking up and recalling the dream. With a lucid dream on the other hand, this realisation

happens within the dream itself, leaving you completely aware that you are dreaming, while it is

happening.

Once this realisation happens, all sorts of possibilities become available to the lucid

dreamer. Since the normal rules of the real world do not apply in dreams, there are a limitless

number of possibilities one can explore within his or her own dream worlds. Typically, after

becoming aware that you are dreaming, you can then take full control over that dream, and do

whatever you like until the dream is over. It is worth mentioning, that while most lucid dreams

result in you having control over your actions within the dream, this is not always the case, and

some lucid dreams simply involve awareness of the fact that you are dreaming, without any

level of control.

8
 To the lucid dreamer who does have some control over their dream, the extent of that

control can vary from situation to situation. Several factors can affect this, including the level of

experience of the lucid dreamer in question, and their subconscious beliefs about themselves at

the time of having the dream. In one dream, someone may have zero control whatsoever. In

another dream they may have control over their own actions but none over the world in which

they are in. In yet another dream they may be able to shape the landscape around them, control

the characters, spawn items and objects, use superpowers, and do whatever they like.

Lucid dreams are not governed by the same laws and rules as the real world, for

example in a lucid dream you can fly, shape-shift, or teleport. In this chapter I will go into more

detail on the rules that govern the dream world and your lucid dreams, and what you can expect

from the lucid dreaming experience.

R.E.M Sleep & Its Importance

At night when you go to sleep, you cycle through five stages of sleep. In Stage 1 sleep, you are

still entering sleep, Stage 2 is a light sleep, Stages 3 and 4 are deep sleep, and finally, Stage 5, is

known as REM sleep. REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement, due to the fact that during REM

sleep, your eyes dart around in every direction quickly. REM sleep is also when your typical

dreams occur; you can dream during other stages of sleep, but these dreams are often non-visual

in nature, or feature other characteristics that differentiate them from your standard REM based

dreams (such as lacking a body or being unable to interact with the dream world).

During REM sleep, you experience something known as REM atonia. In short, your

muscles become paralysed, which is probably to protect you by preventing you from acting out

your dreams. After all, when you are dreaming, and you attempt to act, your brain sends signals

to the muscles much in the way it does when you attempt to act in the real world. Without REM

9
atonia, your body would begin to attempt to act out your dreams, and you could get seriously

hurt. There are some people with sleep disorders who fail to achieve proper REM atonia and can

get injured as a result.

This REM atonia, as well as keeping you safe, plays a major role in allowing you to

have such vivid and immersive dreams during REM sleep. After all, since your body is safely

paralysed in bed, you can control an imaginary dream body in much the same manner as you

would control your real one. So it feels very much as if you are actually there experiencing these

things for real. This is why, throughout this book, we will be aiming to become lucid during the

REM stage of sleep, and for simplicity’s sake, ignoring the other stages of sleep. I will however

briefly touch on becoming lucid during other stages of sleep in a later chapter.

As you will learn later in this book, there are two or three primary different methods for

achieving lucidity, the Wake Induced Lucid Dream (WILD), the Dream Induced Lucid Dream

(DILD), and perhaps a third (the Sleep Induced Lucid Dream / SILD), depending on your

personal definition of each term. For DILD and SILD, you need not concern yourself with what

stage of sleep you are in, but when attempting to enter a lucid dream from the waking state, as

in WILD, it is desirable to wake up in the middle of the REM stage of sleep prior to performing

the method. When you wake up during your REM stage of sleep, and then return to sleep

shortly after, through whatever method you perform, you will quickly re-enter REM, and thus

will be able to have vivid immersive lucid dreams. Attempting to perform any of the various

WILD techniques without first getting into REM will almost always prove futile, and so is best

avoided.

Throughout the night you cycle through the five different stages of sleep. These cycles

repeat themselves at regular intervals. Each person’s sleep is different, and when each cycle

begins, or how long it lasts, may be entirely different for you than when it occurs for me or

someone else. With that in mind, I cannot offer definitive times for when you will enter the

10
REM stage of sleep (or any other stage), however, I can offer some general guidelines and

suggestions for getting into REM.

Firstly, the REM stage occurs roughly every 90 minutes of sleep. This means if you

sleep for approximately 90 minutes (1 hour 30 minutes) then you will likely end up in REM; if

you sleep for 180 minutes (3 hours), you will likely end up in REM; if you sleep for 270

minutes (4 hours 30 minutes), you will likely end up in REM; if you sleep for 360 minutes (6

hours), you will likely end up in REM. So, when attempting to get into REM to perform one of

the various WILD techniques, we usually aim for one of these intervals of 90 minutes, sleeping

for that duration and then waking ourselves up with an alarm.

As the night progresses, the REM stages increase in duration, and so it is desirable to

aim for a later REM period rather than an earlier one. For this reason, I usually suggest sleeping

for 6 hours when attempting to get into REM. However, if you’re limited for time, 4 hours 30, 3

hours, or 1 hour 30 will do. One thing I have consistently seen people get wrong with this is

failure to consider the time it takes for them to fall asleep. Your sleep stages do not progress

until you have started to fall asleep, and so if you go to bed at midnight, but it takes you 30

minutes to fall asleep, and you are attempting to aim for the 6-hour REM period, then you

should set an alarm for around 6:30AM, NOT for 6:00AM as many make the mistake of doing.

Keeping this in mind, it is far better to sleep slightly too long, than slightly too short. You want

the REM stage to have already started when you wake up, so sleeping too little and missing it

entirely will be no good – but sleeping a little too long and already being half way into your

REM period will work fine, you just might have less time to lucid dream. So if in doubt, add an

additional 10-20 minutes to your alarm.

Example: It is 11PM, and you intend to be up for the 4 hour 30 minute REM stage. You

know it takes you somewhere between 10-20 minutes to fall asleep. 4 hours 30 from now would

be 3:30AM. Add 10-20 minutes, and you get 3:40 to 3:50AM. To be on the safe side, you can

11
set your alarm to 5 hours from now, i.e. 4AM, since losing 10-20 minutes of REM is better than

waking up too early and missing it.

As I mentioned earlier, when your REM stages will occur is highly individual, and

while the 90-minute rule will work well for most people, for some people this will land them in

one of the other non-REM stages of sleep. My suggestion is to initially assume the 90-minute

rule works for you, but if when you try out the alarm-based/WILD techniques I outline later in

the book, you have no luck after 3+ weeks of continued effort, then experiment with different

alarm times. For example, instead of 6 hours, perhaps try 5, or 7. When experimenting with a

new time, try it out for at least 1-2 weeks before switching to a new time.

A good sign that you have woken up in REM is if you woke up in the middle of a

dream. This could also signify that your REM stage has just ended, but more often than not, it

means you are in the middle of it right now, and it is the perfect time to perform a lucid dream

induction technique.

If you are struggling to find your REM stages, a somewhat unconventional technique

that I have used for a while now is to repeat a mantra before falling asleep in which I tell myself

that I will wake up during REM, or in the middle of a dream. Simply repeat to yourself in your

head something like “I will wake up in the middle of a dream tonight” for 2-3 minutes, and then

allow yourself to fall asleep. Since REM is when your dreams occur, waking in the middle of a

dream usually means waking in REM. Don’t worry if this doesn’t work first try, keep repeating

it each night, and with some time you should start to find yourself naturally awakening during

REM sleep.

A final note regarding REM. Some drugs/medications may interfere with REM sleep,

causing you to experience less of it, or to alter the times when the REM stage occurs. If you are

taking any medications or drugs, medicinal or recreational, investigate whether they affect REM,

and take that into account when attempting to lucid dream.

12
 Dreams & The Subconscious

If you take a moment to recall as many of your dreams as you can, you will probably have

numerous strange and exotic dreams that come to mind. Mind-boggling dreams that make no

sense whatsoever. Yet you may also notice a trend for your dreams to include fragments from

your day to day life: people you know, places you’ve been to, activities you like to take part in,

your day to day routine, etc. This is because your dreams are created by your subconscious

mind. Your subconscious beliefs and expectations, your past experiences, your emotions, and

your thoughts, all play a role in shaping your dreams.

This means a few things. For one, dreams can be analysed, and through this activity one

can discover a lot about what is going on beneath the surface of their own mind. Secondly, this

means that through changing what goes on in your subconscious, you can change the content of

your dreams. This plays a large role in dream control, something I will talk about in more detail

in its own chapter. Your ability to control your dreams is largely based on your ability to affect

your own subconscious, through believing and expecting certain things to work, or through

manipulating your thoughts or emotions in certain ways.

Finally, this almost means that while you can exert a degree of control over your dreams,

there is always a degree of separation between you and the dream itself. Just as the conscious

mind and subconscious mind are separate during waking life, and you experience your

conscious thoughts, but do not experience much of what occurs in the subconscious, the same is

true in a dream. Your subconscious will take control of the world and characters around you,

giving you an illusion of existing in a world much like the one we call our home during waking

life. Ultimately everything is being controlled by you, but just as you don’t experience yourself

controlling the digestion of food in your stomach, or your heartbeat, much of the dream will feel

as if it is occurring without your input.

13
 As dreams are a product of what is occurring in the subconscious, this also makes them

a useful tool for psychoanalysis, both through the analysis of dreams as I mentioned earlier, or

through doing such things as asking your subconscious mind direct questions from within a

lucid dream. For this reason, lucid dreaming, while being a ton of fun, can also be incredibly

useful for therapeutic purposes, and for personal development.

Dream Duration

A popular question I’ve received during my time teaching others to lucid dream is “How long

do lucid dreams last?”. There is no absolute definitive answer to this question, because every

dream is different in length, but there are several factors to consider that dictate how long a

lucid dream can be.

Firstly, the length of the stage of sleep you are in. Assuming you have entered a lucid

dream in the middle of one of your REM stages, when that stage comes to an end, so must your

dream. Secondly, the stability of a dream itself. Dreams can become unstable for numerous

reasons such as excitement or trying to do too many things at once, and this can cause a dream

to end prematurely, leading to a rather abrupt awakening. The next thing to consider is that even

during any given REM stage, you typically have multiple dreams. A dream can end and give

way to another, without you waking up.

Taking all of this into account, there are some serious limitations to the duration of any

one given dream. In order for a dream to keep going, you must keep it stable, avoid getting too

excited or doing anything to prematurely end it, not be near the end of your REM stage, and

also simply be lucky enough to avoid it ending and turning into a new dream. For this reason,

almost all your lucid and non-lucid dreams will be shorter than 30 minutes in length, and if you

14
struggle with stability, you may be greeted with countless lucid dreams that end long before

even the first minute is up.

If you go back now into your memory, and recall some of your longest dreams to date,

you may recall having some dreams that seemed a lot longer than 30 minutes. Some may have

even seemed to have been hours, or even days long. Why is this? I want you to do a little

experiment right now. Recall your entire life, as best you can, from the day you were born, to

today, right now. Try to be quick about it.

If you tried out that little experiment, you might have just breezed through entire

decades in a matter of seconds, or minutes at the most. When going back through your memory,

you probably recalled key events like your first day at school, graduating high school, your first

crush, your first job, and anything else that really stuck out. Did you experience all the rest

though? All those forgotten moments, all the days of sitting around bored, weeks or months

playing video games or watching TV, or eating, or sleeping? No of course not, but by jumping

through the most important events during those years, you piece together a picture of an entire

lifetime.

So, what was the point of that experiment? Well, now you can begin to understand how

in a dream that takes up 30 minutes or less, you can feel like you have experienced a much

longer period. In 30 minutes you can easily experience short fragments of key events from a day,

week, or month-long period, making it seem like you were in your dream for a very long time

when you look back at it after waking up. If you probe your memory of the dream for the finer

details, the other 99% of the time during those days/weeks/months, you’ll quickly realise that

you never experienced any of it. All you experienced was a few brief fragments of the larger

time-line, and when put in sequence, it made it seem like you experienced a lot more than you

did.

15
 As an example of this, you could have a dream in which you spend 30 seconds being

born and crawling around as a toddler, a couple of minutes playing with friends in your early

schools, a few more minutes at high school, a few more at university, and then a few at your job.

You’ve been dreaming for maybe 12-15 minutes, but when you wake up and recall everything

you just experienced, and you put it all in sequence, it creates the illusion that you must have

been dreaming for more than 20 years. During the dream, you’ll still experience just 12-15

minutes, but looking back after you’ve woken up, it can look like a lot more.

Even short lucid dreams can present us with a whole lot of opportunities. Due to the

rather lax rules of the dream world, you can easily fly around the whole world and visit 20

different countries in a matter of 5 or 6 minutes. So, don’t freak out over the short duration of

lucid dreams and worry that you won’t be able to get anything done in a mere 20-30 minutes.

You’ll quickly learn to take advantage of your dream control abilities to really make the most of

that time, and do more in short dreams than you might accomplish in an entire day of waking

life.

So long as your sleep stage has yet to end, you can also do things like chaining multiple

lucid dreams together by creating and entering a new dream after the last one ends. This can be

used to have much longer lucid dreaming experiences. While a single dream might only last 10,

20, 30 minutes, or maybe a little longer if you’re lucky, a series of dreams had in sequence

could easily last over an hour. I will go into more detail about how this can be achieved in a

later chapter.

Where Dreams Happen

One of the things that you will quickly notice upon attaining lucidity for the first time, is just

how real a lucid dream feels. You can be forgiven for not becoming lucid during your other

16
dreams, because everything often feels so real and authentic. They say that seeing is believing,

but what about when you can not only see something, but touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it? In a

lucid dream, all of that is possible, it is a fully immersive experience that spans all of your

senses.

When the dream world can at times feel as real as the one we inhabit while awake, it

leads to us starting to question what exactly this world is. If seeing is believing, then does that

not make the dream world just as real as our own? For many this has long been held as a belief,

and it is likely that in early history, lucid dreams helped shape many of the various religious and

spiritual texts, these experiences being taken as actual visits to other worlds or spiritual realms.

As we have become more acquainted with lucid dreaming and explored it to greater

depth, we have since come to the realisation that these worlds are all internal. Worlds inside

your own mind. Your subconscious shapes these worlds, and they have no connection to the real

world we know and love in our day to day lives. This means that no-one else can see or hear

what goes on inside your dreams. They are a private sandbox of yours, to be used for pleasure

or for personal development as you see fit.

You have probably heard the expression “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”

before, referring to the crazy antics that people often get up to when visiting Las Vegas in the

United States. A similar phrase could be coined with regards to your dreams. “What happens in

your dreams, stays in your dreams”. There is no link, other than you, between the dream world

you experience, and the external world you experience while awake.

Aside from meaning that everything you get up to in your dreams, no matter how

unusual, weird, or embarrassing, is kept entirely secret from anyone else, it also means a couple

of other important things. The first of these is that actions taken within your dreams have no

effect on the real world, beyond any effect they may have on your subconscious. A dream may

shake you, or affect your emotional state, leading to you thinking or acting differently during

17
your waking life, but other than this, there is no way for a dream to change anything about the

real world. If you encounter a person you know in a dream, they are just a dream character

representing that person, and not the actual person in question. So, if you for example run into a

friend in a dream, and try to tell them something, and then question them about it later in

waking life, they will not recall your conversation.

If something happens to a person, place, or object in a dream, it doesn’t mean that this

also happens to their real-world analogue. For example, if you lose your wallet in a dream, your

real-world wallet will still be exactly where you left it when you wake up. For most of us this is

common sense, but when you are in a dream, your level of consciousness is often reduced to

such a state that you forget or ignore these facts, treating people, objects, and places, as

carefully as you would when faced with the real ones while awake.

Now in addition to your actions not affecting the real world, physical things that happen

to you in your dreams have no effect on your real physical body. This means that if you are

harmed, or even killed in a lucid dream, nothing happens to the real you.

Death during a lucid dream can have different effects depending on the circumstance.

The most common is that you will simply wake up the moment that you experience your death

in a dream. Sometimes you will experience something else, related to what you believe should

occur at that moment. For example, some people have experienced themselves going to heaven

or some type of after-life, and others have simply experienced themselves “respawning” as if

they were in a video game. No matter the outcome, death is not something to be feared in a

lucid dream. No matter what danger you are in during said dream, this never translates to any

real-world danger.

Because your dreams occur inside your mind, this also means they are not governed by

real world rules and laws. You are in no danger of getting arrested in the real world for speeding

down the street in a dream, and you are also not limited by the laws of nature or physics like

18
gravity and so on. This means the real limitation to your lucid dreams is your imagination. If

you can imagine it, you can almost certainly experience it during a lucid dream.

There are some things you cannot experience very well while lucid. One such example

is reading. Your brain struggles to process longer sequences of text during a dream, and so text

will often appear to be made up of strange alien symbols, or letters will be jumbled, or sentences

won’t make sense. On some rare occasions passages of text will read normally, but most of the

time reading or interacting with technology like computers doesn’t behave the way you would

expect it to.

In a similar fashion, the world is ever changing. You can look at a building one moment,

turn around, look back, and it can be replaced by a forest. The world is not static like the real

world, and this is part of where dream control can come in to make things a whole lot of fun.

19
 II: Building a Foundation

Healthy Sleep

Before you start to become aware and lucid in your dreams, it is important to get a few

fundamentals out of the way. You can still get lucid while neglecting these things, but if you do

neglect them, expect to struggle, and get far less results no matter how many techniques you

implement and how hard you try to get lucid. For this reason, I will deal with these

fundamentals first, and then move on to teaching you how to lucid dream after they have been

covered.

One of these fundamentals is healthy sleep. It is entirely possible to get lucid on a

messed-up sleep pattern, while not sleeping enough, or sleeping too long. Nonetheless, when

attempting to lucid dream, it is best to ensure some variables like sleep remain consistent most

of the time, so that when faced with difficulties you know that your sleep isn’t to blame. As

such, you should aim to maintain a regular healthy sleep schedule.

The first step to getting a healthy sleep schedule is ensuring you sleep at the right times.

If you work the night shift, or for some other reason must be up during the night, then you can

20
skip this step, but if possible, you should follow through with this. Aim to fall asleep when it is

dark, and wake up when the sun starts to rise. In some parts of the world this may be difficult,

so a general rule of thumb is just to go to bed between 7PM and 1AM, and to get in the habit of

waking up between 4AM and 8AM.

The reason for sleeping during the night boils down to one thing: Melatonin. Melatonin

is a substance that is produced in response to darkness, and as well as regulating our sleep

schedule and helping us fall and stay asleep, it also plays an important role in our dreams.

Simply put: More Melatonin usually means more vivid dreams, better dream recall, and a higher

chance of becoming lucid. As Melatonin is produced in response to darkness, sleeping during

daylight hours means the opposite: less vivid dreams, poorer recollection of those dreams upon

waking, and a decreased chance of becoming lucid.

Next is duration. You should be sleeping for at least 7 hours, no less, and no more than

9 hours. Sleeping too long or too short has a whole range of negative repercussions, and so you

should always try to fall in this range. Of course, there are some days where this will simply not

be possible, but what matters is the majority: if 99% of the time you’re sleeping 7-9 hours, then

it’s okay if on some rare occasions you sleep 4-5 hours, or sleep in for 11 hours.

I mentioned already that Melatonin is important and is produced in response to darkness,

so we can also take an additional measure to ensure the best quality sleep, the most dreams, and

the most opportunities to become lucid. That measure is to ensure absolute darkness when we

sleep.

This can be done in two ways: The first is by creating a blackout. This means blacking

out all windows, turning off all electronics that might have standby lights, and ensuring you

don’t use your phone, tablet, computer, or TV, in the 30-60 minutes leading up to your bed time.

The second way this can be achieved is by wearing a sleep mask. This is a lot easier

than blacking out all light, and achieves a similar, albeit less complete, effect. I personally

21
choose to use a sleep mask rather than blacking out all light as it is less time consuming and

difficult, and yet remains very effective. When wearing a sleep mask or blacking out all light,

you will fall asleep more quickly, and your sleep will be full of vivid dreams.

A third less desirable option is to take a Melatonin supplement. This will allow you to

have high levels of Melatonin even when there is light present that would normally block

Melatonin production. The downside of this third option is that taking a Melatonin supplement

in the wrong dosage or at the wrong time of day can seriously mess up your sleep schedule and

cause more problems than it solves. I would only suggest using Melatonin as a last resort, and if

you are very comfortable at re-arranging your sleep pattern should it get messed up because of

the Melatonin. I also suggest using very small doses (0.5 milligrams or less), and only taking it

at night, never in the day.

The final step is to remain consistent with sleep. Once you have achieved a healthy

sleep schedule, try to maintain it as strictly as possible, without deviating much from your usual

times for falling asleep and waking up. Changing your sleep times and durations can actually be

an effective lucid dream induction technique, however even such a technique will work best if

you already have an established consistent routine that you adhere to.

In general, keeping a consistent routine also eliminates one variable from the equation

when considering your lucid dreaming success. Basically, if you’re struggling with lucid

dreaming, you want to rule out the possibility that your sleep is the issue, so you can figure out

what you’re doing wrong. By keeping your sleep consistent, you can focus on other possible

areas of concern that may be preventing you from getting lucid.

22
 The Dream Journal

How often do you dream? I want you to try and answer that before you read any further. Do you

dream every night? Some nights? Most nights? Rarely? Never? If you answered anything other

than every night, simply put, you’re probably mistaken! Most people do in fact dream every

single night, usually an average of 5-6 dreams each night. So why is there such a good chance

that you answered something other than every night? Well, because of dream recall. Dream

recall is your ability to remember your dreams when you wake up. Most peoples’ dream recall

is quite abysmal, and they remember only vague fragments of dreams, or more often than that,

no dreams at all.

If you’ve ever felt like you “don’t dream” or “don’t dream very often”, that couldn’t be

further from the truth. The issue is simply that you are not remembering those dreams upon

waking. The good news is that this is something that is very very easy to correct. Yes, it doesn’t

matter how rarely you remember your dreams, you can go from recalling no dreams whatsoever

each month, to recalling several very vivid dreams every single night.

When trying to improve dream recall, the first thing you need to do is simply make an

effort to recall your dreams. It sounds simple, but most people don’t do it. Most days when you

wake up, your first thought is about what you have to do today, or how you don’t want to get

out of bed. You need to get yourself into the habit of making your first thought upon waking,

“What did I dream about last night?”. Getting into the habit of trying to recall your dreams, will

quickly result in you starting to remember more of them.

The way we both get into the habit of doing this, and take it one step further, is through

the use of a dream journal. A dream journal is, as the name suggests, a journal that keeps record

of all your dreams, both lucid and non-lucid. Some people prefer to use a pen and paper journal,

while others opt to use an app on their phone or tablet. I personally prefer to use an app, and

then if necessary, transfer my dreams to a pen and paper journal later.

23
 The reason for this is that sometimes when you wake up, you’re too tired to pick up a

pen and start jotting things down, but briefly entering a few key words and notes into your

phone is more easily accomplished. This also makes it easy to note down dreams when waking

up in the middle of the night, without needing to turn on a light or really stir from your sleep to

start writing.

At the time of writing, a favourite of mine has been an app called “Lucidity” available

for Android phones, however since I do not know when you are reading this I can’t say for

certain whether this application still exists or remains as useful as it was for me when I wrote

this. I can say however that just a quick cursory Google search for “dream journal apps” should

present you with numerous suitable options should the option I mentioned no longer be

available or not be to your liking.

Before we go any further, I need to talk about what you should do if you cannot

remember any dreams. Many people get stuck at this first step, because they recall no dreams,

and so write nothing in their dream journal, thus continuing to recall no dreams. The trick is to

always write in your dream journal, even if you do not remember any dreams.

So, how do you begin your dream journal entry? As soon as you wake up, either in the

morning or the middle of the night, get your app or journal open, and begin to consider what

you can remember. This can be anything you remember, and not just dreams or dream content.

If you remember what you were thinking about before you fell asleep: great, write that

down! If you remember briefly waking up and thinking it was the morning already: excellent,

write that down too. Write down anything you remember thinking, feeling, seeing, or

experiencing since you got into bed last night. Try your best to recall if that includes any dream

content, but don’t get worried if it doesn’t.

Since dreams and thoughts are highly personal matters, I feel it most important to bring

up the issue of privacy and secrecy at this point. Many people are fearful of keeping a dream

24
journal in the event that a friend or family member might stumble upon it and read the weird

and wonderful goings on of their mind. No-one wants their deepest personal thoughts laid bare

for the whole world to see, and so this concern is understandable. It is however something that

needn’t concern you.

There are multiple ways to solve this issue of privacy. The first is to ensure no-one has

access to your journal, by keeping it locked away somewhere safe, or using a pass-code on your

phone. The second is to be cryptic in your note-keeping, for example you can refer to people,

places or activities by acronyms or code-words that only you would understand. This renders

your dream journal entries readable to you, but a mystery to anyone who would dare to snoop.

My third and final suggestion, for those thoughts or dreams you really don’t want to

share whatsoever, is to simply write them down in your phone or on your computer, and delete

them immediately after. The mere act of attempting to recall and then write down these thoughts

and dreams will improve your dream recall, but storing them only serves the purpose of

allowing you to analyse and look back on them later. Storing them is not necessary for dream

recall, and so as soon as you have written a dream down, you are free to delete it if it is too

private in nature.

When you start to write your dream journal entries, try to be brief and succinct initially.

What I like to do is try to think how I would summarise my dream if I could only use one

sentence, and then I’ll make that the first thing I write down. For example, I might write

something like “Fought zombies and flew on a plane to England”, or “Climbed the Eiffel tower

and met an alien”. The reason for keeping things so brief initially is that your memory of your

dreams fades extremely quickly, and it is vital to get the essence or gestalt of a dream down as

quickly as possible before you start to forget things. Once this brief description is written down,

you can begin to flesh out the details. Chronologically from start to finish, begin to recall what

happened. If you remember any additional details after making your entry, add them in.

25
 As well as noting down what happened, feel free to also consider additional aspects like

why it happened, what the dream could represent, anything particularly unusual you noticed

during the dream, etc. If you’re uncertain about any details, or think something happened a

certain way but aren’t sure, then mention that in your entry so that there will be no confusion if

you revisit it later.

The length of your dream journal entries is up to you. Some people prefer to keep short

entries only a few sentences long, while others like to write a whole page or two describing their

dream in detail. My personal advice is for you to write down as much as you remember, but to

be mindful of how this might affect subsequent sleep. If you have completed your sleep for the

night and are getting up for the day, then take your time, spend 10 or 15 minutes writing your

dream journal entries if necessary, or even longer if you so desire. If on the other hand you have

woken up in the middle of the night and are someone who finds it difficult to fall back asleep,

then you should still write down any dreams you recall, but keep your entries very brief and

short so as not to risk being unable to return to sleep afterwards. You can always add more

detail in the morning when you’re awake again, should you still remember the details.

In addition to the dream journal entry itself, I suggest including some additional details.

An obvious one to include is the date, so you can look back later and see exactly when this

occurred (most apps on your phone will include this automatically, but check that yours does,

and if not, add it in manually). Another one is to include which lucid dream induction technique

you used if used one before bed, and ended up lucid. Doing this will allow you to later analyse

which techniques have brought you the most success and should become the staple of your long

term lucid dreaming regimen.

You should also make note of any recurring themes or subjects in your dreams. This can

include anything from repeatedly being in the same location, to encountering the same animal,

or character, or object. It can also mean experiencing similar emotions, or encountering things

that seem to relate to previous dreams in some way or another. The purpose of noticing

26
recurring themes is to aid with attaining lucidity. If you are constantly having dreams featuring

particular themes, emotions, people, places, objects, etc, then you can start to notice those things

and use them as a trigger to let you know when you could be dreaming.

A personal example for me is that my dreams often take place back in a town in

England where I grew up. I no longer live in that town, but many of my dreams still take place

there. As a result, any time I find myself in that town, I can stop to question and test whether I

might be dreaming, and many times this has resulted in me becoming lucid.

Another personal example was that a few months prior to starting on this book, I had

many recurring dreams featuring red squirrels. While I do happen to live lots of woodland

occupied by said squirrels, I’ve been to said woodlands rarely recently, and so running across a

squirrel in my waking life is comparatively rare compared to in my dreams. Because of this I’ve

started to test whether I am dreaming any time I encounter a squirrel, and on several occasions

now this has also resulted in me becoming lucid.

You may notice recurring dream signs and dream themes right away when making your

dream journal entries, but this isn’t always the case. So, I suggest taking some time on a regular

basis to review your dream journal entries. Look back through all your entries from the past few

weeks, and briefly skim them to search for any recurring themes. Any time you notice

something similar about two or more dreams, note it down as a potential dream theme or dream

sign, and in future when you run into it again you can question whether you might be dreaming.

Along with searching for dream signs, you can revisit your dream journal entries for the

purpose of dream analysis. This is something I will talk about in greater detail towards the end

of the book, but suffice to say, your dreams contain a lot of information about the inner

workings of your mind, and so keeping a written record of them for later can prove to be very

enlightening.

27
 Some people find that alongside writing about their dreams, it can help to draw some of

the things you saw or experienced. Sometimes this can also make it easier for you to recall

details from your dreams, since much of your memory is kept in the form of images. So if

you’re struggling to recall details of a particular dream, try to draw anything you remember

from that dream.

Your dream journal is something that you should make a daily habit of writing in, and shouldn’t

neglect. You will find that within just a few days of writing in it (even if all you write down

initially are thoughts and feelings you recall that weren’t part of dreams) you will likely start to

remember dreams quite regularly. Soon you will remember dreams pretty much every night, and

often multiple dreams too. If, however you decide to stop writing in your journal for even just a

few days, you will often find your dream recall quickly vanishes, and you go back to recalling

few, if any, dreams at all.

Meditation

A recurring piece of advice you will hear in this book is that you should meditate every day.

Meditation, when done correctly, is perhaps the single most valuable tool you have available to

you if your goal is to lucid dream often. I have tried countless techniques for attaining lucidity,

increasing the duration of my lucid dreams, improving dream recall, and making my dreams

more vivid and clear. Nothing, and I really mean nothing, has ever come close to being as

effective for any of those things as evening meditation has been.

So, what is meditation? Meditation as a word can have numerous meanings, but the

meditation I refer to here, sitting meditation, is typically the practice of becoming present and

comfortable with your mind, acknowledging the content of your thoughts without trying to

28
interact with them. Meditation can also involve training the mind through repeated focus on a

particular idea or action.

Meditation is simple and easy to learn, and equally easy to teach, so for that reason I’m

going to teach you one style of sitting meditation right now.

Start by sitting comfortably, either on the floor, a cushion, in a chair, on a couch, on

your bed, or elsewhere. Your sitting position is not very important, just ensure that you’re

comfortable enough to stay there for at least 10-20 minutes. You can keep your eyes open or

closed. My rule of thumb is: If you’re getting too sleepy, open your eyes. If you’re getting too

distracted by what’s around you, close your eyes. Otherwise, simply keep them open or closed

based on personal preference.

Now begin to watch your breath, as it comes and goes, in and out. Simply continue to

watch your breath. Don’t actively try to control it, but if you do find yourself controlling it

without meaning to, that’s okay too, simply keep it nice and relaxed. Any time you find yourself

distracted from this process of watching your breath, simply return your attention to it, and

continue.

When you begin to meditate, you will notice that distractions likely occur quite often.

You may find yourself scratching an itch, or your eyes may divert to something outside the

window, or you may start to get caught up thinking about your day. As soon as you notice this

distraction, return your attention to your breath. Don’t worry if you find yourself getting

distracted again only short moments later. This is normal, and to be expected. Simply keep

returning your attention back to your breath every time you catch yourself being distracted.

This continued effort to be present with your breath is the act of meditation. In the gym,

growth happens through struggling to progressively overload your muscles with greater

intensity. Meditation is similar, as progress occurs through the continued effort to remain with

your breath for as long as possible, always returning to it after any distraction.

29
 If you find it hard to focus on your breath, an exercise you can try as a beginner is to

count your breath. In is 1, out is 2, in is 3, out is 4, and so on. Keep counting in this manner and

watching your breath for a few minutes. If you find yourself losing count, simply start over at 1

again. After some time, switch to counting every full breath, i.e. in and out is 1, in and out is 2,

and so on. Then after you’ve done this for a while, try resetting your count every so often,

perhaps every 10 or 15 breaths. So, for example you count to 10, then you start over at 1 again.

This will be a little more difficult, and will really test your ability to stay with your breath. Once

you have become comfortable meditating in this fashion, try to meditate without counting your

breath, just watching it as it occurs.

Meditation, just like the act of recalling and writing down your dreams, is something

that you should do every single day. I have yet to really expound upon the benefits it offers to

you, and so I will begin to do that now.

First, we live in a society where stress and over-thinking affects all of us. Most of us

deal with some degree of anxiety and worry as a result of this. Through regular meditation, the

mind can be de-cluttered, stress can be resolved, and anxieties can be forgotten. The mind

becomes a more peaceful place, free from previous worries.

This is not something that occurs overnight, but is a gradual effect that will take place

as you begin to meditate daily over a period of months and years. While the effect occurs slowly,

once it does occur, the effect is very strong and noticeable. When you compare yourself after a

year of daily meditation to how you were before you started meditating, the difference will be

like night and day.

It isn’t just stress and worry that meditation can help you deal with. Meditation can help

you break free from toxic thought patterns that rule your life. If you have any negative habits,

addictions, or compulsions, regular meditation can help you shed them, so that you can lead a

30
healthier and happier life. Meditation can truly help you rewire your brain and replace those

negative habits with more positive ones that change your life for the better.

Meditation also has positive effects on your overall mood. I can say that I am often

happier now than I was when I was a carefree little kid, and certainly happier than any time

since then. Prior to starting up daily meditation practice, my mood was the exact opposite. I was

at an all-time low, had very little desire to progress in life or even continue living. Meditation

enacted a radical shift in my attitude to life, and brought me true lasting happiness that has

persisted even during times when I’ve taken breaks from it. Now I can enjoy life and appreciate

the little things, something I had a real difficulty with in the past.

If I were to continue writing about the benefits of meditation, I could complete this

entire book without ever changing subject, since the benefits are so numerous they are worthy

of several texts of their own. This is however a book on lucid dreaming, not on meditation, and

so I will move on, simply noting that meditation has very many benefits for your psychological

well-being, and is something everyone should be doing. That said, I will now touch on the

benefits that you might care more about: the benefits to lucid dreaming.

The first benefit here, is that meditation can help with attaining lucidity. Yes, just

meditating every day is enough to bring you lucid dreams. Sometimes more than any other

technique too (more on that in the next chapter). It can extend the duration of those lucid dreams,

allowing you to enjoy the dreams for much longer periods of time. It can increase how vivid and

clear those dreams are. It can improve your dream recall, beyond the level to which the dream

journal alone will take it.

It can even help you gain more control over those dreams, making dream control in all

its forms come completely naturally to you. It makes communication with the subconscious

effortless. It also makes it possible to get lucid during another stage of sleep outside of REM

31
(more on that in a later section on “Lucid Sleep”). All in all, it just makes the process of lucid

dreaming easier in every way imaginable.

If you are not meditating already, start. If you only take one single habit away from this

whole book, let it be daily meditation. I suggest meditating in the evening or night, in the final

hours before bed, for best results. I have experimented with meditating at different times of the

day, and find that all meditation has some impact on my dreams, but it is evening or night-time

meditation that has the most substantial benefits for lucid dreaming.

As well as timing, the duration of your meditation is important. I have not found short

meditation to have much of any impact at all on my dreams, but longer meditation, a minimum

of 20 minutes, ideally more, has a very noticeable effect on my dreams and sleep. That said,

consistency is the most important thing with meditation, and so if on some days you cannot

meditate for a full 20+ minutes, do not use that as an excuse not to meditate.

Meditate every single day no matter what. If you have no time, meditate for just a few

minutes, or even a minute or two. This is to keep you in the habit of meditating every day no

matter the circumstances. That minute or two of meditation won’t do anything for getting you

lucid, but it will keep you from breaking the habit of daily meditation. Then, at every

opportunity available to you, meditate for longer periods of time before bed, and your dreams

will be plentiful, vivid, and many times: lucid.

32
 III: Getting Lucid

DILD vs WILD (vs SILD?)

There are two main methods for achieving lucidity, the Dream Induced Lucid Dream (DILD)

and the Wake Induced Lucid Dream (WILD). I also like to think of there being a third one, the

Sleep Induced Lucid Dream (SILD), for reasons I’ll explain shortly. That said, we’ll really only

be talking much about the first two methods, and the other one is more of a technicality and not

important for you to know too much about, although I will talk about it more later on.

First let’s talk about DILD. DILD, or the Dream Induced Lucid Dream, is a method of

attaining lucidity by realising that you are dreaming within an existing dream. This could occur

for numerous reasons.

Perhaps you start thinking about lucid dreaming, and so begin to question whether you

may be dreaming right then. Perhaps you perform some kind of test to determine whether or not

you are dreaming, and it in fact proves that you are. Maybe realisation is spontaneous because

something alerts you to the fact that you could not be awake right now. Whatever the reason,

DILD results in you suddenly becoming aware that you are dreaming in the midst of a dream.

33
 Next, we have WILD. WILD, or the Wake Induced Lucid Dream, is a method of

attaining lucidity by transitioning directly into a lucid dream from waking consciousness. WILD

is typically performed during the REM stage, and this is where the method of waking up in

REM we discussed earlier comes into play.

You wake up in REM, then perform one of the various WILD techniques, and if all

goes well, you enter a dream directly. Since you are conscious of the entire process as it

happens, there is no realisation moment where you become lucid, but rather you are aware even

before you enter the dream, and that awareness carries through into the dream as you do so.

Now SILD, or the Sleep Induced Lucid Dream, is a term that I’ve coined in this book,

to refer to a third type of method of attaining lucidity that is less common. A subject I will

discuss later in this book is the idea of “lucid sleep”, becoming lucid during deep sleep. This

experience leads to you simply experiencing yourself being asleep, without any dreams, and

aside from being a fascinating experience, it offers us a third and final avenue for achieving

lucidity. During this lucid sleep, one can create and enter a dream of their own volition, much

like a more fluid and easy version of WILD.

The method itself often feels much like traditional WILD, but since it occurs during

your sleep, and since some WILD techniques do not work here, the name “Wake Induced Lucid

Dream” seems like a poor description. Since you are not yet in a dream when performing the

method, “Dream Induced Lucid Dream” doesn’t really fit either. Therefore, I coined the term

“Sleep Induced Lucid Dream”, but for all intents and purposes, this method is only really useful

to you if you are experiencing lucid sleep, and can otherwise be ignored. So, from this point out

we’ll only be talking about DILD and WILD.

34
 Questioning & Testing Reality

One of the simplest techniques for attaining a Dream Induced Lucid Dream or DILD, is to get

into the habit of regularly questioning reality. Throughout the day, simply begin to ask yourself,

“Am I dreaming right now?”.

This technique is incredibly useful for anyone who is strapped for time, or who doesn’t

have the motivation to perform the other more detailed techniques outlined in this book. If you

don’t have time, and don’t want to do anything else, simply start asking yourself if you’re

dreaming on a regular basis.

Results may vary, for some this might cause you to become lucid quite frequently,

while for others it will only help on rare occasions. The frequency at which you ask yourself

whether you’re dreaming, and how seriously you take it when you do, will affect the results.

When asking yourself whether you are dreaming, you should really consider it. Don’t

just assume that you’re awake because you think or feel you are. After all, during a dream, you

usually think or feel that you’re awake too. So, take it seriously, and realise that at this very

moment, you could be dreaming.

When performing this technique, it can be easy to forget to do it, so to start it is helpful

to give yourself some kind of reminder to do this. Get a sticky note and write down “Am I

dreaming?” on it, then stick it somewhere you frequent, like above your computer monitor, on

the bathroom door, or on the fridge.

Another way to remind yourself is to set an alarm on your phone to beep every couple

of hours. Each time it goes off, ask yourself if you are dreaming right now. As you build up a

habit of asking yourself this regularly, the chances of you asking yourself this question while

actually dreaming, and realising that you are, increase over time.

35
 For this reason, this starts out being one of the least effective techniques for getting

lucid, but over time becomes more and more effective, the longer you maintain the habit. So,

despite its low initial efficacy, it’s something you may as well practice in the long run if you

want to be lucid as often as possible. Besides, this can be combined with other techniques, so

there’s no reason not to do it.

Sometimes when trying to figure out whether or not you are dreaming it can be quite

difficult if all you do is ask yourself that question. After all, dreams can seem very life-like and

realistic. So, a handy tool in our arsenal is the reality check or reality test. This is a simple test

that can be performed to determine if you are currently awake or dreaming. The nature of these

tests is that certain actions when performed in a dream will have different outcomes to the ones

normally expected of those actions in the real world, so we can use this to find out whether or

not we are dreaming.

Reality checks do not always give us a definitive answer right away. They sometimes

need to be performed multiple times, and you will often need to perform several different tests

together to be certain you are or aren’t dreaming. Sometimes you will perform your reality

check, and everything will behave as normal, just the way it would in waking life. So it is

important to test again, and use different tests, or at times your tests will fail you and result in

you continuing your dream unaware.

It is also vitally important to take reality checks seriously. Just as I mentioned above

with regards to asking yourself whether you’re dreaming right now, you must seriously consider

the possibility that you could be dreaming right this second. If you don’t do this, and instead

just assume that you’re awake, and “go through the motions” of performing the reality check

simply to make it a habit, then it will become a habit, but one that does not serve you.

The habit will carry over into your dreams, you will start performing reality checks in

them, but because you always just went through the motions and saw them as practice, you will

36
take the same attitude in your dreams. You will rush through the tests, assuming that you are

awake, and go through them too hurriedly to notice that you are in fact dreaming. It is no point

building habits that don’t serve you, so take your time. At any moment you could be dreaming,

every reality check should be taken as seriously as the last. Never rush the process.

There are many different reality checks available to you, and I will share a few

examples. The first is simple: Look at your hands, and try to notice if anything seems off about

them. Since you don’t spend an awful lot of time looking at your hands during waking life, they

can often appear a little strange in dreams. You might have more or less fingers than normal.

Your skin might be a different colour, or perhaps even see-through. Your hands might be on

backwards, or you might not even appear to have any hands at all.

After examining your hands, try to look away and look back at them, and see if

anything is different. As I mentioned earlier, the dream world is not static, and so this simple act

of placing your attention elsewhere and then back on the object, can result in the object in

question changing in some way. If the number of fingers on your hands changed, or they look

bigger or smaller, or something else shifted or changed about them, then you can be certain that

you’re dreaming. Try this out a few times rather than just once.

The next thing you can try is taking the index finger of one hand, and attempting to

poke it through the palm of the other hand. Ordinarily in the real world this wouldn’t work, but

since the dream world doesn’t follow the rules of the physical universe, weird things like being

able to poke right through solid objects can occur.

As with the previous reality checks involving your hands, try this out a few times before

accepting the result. Often you’ll attempt to poke your finger through your hand once or twice

without it working, but then on the next attempt, suddenly your finger goes right through.

The next reality check, is to take your thumb and index finger from one hand, and use

them to hold your nose shut. While your nose is held tightly shut, attempt to breathe through it.

37
 Normally you should feel that you have blocked the airways, and you can’t breathe

through it. In a dream however, you will typically find that you feel the normal sensation of air

travelling through your nostrils, despite your nostrils supposedly being closed. This once again

is a tell-tale sign that you are dreaming. Just as before, you should attempt this a few times

before assuming you’re awake.

Just as solid objects can be passed through with ease as in the finger through the palm

test, you can also do things like stretching or reshaping objects that should normally be rigid.

Take your finger, grab it with your other hand, and try to pull on and stretch it gently. If your

finger stretches/grows when you do this, then of course you know that you’re dreaming. As

always, as you should know by now, this is worth trying a few times.

I mentioned earlier in this book that text and technology can behave a little weirdly in

dreams, so another great test to see if you are dreaming is to attempt to read some text, or read

the numbers on a clock, then look away and look back. Even on your first look you may find

something seems off, or the numbers aren’t real, or the text is gibberish. If not, then a second or

third look usually confirms it, as the numbers or text change. On a similar note, you can attempt

to use your computer or phone, and see if everything behaves the way it should.

Another popular one is to write a letter or draw a symbol on your hand. Periodically

throughout the day, check your hand to see if the letter or symbol is there. If it is not, chances

are that you are dreaming. Even if it is there, you should do some other reality checks and

question whether you could be dreaming.

One thing to note is that sometimes during a dream, your lowered state of awareness

leads to you believing everything is as it should be, even when it isn’t. For example, you will

look at a page in a book, everything will be gibberish, but you’ll convince yourself that it looks

completely normal. This is why it’s good to use multiple different reality checks together, rather

than relying on one alone. One alone has a very good chance of letting you down, but 3, 4, or

38
more different reality checks together have a very high chance of making you aware that you are

dreaming.

Alongside asking yourself if you are dreaming, and testing to see if you are, a very

useful technique is to see what you remember of your day.

Dreams are odd in that there is no clearly defined beginning to a dream. A dream can

start anywhere, in the middle of the day, in some weird location, with no explanation of why

you’re here or what you’re doing. As such, in a dream, you will only really remember any

events that have happened in that dream, and not really how you got there or why you’re there

in the first place.

So, by going back through the sequence of events of the day, if you find yourself unable

to remember what happened before a certain point, and you generally have a good memory,

then it’s highly likely that you’re dreaming right now. Confirm it with a few reality checks.

Combine these things together. Regularly throughout the day, and any time you notice

something off, you should stop to ask yourself if you could be dreaming, try to retrace your

memories throughout the day, and perform several reality checks, multiple times each, carefully

and slowly.

Remember how in the previous chapter we talked about recurring dream themes and

dream signs that you should look for in your dream journal entries? Well this is where those are

going to come in handy. Every time you encounter a dream sign or recurring theme from one of

your dreams, begin this process of questioning and testing whether or not you might be

dreaming. You’ll often find that you are in fact dreaming, and become lucid as a result.

39
 Wake Back to Bed (WBTB)

Wake Back to Bed, or WBTB for short is another very simple DILD technique for attaining

lucidity. When performing WBTB, as the name suggests, you wake up (in REM) and then

return to bed in the hopes of becoming lucid. There is more to it than that though.

First of all, you wake yourself up in REM as described in the first chapter. Once there,

you should get out of bed immediately. You want to wake yourself up fully. You can go use the

bathroom, go check your email, go take the dogs for a quick walk, or do some light exercise. Do

something to wake you up fully, and leave you aware and alert. For even better results, you can

spend the time reading, watching videos, or otherwise learning about lucid dreaming in some

shape or form. By keeping your mind on lucid dreaming, you increase your chances of this

technique proving to be successful.

Depending on how easy it is for you to fall back asleep, the time you want to spend

awake when performing this technique may differ. For example, if you fall asleep very quickly

and easily, then you may want to stay up for a longer period of time, such as 45 minutes to an

hour. If on the other hand you find yourself struggling to fall back asleep, then 10-20 minutes is

probably the longest you want to stay up. Experiment with different lengths of time and find

which one works best for you.

After being up for your chosen length of time, return to bed. Set the intention to lucid

dream, and try to think about what you intend to do in your lucid dream. You can even visualise

your lucid dream and where exactly you want it to occur. After taking some time to plan out

what you want to do in your dream, simply head back to sleep. If all goes well, you will find

yourself inside a dream, and lucid.

Don’t be discouraged if this doesn’t work on the first few attempts. No lucid dreaming

method works 100% of the time, and with most methods, you’ll often have to give them several

40
tries before you get any results. The more experience you have with lucid dreaming, and the

more lucid dreams you have had, the easier it will be to have subsequent lucid dreams. In

essence, techniques should become more effective the longer you practice lucid dreaming.

Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreams (MILD)

The next DILD technique I will describe to you is called the Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dream,

or MILD for short. The goal of MILD is to encourage you to remember to recognise when

you’re in a dream. The most common way that we achieve this is by the repetition of a phrase or

mantra prior to falling asleep. This can be done at the beginning of the night, but this will not be

particularly effective. For best results, wake yourself up in REM as you would for other

methods, and then perform this next step.

Repeat a mantra or phrase in your head to remind you that you will be dreaming. I

personally have always used the phrase “I will be lucid in my next dream”, the rationale I used

when I started to use this was that including the word lucid in there would encourage me to

remember to think of lucid dreaming in my next dream, and become lucid as a result.

If you prefer, you can use another phrase like “Next time I’m dreaming, I’ll remember

I’m dreaming”, “I will recognise when I am in a dream”, “I always know when I am dreaming”,

or “I will remember to perform a reality check in my next dream”. Anything that can remind

you to question reality or realise that you are in a dream is a suitable mantra. You don’t need to

over-think it.

There is some debate over whether it is suitable to start such a mantra off with the

words “I will”, or talking about things in future tense, as typically when making affirmations,

we are trying to implant a suggestion in the subconscious. When doing this, we usually want to

refer to things as if they have already happened, rather than leaving them as something that can

41
happen at some indefinite date in the future. This helps the subconscious believe them to

already be fact.

In the case of MILD, such attention to detail on wording is not necessary. The purpose

of the mantra of MILD is not so much for it to function as an affirmation to change your

beliefs – but merely for the phrase or mantra to be remembered in your dream due to you

repeating it while falling asleep.

As such it’s perfectly fine in my opinion to use “I will” at the start of such a mantra.

I’ve done it this way myself for years, and MILD has always worked well for me. It’s important

to remember that as your dreams are deeply rooted in your subconscious, trusting your own

intuitive feelings about particular techniques and methodologies is a good idea.

If a particular mantra feels more right to you than any other, go with it. If on the other

hand you don’t like a given mantra, or it doesn’t seem to be worded correctly, then don’t use it.

Once you’ve chosen your phrase or mantra, repeat it for as long as you desire

prior to falling asleep. Originally MILD guides and tutorials all suggested that this mantra

should be repeated endlessly until you fall asleep. If you’re like me, you may find it difficult to

fall asleep while repeating a mantra, so I personally just repeat it for a minute or two, then stop

and go to sleep. I haven’t found this approach to be much less effective.

Finger Induced Lucid Dreams (FILD)

On the WILD (wake-induced) side of things, one popular technique is the FILD or Finger

Induced Lucid Dream. The clue is once again in the name, as in this technique you are going to

be using finger movements to ease you back into sleep and into a dream.

42
 First you need to learn the finger movements themselves. Imagine that you are going to

play piano or keyboard. Place the tips of your index and middle fingers on a surface like a desk

or table, now lightly begin to alternate tapping those fingers as if you were playing piano. Think

of your index finger as finger 1, and your middle finger as finger 2.

Press 1 down gently, then 2 down gently, then 1 down gently, then 2 down gently. Keep

repeating this pattern as if you were playing the same two keys over and over on piano. Do not

press hard as if you were pressing down the keys on a computer keyboard, the movements

should be subtle and soft.

Once you have learned the movements, you are going to remind yourself to perform

them the next time you wake up in REM. You can either use an alarm to wake you up in REM

as usual, or wait for a night in which you wake up in the middle of the night or during a dream.

When you wake up, try not to move much (aside from turning off your alarm if you

need to, and then laying back down), close your eyes if they aren’t already closed, and begin to

repeat the finger movements from earlier. 1,2,1,2,1,2, etc. Keep repeating these gentle finger

movements for around 30 seconds.

After you have repeated the motions for approximately half a minute, it is time

to see if you have entered a dream. Perform one or more of the reality checks I outlined in the

previous section. If you can’t see anything, simply reach for your nose, try to close it, and

breathe through it as in the reality check I previously taught you. If you’re not yet in a dream,

you can get out of bed and perform a WBTB attempt, and perhaps even perform FILD again

when returning to bed.

43
 Wake Induced Lucid Dreams (WILD)

While WILD can be used to refer to any technique that gets you lucid from a waking state, if

someone says they’re performing WILD, they usually mean the following technique. I’ll

explain this technique in detail now. Before I do so, I would like to address a very common

misconception about performing WILD, and that is that you need to go through sleep paralysis

when performing it.

Earlier on we mentioned something known as REM atonia, where the muscles paralyse

themselves during REM sleep. When this atonia occurs while you’re falling asleep (but still not

entirely asleep) or while waking up (but still not entirely awake), you can experience this

paralysis while feeling like you’re awake and in your room. You can often experience vivid

hallucinations, and it can be quite the jarring experience. This is known as sleep paralysis, and it

is the cause of many reported hauntings and ghost sightings that occur at night. If you’ve ever

woken up, feeling like you’re unable to move, and deathly afraid, that was sleep paralysis.

When in sleep paralysis you are right at the edge between wakefulness and a regular

dream, and so it is incredibly easy to enter a dream directly at this point. So, for a long time,

every WILD tutorial out there suggested that to enter a dream from the waking state, you must

first enter sleep paralysis, and do it from there.

We now know however that this is not the case. You can enter a dream directly from the

waking state without ever entering sleep paralysis. Since sleep paralysis can be scary and

unpleasant for some, and since it’s unnecessary, there’s no real reason to go through it unless

you especially wish to. So, the WILD technique that I will share now is one that does not

involve you going through sleep paralysis.

In addition to being unnecessary, sleep paralysis can over-complicate things. For some

people such as myself, relaxing enough to achieve sleep paralysis is far more difficult than

44
simply entering a lucid dream, and so if you add in this step, it can make the technique very

difficult to succeed with.

To begin performing WILD, we will start by waking up in REM as usual, either using

an alarm, or by simply utilising an opportunity when we naturally wake up in the middle of a

dream during the night. We will then lay down comfortably, close our eyes, and simply pay

attention to what is happening behind our closed eyes.

Do you remember how we learned meditation in the previous chapter? Well, that’s

going to come in handy here once again. You should pay attention to what is going on behind

your closed eyelids, in much the same manner you pay attention to your breath during

meditation. Don’t try to control it, or force it, simply be aware of what is happening, and

anything you can see. Most probably initially that will be nothing. You’ll just see black. Just be

aware of that, don’t try to change it, just let yourself experience it.

After some time, you may start to notice something. Perhaps you notice some shapes or

colours, or often you’ll find yourself starting to get caught up in thought. Simply keep your

attention on what is happening behind your closed eyes. Now, here is where things start to get a

little different from meditation. In meditation if you were to start letting your mind wander and

imagine things, you would immediately catch yourself and return your attention to your breath.

Here, when performing WILD, if you find yourself starting to imagine and visualise

things, let it happen, go with the imagined images. You may start to find that soon you’re no

longer paying attention to the blackness behind your closed eyes, but instead to the images

forming in your mind’s eye.

Or alternatively, you may find that you are paying attention to the blackness, and in that

blackness, images are starting to form of their own accord. Often these images will be vague,

like the outlines of shadows. Anything you notice, whether in the darkness behind your closed

eyes, or in your mind’s eye, you should explore. If you see a shape, try to imagine what the

45
shape could be. If you see a scene in your mind’s eye, try to look through it, and see more of it.

If you see scenery, try to imagine that you’re zooming towards it and it’s getting closer to you.

As you play around and interact with what you can see or imagine, you may start to find

that the imagery starts to become more tangible and real. Real scenes start to form, and at times

it almost feels as if you’re there right next to the things that you see.

When this starts to occur, it is time to try to engage your senses. Try to imagine some

other sensory information from the scene you are viewing. As an example, if you see a kitchen,

try to imagine the scents, and smells, of different foods that you might find there. If you see a

group of people, imagine the sounds of their voices as they have a conversation together. My

personal favourite is to engage my sense of touch.

I will imagine the feeling of running my hand along one of the objects I can see. I like

to use everyday surfaces, like walls, floors, or grass, and imagine how it would feel to run my

hands along or through them. I recall the sensation of running my hands along similar textures

in real life from memory, and as I imagine these sensations, they eventually start to get stronger,

until I can really feel them.

I repeat this until I find myself actually touching the objects inside the dream scene.

Soon, I can move my hands and arms about in the scene, which I do for a few brief moments

until I find myself conscious of my legs. Once I’m conscious of my legs, I begin to walk around,

and sure enough, I’m now fully inside this dream, and of course, lucid.

The same can be done with other senses, imagine the smell or taste or sound getting

stronger and stronger, until you can really feel it, taste it, smell it, or hear it. Then try to interact

with it in some way, until you find yourself there inside the dream.

Don’t be disappointed if while doing this you simply find yourself returning to the black empty

space behind your eyes. This is normal, and even if you’re proficient with this technique, you’ll

46
sometimes find it takes several attempts, several different scenes, before you are finally able to

enter one and step inside a dream.

This technique will take more practice than the earlier techniques I mentioned, and may

prove quite difficult if you are still inexperienced, so I suggest combining it with other

techniques initially. That way if it doesn’t work those other techniques also have a chance of

working.

For example, perform daily meditation, regular reality checks, perform WBTB, and

then when returning to bed, perform the mantra for MILD. Then finally, attempt WILD. If

WILD fails, you still have a chance of getting lucid from the meditation, reality checks, WBTB,

or MILD. This will make any initial failures with WILD less discouraging.

Dream Exit Induced Lucid Dreams (DEILD)

DEILD or the Dream Exit Induced Lucid Dream is another variation of WILD in which you use

a dream that you were just in, as an aid to help you enter a new dream, or even re-enter the

dream you just left moments earlier.

When you find yourself waking up from a dream or after a recent dream, it is the perfect

time to perform DEILD. Lay in bed and relax, as if you were about to perform WILD normally.

Close your eyes, and now begin to recall the dream you just experienced. Remember what you

were doing in the dream, the sequence of events that happened, how you felt, what you saw,

what you heard.

As you recall the dream, try to visualise in your mind’s eye the dream scene you were

just in. If you are very relaxed and sleepy still, then you will often find that this works very

quickly, and soon you are actually seeing the dream scene you just left, or even re-entering that

dream without even actively trying.

47
 If you’re not quite as relaxed, then you may need to continue as if you were performing

WILD normally. Continue visualising (in other words, imagining) the dream you were just in,

and then, when you start to be able to picture it in your mind’s eye, begin imagining interactions

with the dream just as you did with standard WILD. Imagine running your hands along a

surface, or imagine a scent, or something you can hear from the scene. Keep doing this until the

scene solidifies and you are able to enter the dream.

Alternatively, a simpler approach, is to simply continue to visualise and imagine the

dream you were just in, until you find yourself in it. Since the dream is so fresh in your mind,

simply focusing your imagination on it for long enough should usually eventually result in you

entering either the dream you just left, or a fresh one.

You can also simply perform WILD in the normal fashion as outlined in the previous

section. If you have just left a dream, then WILD will work more quickly than usual, and you

can find yourself within a dream in just a matter of seconds in some cases.

DEILD can be performed when exiting lucid dreams too, and not just regular dreams.

This means that learning DEILD is one of the single most effective things you can do to

increase the number of lucid dreams you have, because the moment you master DEILD, all

those nights where you have one lucid dream, can turn into nights where you have several.

Meditation to Attain Lucidity

Although I touched on this already in the previous chapter, I feel it is important to talk about

meditation once again. Meditation is the single most effective method of getting lucid that I

have found to date. With meditation, I have achieved a whopping 13 lucid dreams in a single

night, without using any techniques, or even maintaining a dream journal at that time. It’s

48
possible that I’ve since beaten that record since writing this, and if I have, I can confidently say

that it’ll likely be through meditation and not any other technique.

It is important to realise that meditation is much like reality checks or asking yourself if

you’re dreaming, in that it initially has a lower success rate. If you just start meditating today for

the first time, don’t expect to suddenly be getting lucid every night in your first week. You may

get lucid once or twice, or find you get no results whatsoever initially.

This is one of the many reasons, why consistency with daily meditation is so incredibly

important. Once you’ve been meditating for a few weeks, you’ll start to notice it impacting your

dreams more and more. The longer you practice, and the longer each meditation session, the

more often you will find yourself getting lucid. You will find other lucid dreaming techniques

are now more effective and have a higher success rate, but you will also find yourself getting

lucid spontaneously, simply through the increased awareness that meditation provides.

This is precisely how meditation can help you with lucid dreaming. Have you ever

noticed how you’ve learned to automate certain activities that you do a lot? Things like washing

dishes, or driving your car, or brushing your teeth. You often don’t even think about them at all

as you do them, because you’ve learned to do them on auto-pilot. It’s no wonder then that

you’ve developed a sort of auto-pilot in your dreams.

You don’t think, you just act, and as a result, you never stop to notice your surroundings,

and never catch the fact that you’re dreaming. When you start to meditate, you are taking the

time to become present and notice exactly what is happening in this very moment. You are

taking yourself off auto-pilot.

As you learn to stop being on auto-pilot while awake, this also carries over to your

dreams. When you stop being on auto-pilot in your dreams, you start noticing, questioning, and

becoming aware of the fact you are dreaming.

49
 As I stated earlier, meditation for the purpose of getting lucid should be performed in

the evening or night, for a minimum of 20 minutes. It should also be performed every single

night. The longer you maintain consistent daily meditation, the more of an effect it will have.

The more lucid dreaming experience you have, the more of an effect it will have.

Eventually if you keep meditating regularly, and become sufficiently experienced with

lucid dreaming, you may find yourself faced with a situation similar to the one I faced when I

moved my meditation to the evenings: Every night, all of my dreams were lucid. I recalled them

all clearly upon waking. My dreams were long and stable. I had effortless dream control.

Interestingly, I also became lucid during my deep sleep (this is the “lucid sleep” I referred to

earlier), from which point I could create and enter dreams whenever I pleased.

When I stopped meditating for just a day or two, the effect often disappeared instantly.

When I moved my meditation back to the mornings, the effect disappeared completely, and I

went back to lucid dreaming at the normal rate. As such, consistency and timing are key.

In this section on meditation I briefly want to touch on another technique that works in a

similar manner to meditation. This technique is known as ADA or All-Day Awareness. ADA is

simple. Throughout the day you try to stop what you are doing, get off auto-pilot, and really

notice your surroundings. Take in everything you are experiencing with all your senses, and just

notice and be aware of it much like during meditation.

Periodically repeat this throughout the day, and you will find that just like meditation it

allows you to get off auto-pilot, become more aware during the day, and as a result, become

more aware during sleep. This of course can result in similar benefits to daily meditation. For

best results, practice both.

50
 Increasing Your Chances of Getting Lucid

Some lucid dreaming techniques are more likely to work than others. Depending on your level

of experience with lucid dreaming in general, or with a given technique, that chance may be

higher or lower. No technique, no matter how good you are, ever gives you a 100% guarantee of

getting lucid. For this reason, when you really want to get lucid as often as possible, it is

desirable to do certain things to increase your chances of getting lucid.

Some things that we have already mentioned that can increase your chances are:

Keeping a dream journal and noticing dream signs, maintaining healthy regular sleep, wearing a

sleep mask, blacking out all light, taking Melatonin, performing regular meditation, and

practising All-Day Awareness.

In addition to all of these things, one of the best ways to increase your chances of

getting lucid, is simply to combine multiple techniques. When you wake up in REM, you do not

have to simply perform one technique and be done with it. You can combine multiple. Example:

Do ADA throughout the day, meditate at night, ask yourself regularly if you’re dreaming,

perform regular reality checks, wake up in REM, perform WBTB, head back to bed, perform

the MILD mantra, attempt FILD, if that fails, attempt WILD, if that fails, simply head back to

bed, and hope you get a Dream Induced Lucid Dream.

Now you aren’t just relying on one technique to work, as every single technique that

you’re using has its own chance of working. Combining lots of techniques like this gives you a

very high chance of getting lucid on any given night.

Another way to increase your chances of getting lucid is through the use of lucid aids,

which you will find out more about in Chapter 6. Lucid aids include things like dream herbs and

supplements, dream masks, hypnosis, affirmations, and the placebo effect. These things can be

51
combined with standard techniques to produce extremely high chances of attaining lucidity in

any given night.

Last, but not least, as I mentioned earlier, your level of experience significantly impacts

how well different techniques will work for you. The more experience you have with a

technique, the more likely it is to work for you. In addition, the more lucid dreams you have

under your belt, the more easily you will recognise when you are dreaming, and so you will start

to have more and more spontaneous DILDs without even having to perform any techniques.

There are periods in my life where I take weeks or months away from practising any lucid

dreaming techniques, focusing primarily on other areas of my life, and yet I still manage to

lucid dream quite regularly due to these spontaneous lucid dreams I have at my current level of

experience.

52
 IV: Staying Lucid

Meditation & Dream Duration

Meditation, as well as giving you a much higher chance of attaining lucidity in the first place,

also helps with the duration of those dreams. The stability and duration of my lucid dreams has

always been my biggest weakness, and even today it is still the area of my lucid dreaming

practice that needs the most work. When I first started out, I was plagued with many lucid

dreams that were very short and fleeting, making it hard to accomplish anything before the

dream was over.

Over the years as my experience has grown, so has my ability to keep my dreams

lasting long and remaining stable. However, there are still many occasions when I struggle with

short lucid dreams that are over in under a minute, and stabilisation techniques simply fail to

achieve the desired result.

There is one thing however, that has been able to result in consistently longer lucid

dreams. You guessed it: Meditation. When I began to practice meditation at night in the hours

leading up to bed, I found that my dreams stopped suffering from issues of poor stability, and

would last long even without me doing anything to stabilise them. On top of this, dream entry

53
became so easy, that even the dreams that did end prematurely, could simply be re-entered

without any trouble through DEILD.

Along with making your dreams more stable, meditation helps to keep you calm during

your lucid experiences, which as you’ll learn later in this chapter is absolutely vital if you want

to have those experiences lasting for a decent length of time.

As always, meditation for these benefits is best performed in the evening or at night,

and for a minimum of 20 minutes. Meditation practice should be done every day for best results,

even if that means only meditating for a few minutes on some days where you’re strapped for

time. Consistency is key.

Chaining Dreams

In the previous chapter we learned about DEILD, or the Dream Exit Induced Lucid Dream. This

technique, as well as being a great way to get lucid in the first place, is also a great way to deal

with that issue of having short lucid dreams.. Sometimes your attempts to extend the length of a

lucid dream simply fail and you find yourself waking up. Normally this would be the end of

your experience, but if you are proficient with DEILD, then you can use it to quickly re-enter

the dream you just left, or enter a brand new one.

In this manner, DEILD can be used to chain several dreams in a row. Even if your

dreams are only a few minutes in length, by having 3 or 4 such dreams, you’ve dramatically

increased the time that you spend lucid. This is my secret to having 3, 4, 5, or even 10 or more

(my best being 13 as I mentioned earlier) lucid dreams in a single night. Every time one ends,

simply perform DEILD and enter another. Once you get familiar with DEILD, it becomes much

easier to do, and it’s one of the most effective techniques you can find for both increased

frequency of lucid dreams, and increased overall time spent lucid.

54
 As well as using DEILD to re-enter a dream after having left one, you can sometimes

simply wait for another dream to begin. When a dream ends, you usually find yourself staring at

what appears to be the blackness behind your closed eyelids.

Many people make the mistake of assuming that at this point they are awake, and that

they may as well open their eyes. Most of the time this is incorrect, you are in fact still asleep,

and the blackness you see is simple a void space between dreams.

If you are patient, you can simply wait in this black space, and a new dream will begin

to form, mere moments later. Alternatively, you can begin to visualise, imagine, or watch the

black space in a manner like WILD or DEILD, and encourage the formation of a new dream.

With visualisation and imagination, you can even sometimes choose the location of the new

dream by imagining it vividly.

If you find yourself awake, and DEILD isn’t working, then another trick you can use to

chain multiple dreams is simply to return to sleep. If you have just left a lucid dream, and you

return to sleep, you will almost certainly enter a dream very quickly, and usually quickly realise

that it is a dream since you were lucid only moments earlier.

In fact, this technique can work even when your previous dream wasn’t a lucid dream.

By simply waking yourself up repeatedly and going back to sleep over and over, you can often

become lucid.

It’s hard to say why this method works, but I’ve always found it to be quite effective,

and in my early days of lucid dreaming, I would often utilise 10 to 15-minute alarms to take

advantage of this. I would lay down for a nap, and have an alarm wake me up every 10-15

minutes. Or alternatively I would wake up in the morning or after a long sleep, and then begin

setting alarms every 10-15 minutes. Each alarm would wake me, and I would turn it off, ensure

the next alarm was set, then head back to sleep. After several awakenings, I would start to find

myself having very vivid dreams, and on many occasions these dreams would become lucid.

55
The alarms did mean that the duration of those dreams was limited, but because I was able to

keep getting lucid time after time, it didn’t really matter.

This is actually a lucid dreaming technique that I refer to as nap chaining. I didn’t

include a full section on it for the simple reason that the technique is so simple it didn’t need

much explaining. If you want to lucid dreaming during the day, simply set alarms to go off

every 10-15 minutes and nap. Then when you start waking up from dreams, if you want you can

turn off your alarms and just go back to sleep, with the intention of lucid dreaming. Or you can

keep the alarms going.

Just like I was explaining, as you can do with any other technique, any time you wake up from a

dream, perform DEILD, and enter a brand new one.

Excitement

Excitement can often be the biggest enemy of long lucid dreams. During REM sleep, the stage

in which we are typically in during our regular lucid dreams, we are actually very close to

wakefulness. You would think that perhaps our dreams occur in the deepest stages of sleep, but

on the contrary, during REM you are the closest to wakefulness you have been since the early

beginnings of Stage 1 sleep. As a result of this, you are very easily awoken by anything external

that may stir you from your sleep. You are also equally easily awoken by yourself, and your

own emotions.

The chief emotion involved is usually excitement. It usually goes a little something like

this: you get lucid, and immediately you’re so excited about the fact that you’re lucid, so excited

about all the things you can do, that the dream starts to become unstable and fade away. Then

moments later it’s over.

56
 When you first start lucid dreaming, there is a very high chance that many of your lucid

dreams will occur like this, especially since getting lucid for the first few times is just so

exciting in itself. So, after getting past the hurdle of achieving lucidity, you’re left facing a new

problem: the dreams simply don’t last.

The first thing you need to address is that excitement. It’s hard not to be excited about

lucid dreaming, but you have to do your best to tame and manage it. If you find yourself inside a

lucid dream, and getting excited, one thing you can do is simply sit down, relax, and take in the

scenery without acting.

By slowing down and stopping what you’re doing, you can begin to calm down and

relax a little. As you begin to relax more fully, you should find the dream starts to become more

stable. You’ll instinctively know how stable a dream is, because an unstable dream will be

blurry, murky, or feel like it’s falling apart at the seams and the dream is ending. A stable dream

on the other hand will feel quite real.

Meditation, once again, comes in handy here. If you are meditating regularly, you will

naturally be more calm and relaxed, both while awake, and asleep. So, this is yet another reason

for you to start meditating daily if you have not begun already.

Alongside meditation, any other practices that help you relax and be calm during the

day can also carry over that calming effect into your dreams. This includes things like listening

to guided hypnosis or relaxation tracks, getting a massage, taking a trip to a sauna, having a nice

warm bath or shower before bed, lighting pleasant incense, or drinking herbal teas. Anything

that results in you being more relaxed will usually help you with maintaining longer lucid

dreams.

There are of course some exceptions to this. For example, some drugs or medications

may relax you, but also inhibit REM, and so will decrease your chances of becoming lucid or

remembering any dreams in the first place. An example of this would be Cannabis, which is

57
well known for inhibiting dreaming. So, if your goal is to relax for the purpose of longer lucid

dreams, be sure that the means of relaxation chosen don’t interfere in other ways.

Another way to tackle excitement is to prepare yourself before you enter a lucid dream.

When you become lucid, if you have no specific goal to undertake, then you’re left with an

overwhelming number of possibilities available to you. That in itself can be a cause of massive

excitement, and you can quickly lose your hold over the dream.

If on the other hand you know exactly what it is you plan to do in your dream, then you

have no need to be overwhelmed, and can quickly begin working on the task at hand. This also

saves time, since there is less time spent debating or deciding what to do, and more time spent

moving towards those goals. So, I highly suggest deciding what it is you plan to attempt to do in

your next lucid dream well in advance, and reminding yourself of this goal before performing

any technique.

Dream Stabilisation

Sometimes you will find yourself in a dream that is unstable or rapidly seems to be ending. At

this point, it doesn’t matter how calm you remain, or how much meditation you’ve been doing –

the dream will end unless you act fast. It is at this point that you need to know how to stabilise

an unstable dream.

There are numerous ways to stabilise a dream, but the principle that usually connects all

of these techniques is that they all involve enhancing your connection with the dream world. As

the dream world becomes faint and distant, it will simply dissipate into nothingness. If on the

other hand, you can keep constantly interacting with the dream world, building a stronger

connection to it, then the dream will be much more likely to remain stable and keep you in it.

58
 Dream stabilisation techniques share some similarity with the techniques that can be

used to help you enter a dream when performing something like WILD. By trying to engage

your senses and really feel different aspects of the dream, you heighten your connection to it,

and increase your chances of being able to remain in it.

The first technique I am going to share with you is simple. Lift your hands up to your

face and look at them. Try to look at every little detail in your palms. This act of exploring the

scene close up visually, can improve your connection, and stabilise things through the use of

your sight.

Your other senses can be used to stabilise the dream in similar manners. For example,

touch is a great one, and perhaps the most common way of stabilising a dream. Take your hands

and rub them together vigorously. If all goes well, you should immediately feel the dream

becoming more stable.

An alternative is to touch the dream world itself. I like to run my hand along or through

objects with distinct textures, much like I do when entering a dream via WILD. I will run my

fingers through the grass in a field, or run my hand along a brick wall. Anything to engage my

sense of touch and connect me more to the dream I’m in.

If there is a body of water near you, submerse your hands or feet into it and feel the

water moving over your skin. If there is mud, jump in it, or roll in it. The stronger the tactile

sensation that interacting with that particular object is likely to produce, the more likely it is to

be effective at stabilising the dream.

Sight and touch aren’t the only senses you can use for stabilisation. Using your hearing

works great. Try really focusing in on the sounds you can hear around you, or you can even

make some yourself. Talk, shout, or better still: sing or play an instrument. The sound of music

can provide an incredible connection to the dream and make things very stable, very quickly.

Remember, it doesn’t matter if you sing terribly, no-one can hear you, and it will usually help

59
stabilise the dream. Besides, in a dream your imagination is in control, so if you think your

voice will sound great, or that your guitar skills will be amazing, then in the dream they may be!

Your sense of smell can also provide a powerful connection to the dream world. Find

some flowers, or some coffee, or some incense, or a fire, or anything that would produce a

unique and strong scent, and let yourself smell it. If there’s nothing around you with a

particularly interesting scent, you can even just imagine that you can smell something that isn’t

there, like some freshly baked bread, or your favourite food.

Speaking of food, taste is a great one to use too. Using taste has lately become one of

my favourite ways of stabilising a dream, partly because you’re always actually combining three

senses into one. When you eat or drink in a dream, you are tasting the food or drink, feeling the

tactile sensations of it in your mouth, and smelling it all at the same time.

In this way, tasting things can be one of the best ways to keep things stable and long

lasting. One thing I’ve been experimenting with recently is finding drinks or snacks, and simply

continuing to drink or eat from them over and over as I go about doing the things I want to do in

a dream. I’m never more than a few seconds without taking a sip or a bite, so I’m constantly

activating these three senses, and it has helped tremendously in making my dreams last longer.

Obviously this doesn’t fit with every dream, but in many where I’m just exploring, constantly

snacking or drinking can be a great way to stay in the dream.

Alongside utilising your senses to connect you more with the dream, there are other

things you can do for stabilisation purposes. One popular technique is to ask or command the

dream to become more stable. You can do this by asking it like you would a person, saying

something along the lines of “I’d like some more stability please”, or by issuing a command,

like “Stability” or “Stabilise”.

60
 You can speak it, shout it, or even simply think it. I personally find thinking a word like

“Stability” or “Stabilise” is quite effective and often results in the dream instantly becoming

crystal clear and sharp.

Simply believing or expecting the dream to remain stable is something else with very

high efficacy – and the opposite is also true: if you expect short dreams, then your dreams will

often be short. I will speak in greater detail about this idea in the next chapter when I cover

dream control and the role your beliefs and expectations play in it.

Another technique is to spin around on the spot. For many people this is touted as a

stabilisation technique, but I find that for me and many others, this technique actually speeds up

the end of the dream, but leaves you in that black space between dreams, and a few moments

later, results in a new dream forming.

If you feel a dream is going to end no matter what you do, this can be a great last-

minute thing to do, since I find that when spinning I always end up in this black space between

dreams rather than simply waking up. So, I’m always able to enter a new dream this way. In this

manner, it can serve as a safeguard against waking up and ending your dreaming entirely.

Making the Most of Short Dreams

At times your dreams will simply be short, no matter what you do. It is hard to know how long

any given dream will be, and so as well as learning to make your dreams longer, it is equally

important (if not more so) to learn how to make the most of the limited time available to you.

Planning out your dreams beforehand like I mentioned earlier certainly helps, as it

minimises time procrastinating or deciding what to do. Using various techniques and short-cuts

to save you time will also be very helpful. For example, rather than walking some place, try

61
flying there, or better yet, teleport, or make the location come to you. Rather than trying to

locate a particular object or person, you can spawn them near to you.

Another example: if you end up in a dream you don’t like, rather than wasting time

trying to change everything about it, from the location, to the characters, to the objects present –

it can be easier to simply spin on the spot until you reach the void, and then wait for a new

dream to form.

When you begin to learn different dream control techniques, many of which I will talk

about in the next chapter, it is important to try out different techniques and ways of doing things.

As you experiment, you will find that some techniques have a higher chance of working for you

than others, and some are also quicker and easier for you to perform. Once you find the

techniques that work best for you, stick to these to save time.

Practice makes perfect, and as you become more experienced with lucid dreaming, you

will find it a lot easier to get more done in a short time. Even those one or two-minute-long

dreams will start to become ample time to achieve a whole lot in. There are some goals in

particular that also really lend themselves to short lucid dreams.

For example, if you are concerned with getting inspiration and ideas, or the answers to a

question, you can probe your subconscious for information in a lucid dream. More on this in the

next chapter! This can be accomplished in 30 seconds or less, and afterwards if the dream does

end prematurely, you’ve already completed your task, so it doesn’t matter.

Another thing you can do is revisit previous dreams. If you are cursed with constant

short lucid dreams, and haven’t yet mastered stabilisation, then when you do want to

accomplish something that’ll take you more time, try to conjure up the dream you were in last

time and continue from where you left off. This way something that might take 10 or 20

minutes to complete, can be slowly completed over the course of several shorter dreams.

62
 One tip I will give you is to always be prepared for the worst. Expect long and clear

lucid dreams, as that expectation will likely result in them occurring, but always be prepared for

the short ones.

If you do have a goal that can’t be completed in a short lucid dream, and you don’t want

to complete it in parts, revisiting the same dream each time, then you should have a backup goal

that can be completed in a short dream. That way if you find yourself in a dream that you’re

struggling to stabilise, you can work on your backup goal, and still achieve something.

Finally, if you ever find yourself in an unstable dream and don’t have a backup goal,

then one thing I sometimes like to do is to simply ask the dream to show me something useful or

interesting. I will call out to the dream itself, or speak to a dream character, and I will ask in

plain English: “Show me something interesting”.

Many times, this will do nothing, but at other times, the dream takes a turn in a new and

exciting direction, and reveals something fascinating or useful to me before it ends. While lucid

dreams afford you the opportunity to control the direction of all of your dreams, sometimes

simply going along with the direction of an existing dream, or asking the dream to direct you,

can prove equally rewarding.

63
 V: Dream Control

Belief & Expectation

In this chapter I’m going to be teaching you about dream control. The skill you’ll need to learn

if you want to go beyond simply getting lucid. This is what you use to summon objects, to

change the scenery, to fly, use superpowers, or do any of the other numerous things you might

want to do in a lucid dream.

Before we move on to individual techniques, it’s important to cover the most important

aspects involved in dream control: Belief, and expectation. As we learned earlier, dreams are a

product of the subconscious mind. This means that your subconscious beliefs and expectations

will affect everything about a dream; from the location, to the characters and how they act, to

your ability to perform any of the various dream control techniques you’re going to learn.

If there is only one dream control technique you invest time in learning, it should be

control over your own beliefs and expectations. Let’s use an actual example of something you

might want to attempt to do in a lucid dream: flying. In a lucid dream, since the dream is a

construct within your mind, it doesn’t behave by the rules of the normal world, and you’re able

to do things like flying without the aid of equipment or planes.

64
 You can literally shoot up into the air like Superman, or flap your arms until you start

flying, or even swim through the air. For many people like myself this comes quite naturally

now, but for many others it’s a struggle. When I first started, I had no ability to do it initially

either.

The main thing that affects someone’s ability to succeed with a technique like flying in

a lucid dream is their subconscious beliefs surrounding the activity. If you subconsciously

believe that even in a dream flying is impossible, then what do you think will happen when you

attempt to fly? After all, your subconscious is producing the dream, so if your subconscious

doesn’t think it’s possible, then guess what: it isn’t.

On the other hand, if you believe that flying is possible, and also believe that you will

succeed with the particular technique you use to attempt it, then chances are you will be

successful 9 times out of 10.

While I would consider myself a spiritual person, I don’t belong to any particular

religion. I also don’t think lucid dreaming has much to do with religion. So I certainly never

thought I’d find myself quoting the Bible when attempting to teach lucid dreaming. Nonetheless,

there is a fantastic quote in it that ends up being oddly appropriate for teaching this one aspect

of lucid dreaming.

The quote goes a little something like this: Afterwards the disciples came to Jesus

privately and asked, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” “Because you have so little faith.” He

answered. “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this

mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

While I’m certain this quote wasn’t originally intended to have anything to do with

lucid dreaming, it fits perfectly. If you have absolute belief or faith in the end result, then almost

anything will be possible for you to do in a lucid dream. You really can move mountains with

65
just a little faith in your dreams. On the other hand, without faith in your abilities and in the end

result, no matter the method used, you will be greeted with failure.

Another great example of this principle would be the Matrix movie series. If you’re

unfamiliar with the series, definitely go watch them, as I actually think some of the depictions

of the Matrix are quite fitting for describing a lucid dream. Still, I won’t spoil it, but in short, the

main character Neo discovers that he is living in a simulation, and he quickly discovers that

while in this simulation, he can accomplish all sorts of superhuman feats. The requirement is

that he believes, or more aptly: knows, that he can do it.

Belief can even play a role in the efficacy of lucid dreaming induction techniques

themselves. When trying to induce a lucid dream, if you are confident that the methods and

techniques used will work, then you will have much more success than someone who perhaps

doesn’t even believe in lucid dreaming or feels like they’re doing things wrong and doomed to

fail.

So, it is incredibly important to learn to master your subconscious beliefs. Controlling

your beliefs can be tricky, but there are various ways of accomplishing this feat. For one, it

helps to understand that the subconscious, while not something you interact directly with most

of the time, is still something you can influence, manipulate, and control.

Knowing that you have the power to do whatever you like in your dreams is the first

step, because when you realise that and accept it as fact, you have already set up the most

important belief you need: belief in your ability to control things within your dreams.

When it comes to individual aspects of dream control, like flying, using superpowers,

spawning items, controlling characters, and so on and so forth, it helps to make things more

believable. The more believable an outcome is to you, the more likely it is to occur. So, for

example, if you’re struggling to fly, but you have no difficulty spawning items, why not spawn

66
yourself a jetpack? Since it’s far more believable that you can fly with a jetpack, than by simply

flapping your arms or swimming through the air.

I myself learned to fly in my lucid dreams by making the outcome more believable in a

sense. I had never flown in any dream before, neither lucid nor regular, and so I really had no

idea how to do it. One day I was standing in the town I grew up in back in England, which to

me was a sign I was dreaming since I no longer live there. I performed a reality check, and

quickly discovered that I was correct in my assumption that I was dreaming.

I decided that I wanted to attempt to fly, but I wasn’t sure how. So, I quickly began to

think: How would a person fly? Where have I seen a person flying before? Immediately

Superman sprung to mind, so I struck up the pose Superman makes when flying, with his fist

pointing outwards, and jumped up in the air, hoping for the best. Sure enough, I shot up into the

air at lightning speed. It worked, I was flying!

Since then I have learned to believe that other methods of flying (like controlling my

movement with my mind, or simply jumping up and floating up into the air) will work equally

well, and so I’m not so limited in my options. When doing something for the first time though,

it helps to pick a way of doing it that seems more believable to you.

One thing you might be wondering after hearing my story, is how exactly did that work.

After all, Superman is a comic book character, and so you wouldn’t expect emulating him to

actually allow you to fly. Surely that wouldn’t work? Well the subconscious is not picky about

where information comes from.

Have you ever noticed how upset you can become when your favourite character in a

TV show dies? Or how nervous you can be when someone is going to get caught in a stealth

scene in a movie? Your brain is reacting to these situations as if they were real, and not merely

some good (or sometimes terrible) acting.

67
 Your subconscious accepts fact and fiction just the same: what it sees or is told, it starts

to believe. So, if you’ve seen someone using a superpower in a movie or TV show, there is a

small part of your subconscious that believes you can use the power in the same way as they do.

In this fashion, emulating Superman in my dream allowed me to fly.

Spawning Objects & Characters

If in your dream you require a particular item/object, or a particular person/character/being, etc,

then you need to figure out a way of finding or having them appear. You could search around

and look for them, but that will usually fail to bring any results, and you’ll quickly waste the

dream without accomplishing anything. So, it is important to instead learn how to spawn objects

and characters yourself. To spawn something is just to create it or make it appear yourself.

One way to spawn things is simply to believe that they will appear in front of you, and

try to conjure them out of thin air. This can work, but as we learned in the previous section, it is

best to make things as believable as possible if we want them to be successful. It is very hard for

us to believe that we can simply spawn a person or item in front of us, out of thin air.

It is much more believable that we could run into said person or object just around the

corner, or in the next room. So, that’s what I like to do, I like to believe that the person or object

I’m looking for can be found just around the corner, or inside a cupboard, or in the next room. I

then enter that place, and normally, I’ll find the thing or person I’m looking for there. If it

doesn’t work the first time, I’ll just repeat it again and again until it does.

For small objects, pockets work great. Just imagine that you’ll find the object in your

pocket, and reach in and pull it out. You can even do this with larger objects too, but of course

your brain will have an easier time believing you can pull a pen out of your pocket, than a

rocket launcher. So don’t be surprised if you have a bit more trouble with larger objects.

68
 Sometimes, the use of language can be helpful in spawning objects and characters.

Have you ever noticed how if you just try to visualise or imagine something, it can sometimes

be difficult, but when you read a description in a book, you can see the things the book

describes clear as day?

Or how a description can really flesh out the details of something that you’re imagining?

Let’s try it right now. Spend the next 30 seconds imagining a room. Decorate it however you

like. After you’ve done that, come back, and read the next paragraph. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Okay, so you’re back, let’s try that again. This time I’m going to describe a room for

you. You’re standing in a large building, that looks like it was once a church. Huge colourful

stained-glass windows adorn each of the four walls, depicting Saints, and famous religious

scenes. You are standing right in the centre, where the aisle would have been.

There are no pews, as they’ve been replaced by a whole array of machines and

equipment. Treadmills, benches, squat racks, and Smith machines – that’s right, this old church

has been converted into a gym. On the wall to your left-hand side, are some neatly arranged

racks all holding an assortment of dumbbells, and plates, in every weight range imaginable.

The gym is packed, men and women, old and young, out-of-shape and fit alike, all

busting their asses, working up a sweat. The chatter between gym-goers seems to be everywhere,

a cacophony of sound echoing off the ceiling, giving a surreal alien feeling to what you can hear.

In front of you is a large TV screen, to which many of the gym-goers have their eyes

glued. A news report is playing. Smoke billows in the background behind the reporter, who is

talking about the latest missile strike in a war-torn country far from here. Someone bumps into

you, and you hear a quick “Sorry” as a man in a gorilla costume pushes past you, being chased

by an array of gym staff, all dressed in bright blue uniforms.

69
 You hear a loud crash behind you, and turn around, to see someone has bumped their

barbell into a mirror, causing the whole thing to shatter into a million pieces. The sound stops,

everyone is silent for a brief moment, all staring at the newly created mess.

…And you get the idea. It wasn’t your typical every day scene, it didn’t make a lot of

sense, and it probably wasn’t something you’ve seen before. Yet, despite all that, you were

probably able to imagine and visualise what I described quite clearly, possibly more clearly than

when you tried to imagine something by yourself. Why is that? The reason is simple:

Describing something makes it easier to imagine. So, what was this tangent all about?

Well, when trying to spawn an object or person, or use any aspect of dream control, it

can sometimes be helpful to describe the desired result. Think of the dream world as the same

world you see in your mind’s eye when visualising or imagining something. The only difference

is that during a lucid dream, you’re in that world. So, describing things can be just as helpful as

it is when visualising or imagining things. Say something, either aloud, or in your mind, to

describe the desired outcome you would like, while practising some other dream control

technique.

Since we’re talking about spawning objects and characters here, let’s given an example.

We already learned how it helps to spawn things out of sight, since it’s more believable that

we’d find something around the corner, and we’ve just learned that describing things helps. So,

with that in mind, you can say something like “And around this corner is a Ferrari”. Stating

exactly the result you desire, while also expecting the result, will get you much further than

expectation alone.

You may have also noticed in my little church gym scene that when I added in

descriptive language, and more details, things got easier to visualise. So, we can take advantage

of this here too. Instead of just saying “a Ferrari” we can describe it a little bit, we can say “a

70
brand new red Ferrari, with a shine to it, that made it look fresh out of the car wash. With tinted

windows, and the door left wide open for you to get straight inside”.

Just a little extra description like that gets us to start imagining the car, and when we

start imagining it, our brain starts creating it within the dream. Sometimes when doing this, you

might even find the object of your desire appearing right in front of you, before you even have

the chance to turn the corner.

So, this is one way of spawning objects or characters, but there are numerous other

ways to go about this task. Let’s learn about two more, one specifically for objects/items, and

one specifically for spawning people/characters. First up, objects/items. Since it is much easier

to accomplish things that we find believable, we can use this to our advantage.

Ask a dream character for help with finding or retrieving the object in question. In real

life, you’re used to occasionally asking if someone can lend you something, so when in a dream

you ask a dream character for an object, even if the request is unreasonable (like asking a police

officer for a gun), they’re likely to comply a lot of the time and give you the object.

Sometimes dream characters can be unhelpful though, and this is where I borrowed a

trick from Star Wars. Jedi mind tricks. If you’re familiar with the series, you’ll recall the famous

scene in which Obi Wan convinces an enemy that the droids he has with him are not the ones

the enemy is searching for, simply by telling him this in a very matter of fact manner. You can

use a similar trick in your dreams. Rather than asking a character for an object, you can simply

state that they are going to give you it. “You are going to hand me a drink of water now”, or

“You are going to give me the keys to your car” can work really well.

You can even go a step further than that though, and really trick your brain into

believing that they already were going to give you the thing in question. It’s as simple as acting

as if the end result is already assumed. For example, instead of saying “You are going to give

71
me the keys to your car”, you say something like: “Right, so you want me to drive. Well give

me the keys then”.

The idea being that you’ve presupposed that the character asked you to drive them

somewhere, and so naturally their automatic response should be to give you the keys. Just

shifting the language ever so slightly like this can massively improve the likelihood of you

achieving your desired outcome. I use this trick all the time and it rarely ever fails.

Now for spawning characters, I like to use this same principle: acting as if the end result

is already assumed. What is the end result in this case? The end result is that the desired

character is waiting for us in the next room or around the corner. So how do we act as if that end

result is true?

Well, let’s say you’re trying to spawn a friend, in your living room, and you’re currently

in the next room. If your friend really is that next room, you could have a conversation with

them, because they’re within hearing distance. You wouldn’t have a conversation with them if

they weren’t there, so by starting to have a conversation with them, you’re assuming the end

result, that they are in fact there.

So, this is exactly what I’ll do. I’ll start talking to the other room as if I’m in the middle

of a conversation with the person. I might say something like “You found anything decent on

TV yet?” – something I might actually say to my friend while they’re in the other room.

If I get no response, I’ll keep talking, saying more things. What usually happens is after

saying a few things, I actually get a response. I hear the person in question reply. At this point,

the most believable thing to our brains is for the person to actually be there in the next room.

After all, in the real world, we don’t hear our friend in the next room, only to go in and

find the room empty. So, once you’ve heard the person respond, head in to the area in question,

and sure enough, you should find them there. As always, if this doesn’t work on your first try,

try, and try again.

72
 If you’re trying to summon someone in particular, then it can help to change location to

somewhere you’d be likely to find them, before applying this trick, for even better results.

That’s what we’ll talk about now.

Changing Location

Sometimes when you enter a lucid dream, you’re right where you want to be already. Most of

the time though, you’re in some random location, and you have a million places you’d much

rather be in. In some cases, you might even end up getting lucid in the middle of a nightmare

and be in some terrifying location that you absolutely want to leave immediately. Whatever the

situation, it’s very common to want to change your location in a lucid dream.

In the real world, we change location by travelling somewhere. If it’s close, you might

walk or cycle there. If it’s further away, you might drive, take a cab, or take some other form of

public transportation there. In a dream however, this is not a very efficient way of getting places.

After all, the dream world is controlled by your beliefs and imagination. So why limit

yourself to slow real world forms of transportation? In a dream you can fly around the world in

seconds, teleport, or simply make the location you desire appear just around the corner or on the

other side of the nearest hill. Learning to do these things will make getting places a whole lot

easier.

The first thing to master is simply walking around. Sometimes you’ll find that you

become lucid in a dream, but it feels like you don’t really have control over your body, or your

legs won’t move. My solution for dealing with this is to try to interact with the dream with my

hands first, as moving them around and interacting with the dream seems to solidify the

presence of my dream body and allow me to move around. If you aren’t able to even move your

73
hands, then simply start by imagining the sensation of touching various objects you see around

you, until you are, then go from there.

Once you’re able to walk around, you can start using other forms of transportation.

Vehicles, just like in the real world, are one choice for getting around. Don’t worry if you don’t

know how to drive, or if the vehicle is something you’ve never used before like perhaps a plane

or a helicopter. This isn’t the real world, so you only have to convince your subconscious that

you can operate the vehicle in question, which happens to be very easy. In a plane for example

you can simply grab the steering controls and imagine the plane moving forward, and it should

start to move.

Vehicles though, while fun to play around with, aren’t particularly fast or effective

compared to other methods of dream transportation. The next way you can get around is flying.

Yes, you don’t need a plane for this, you can jump up in the air and fly like your favourite

superheroes in a lucid dream.

Just like any aspect of dream control, belief is a major component here, so as I said

before, pick a technique for flying that you personally could consider believable in a dream

setting. If you naturally feel inclined to swim through the air, try it. If you enjoyed watching a

particular cartoon that featured a main character who could fly, try copy the way they did it. For

me personally, as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, the first time I attempted to fly in a dream,

the first character I thought of was Superman. So, I struck up the pose he makes when flying,

jumped up into the air, and sure enough I began to soar.

Other ways you can fly include flapping your arms as if they were wings, spawning a

jetpack and strapping it on, spawning a flying creature and riding on its back, or simply willing

yourself in your mind to float through the air. Don’t worry if the way you attempt to fly doesn’t

work, experiment with several different methods until you find one that works for you.

74
 A peculiar aspect of the dreaming experience is that the world is constantly shifting and

changing around you. It isn’t solid and stable like the real world. You can look at something,

look away, look back, and find the object or location in question to be completely different upon

your second look.

This is why spawning items and objects out of the line of sight can work really well, but

this also works for changing your location. You can simply imagine that your desired

destination is just around the corner, or just over the hill, or just through this door.

Speaking of which, doors are definitely an amazing tool for this purpose. You can go up

to any closed door (or any open one, that you then close), and simply imagine that when you

open it, your desired location is awaiting on the other side. Open up the door, and if all goes

well, you should see the new location and be able to walk right through into it, as if the door

was a portal taking you half way across the world. If you are not successful, then simply close

the door, and attempt the same thing again, as many times as necessary.

Remember, belief is key, so don’t just swing the door open and closed over and over

again wildly, wondering why it’s not working. Take a moment to collect yourself, then truly

know that the desired location is on the other side.

You can even simply use your mind to teleport you to another location. One way you

can do this is by closing your eyes and imagining the location you want to end up in. Don’t be

tempted to open your eyes when you do this. You are in a dream, and so you did not close your

real eyes, as they were already closed. Unfortunately, your real eyes are vulnerable to opening if

you try to open your dream eyes. Instead, simply wait for a new dream scene to form. If it’s

your desired location, great, if not, attempt it again.

Much like with obtaining items, dream characters can be of great use to you here too. If

you’re struggling with other transportation techniques, simply ask a dream character to take you

there. It helps if it would make sense for them to be able to.

75
 You can combine several of the techniques you’ve learned so far, and include things

like making assumptions through conversation. Let’s say you want to go to a particular dream

character’s house, and you’ve already encountered or spawned that particular character. You

can say something like “Oh, so you’re telling me that your house is now connected to mine

through this door? That’s pretty awesome, let’s go check it out”. Then open the door.

Super-human Abilities

One of the most exciting things about your dreams is that they do not require you to play by the

rules of the natural world, nor of physics. You can fly, shoot laser beams out of your eyes, turn

enemies into stone with one look, shrink down to the size of an ant, or use any number of super-

human abilities. The limit to your abilities is really only your imagination, and how well you

convince your subconscious that you can perform them.

We have already covered flying a couple of times, so I’ll avoid repeating myself

unnecessarily on the subject ,and instead cover some other examples of super-human feats and

abilities. Super-human strength is a great one to start with.

In the real world, your strength is limited by numerous variables. These include: the size

of your muscles, the amount of fuel your body has available for use, and the ability of your

brain to send off signals to as much muscle tissue as possible to allow it to produce sufficient

force for the task at hand.

In a dream, none of these factors apply, only belief. If you believe you are strong

enough to pick up a skyscraper, then, you will be! Super-human strength is quick and easy to

master, simply either believe yourself to be incredibly strong, or believe the objects that you are

interacting with to be light as a feather. Either approach will have the same effect.

76
 Next, what about breathing underwater? In waking life, if you wish to explore the

depths of the seas, you need specialised equipment, but in a lucid dream, that is no longer the

case. You can swim as deep as you like, with no need to breathe, after all, you’re not really

underwater. This ability doesn’t even really need to be learned. Simply dive under water and

explore as much as you like. You won’t find yourself running out of breath, because your real

body is breathing just fine, safe and sound in your bed.

Another popular ability that many new lucid dreamers want to try out is the ability to

move objects with your mind. We’ve all seen telekinesis used in Hollywood movies, and so the

idea of being able to play around with it in a dream has its obvious appeal. There are numerous

ways you can go about using this ability in a dream, but as always it is good to make it more

believable if you want immediate results.

One way to achieve this can be to pick up an object normally, and just sort of let go of it

and imagine that it will continue to float in the air. Another way to achieve this is to start with

very light objects, as your subconscious will have an easier time believing that you could move

an empty chocolate wrapper, than a large building.

Along with simply believing that it will work, try issuing commands to the dream.

Command an object to levitate. You can even use the trick I mentioned earlier with regards to

flying, by copying the method used by a fictional superhero or character. For example, let's say

you want to set something on fire. If you’ve seen a book or movie where someone casts a spell

to set something alight, try simply repeating the magic words they used. You may just find that

your subconscious expects it to work, and it does, right away.

Whether the ability you are attempting is flying, shooting fireballs out of your hands, or

turning giant buildings into food, I can share one last valuable tip to make it all much easier. Act

as if it is working. Rather than stopping and giving up after something doesn’t work, just keep

going as if it did work.

77
 For example, if you are engaged in a fight with a monster in a dream, and you are

attempting to throw fireballs at it, but nothing is happening, just keep going, just keep acting as

if you are in fact throwing fireballs at it. The effect this has, is it tricks your brain into thinking

that it did in fact work, and the result is that it usually starts working at this point.

Communication with the Subconscious

The subconscious mind is something that has come up many times already in this book, and for

good reason. It is ultimately the source of your dreams and all that they contain. During normal

day to day life, the subconscious mind is difficult to access. It is, after all, sub-conscious, or

beneath conscious awareness. In a dream however, the entire world is actively being created and

populated by the subconscious, and so it is much easier to interact and communicate with.

What does this even mean? What would be the point of communicating with your

subconscious? Well your subconscious can be thought of as being similar to a massive

supercomputer, that is constantly calculating beneath the surface. Your emotions, your beliefs,

your drives, your ideas, they all bubble up from the subconscious. Sometimes it can be helpful

to take a look beneath the surface, as it can give you insight into why you are the way you are.

Let’s say for example you have been trying to quit smoking for several months now, but

keep failing. Even if you don’t consciously know why you’ve been failing, subconsciously, you

almost certainly do. So you can put the question to your subconscious, and find out why you’ve

been struggling, then adjust your strategy based on what you learn.

You might also subconsciously know what drove you to smoke in the first place, what it

was that you were lacking in some other area of your life, that made you feel compelled to do

something you knew was harmful to you. This kind of insight can be immensely valuable, and

can help you make some serious positive changes to your life.

78
 I also mentioned that your subconscious is the source of your ideas, and what wonderful

ideas those can be. Just take a look at your regular dreams for an example of how creative your

subconscious mind is. I’m sure you’ve had at least one dream before, where you thought the

events were so crazy that you might have caught yourself saying something like, “Wow, my

favourite films have nothing on this!”.

Now your subconscious is constantly providing these ideas throughout the day. If

you’ve ever had a eureka moment, where an idea suddenly pops up, that right there was your

subconscious. Sometimes though, you need an idea, and you don’t have time to wait around for

one to pop up.

So why not ask? Yes, in a lucid dream, you can ask for an idea. You don’t even need a

lucid dream to do this either. In fact, many of my best ideas have come to me through regular

dreams.

When going to bed, you can simply repeat to yourself your desire to receive inspiration

or ideas on a certain subject, in the following manner: “I would like to dream about an

interesting video idea.” It might seem a little silly at first, but it works, try it! That doesn’t mean

every night that you use this technique, you’ll be greeted by the answer you were looking for.

Sometimes you won’t remember your dreams, or there won’t be anything useful in there, but

more often than not, there’ll be at least a little clue, if not a detailed answer to your request.

So direct is your connection with the subconscious in your dreams, that when lucid, you

can simply ask your subconscious a question there and then, often receiving an answer in plain

English.

Yes, you can just say something as simple as “Give me an idea!”, “Show me something

useful”, or ask a specific question, like “What can I do to quit smoking?”. Again, just like the

previous technique, the results can vary, but this is so quick and easy to do, that if it fails to

produce a useful answer, you can simply try it again the next chance you have.

79
 Who exactly do you ask these questions? Well, since your subconscious is creating your

entire dream, there are numerous ways you can go about it. You can shout it up at the sky. You

can simply ask it in your mind. Or, my personal favourite, is to just approach the nearest person

or character I see, and say, “Hey, subconscious, I’d like to ask..” and then fire off my question.

Sometimes you will get an answer, but it will still be a little cryptic. It is your

subconscious mind after all, and it’s not known for being the most direct. You might be shown

an image or a scene, and not understand what it means initially. If this happens, my suggestion

is to write down what you saw or experienced, and then later try to analyse it. Ask yourself what

this imagery could possibly represent.

I’ll give you a little tip here that’ll make this process easy. Trust your gut. Your gut

feelings are subconscious feelings. So if you intuitively feel the imagery you saw represents a

certain something, then it does. I’ll talk more about this process in a later section on dream

analysis, as the same principle can be applied there.

If after analysing what you were told or shown, you still come up empty, then simply go

back again and ask once more in your next dream. If you find yourself getting no valuable

answers several dreams in a row, then it might be your question that needs altering. Try to think

if you could phrase the question in a manner a little more likely to produce a useful answer.

Waking Up

A common fear shared by many beginners exploring the idea of lucid dreaming, is that they’ll

get stuck in a lucid dream and find themselves unable to wake up. Does this happen? Can you

get stuck in a dream? Can you be stuck there forever? What should you do to prevent this, or

what should you do if you do find yourself stuck?

80
 Well, first of all, you absolutely cannot get stuck in a lucid dream forever. In fact, you’ll

probably soon be disappointed to find that you may have the exact opposite problem: finding it

difficult to stay in your lucid dreams as long as you like, and having to go through a long

process of learning to adequately stabilise them. Even with stable dreams, you may find that

they’re still often too fleeting to go on some of the grander adventures you had planned.

This is because, as I said in the previous chapter, your time in a lucid dream is limited.

At most, you could spend the length of one REM stage of sleep in a dream, but usually, this

stage is divided up into several dreams, which may leave only a short time to be spent in any

given dream.

Now as well as there being a hard limit to how long you can spend in a lucid dream, you

are also able to wake yourself up whenever you like. Now this process is often over-complicated.

If getting stuck in a dream has ever been a concern for you, then you may have searched up on

the issue before, and to your horror, found actual examples of people reporting being stuck in

their dreams, unable to wake themselves up, until the dream ended of its own accord.

I’d like to suggest that this arises purely as a result of people using the wrong method

for waking themselves up. People spend time learning how to get lucid, how to spawn items,

how to teleport, fly, and do all manner of other things, but it’s rare that someone actually looks

up how to wake up. So for most people, it’s just an automatic thing, they just try to force

themselves awake.

Most of the time, this approach will work just fine, just willing yourself to wake up, or

even saying “Wake up”, will actually wake you up. However, this doesn’t always work.

Sometimes willing yourself awake will not work, and sometimes asking to wake up won’t either.

This is where I suspect the stories of people “getting stuck” originate. Someone was

using an unreliable method of waking up, like one of these, and then eventually ran into a

situation where it didn’t work. As a result, they had to wait for the dream to end.

81
 Had they known an easier method for waking up, they would not have encountered this

problem. So, what is that method? It’s simple, open your eyes. You see, during REM sleep,

your body is completely paralysed, except for one area, the eyes.

When you look around in a lucid dream, your eyes actually look in those directions for

real. In fact, this was famously used in an experiment designed to prove that lucid dreaming was

real. The researcher, Dr Keith Hearne, got the subject to give a signal with their eyes when they

were lucid. Now in addition to being a key tool that was used to prove lucid dreaming was real,

this also means something for our dreams. It means that if you try to open your eyes in a lucid

dream, your real eyes will open, waking you up.

Now, when you’re in a lucid dream, it’ll feel like your eyes are already open, but the

trick is to realise that they’re shut, and that you need to open them. Just focus on the normal

action of opening your eyes, and voilà, you’re back in bed, awake.

While I suspect this method for waking yourself up is going to be one of the least used

methods in your lucid dreaming arsenal, it’s still handy to know. Most of the time, you’re going

to be trying to stay in your lucid dreams longer, not shorter, but there are some rare occasions

where you just want to end the dream prematurely.

For example, maybe you get lucid in a nightmare, and you don’t want to go through the

effort of reshaping the dream into something more pleasant. In that case, you can wake yourself

up, and you can even then use the DEILD (Dream-Exit Induced Lucid Dream) technique to

enter a new lucid dream if you like. Or perhaps you went into a lucid dream for a simple

purpose, like asking your subconscious a question, and now want to wake up and write down

the answer. Well great, just open your eyes, and write it down.

Now you know you never need to fear getting stuck!

82
 Developing Your Own Dream Control Techniques

One thing you will quickly discover during your lucid dreaming journey, is that you are not

quite like any other lucid dreamer. You will find that things don’t always work out the way

others describe. You may find that when you perform WILD, the Wake Induced Lucid Dream

technique, the sequence of events that occurs is slightly different to what the guides online

describe. Or you might find that the most popular techniques for flying, simply don’t work for

you.

Since the experience of lucid dreaming is so dependent on your subconscious, and the

information populating it, every individual’s lucid dreaming experiences will be unique. You

may share some similar experiences with other lucid dreamers, but your path is your own. Some

techniques will work better for you than others, some techniques that others say are great won’t

work at all, and sometimes, you’ll even be able to discover as of yet unheard of ways of doing

things.

That’s precisely the subject I want to touch upon now: Developing your own techniques.

First of all, I want to talk about why you might wish to do this. So, we’ve established that

different things work for different people, but why develop your own techniques, why not just

look for answers from someone else?

It’s simple really. Since your subconscious governs your dreams, certain techniques are

predisposed to have higher success rates for you, because of your subconscious beliefs. Since

your subconscious is also responsible for your gut feelings about certain things, that means that

techniques that you intuitively feel would work, are very likely to do so.

Since we’ve established the why, we can now talk about the how. What do you need to

do to develop your own techniques? Well, I’ve already given you a hint in the previous

paragraph. Your intuition, and your gut feelings, make for a great guide during your lucid

83
dreams. When you get an idea for something to try, try it out, because often those spontaneous

ideas, that come from the subconscious themselves, produce significantly better results than any

technique pulled from an online guide, or even from this book.

If you don’t yet have any ideas coming to you, then you can kickstart the process by

asking yourself some basic questions. Let’s say you wish to come up with a new way to

summon objects into a dream. Ask yourself the simple question: If it were possible to summon

objects in the real world, how would it be done?

This question gets right to the heart of the issue, because what you’re really asking

yourself, is what do you subconsciously believe would be necessary to allow this to happen?

This tackles your subconscious beliefs, and allows you to find a technique that will work for

you.

For many, a question like this will suffice, but some people may find that they can’t

produce an answer, or that they find themselves thinking something like “Well, this would

never be possible in the real world, therefore it wouldn’t be done.”

If you find yourself reaching a similar conclusion, then my suggestion is to ask an

alternative question: In a fantasy world, where this would be possible, how would a character

do this? Now you’re taking the element of disbelief out of the equation, after all, we’re just

talking about fantasy here. Yet, you’re still asking the subconscious what it feels would be

necessary for you to achieve the desired end result.

You may find yourself coming up with an answer. Perhaps you feel in a fantasy world,

they would recite a magic incantation. Great, write that down, and try it out next time you’re

lucid. Or perhaps you think the character would pray to the heavens for the object to appear.

Write that down too, try it out! Whatever answer comes to mind, give it a go. You know

yourself better than anyone, so it doesn’t matter if the idea seems unusual, as long as it’s yours,

it’ll probably give you good results.

84
 My final piece of advice for you here is to experiment. Play around. Try things out, no

matter how silly or ridiculous they seem. In a lucid dream, you’re in a boundless world of

imagination, so remember that, and embrace the extraordinary, embrace the weird! Have fun

with the entire process, and keep meticulous notes on your experiments. If you do all of that,

you’ll quickly find yourself discovering the most useful and effective techniques for you.

85
 VI: Lucid Dreaming Tools

Sleep Masks & Lucid Dreaming Masks

In this chapter I will be covering the different tools available to aid in your lucid dreaming

experience. The first I want to talk about are masks. There are two kinds of masks available to

aid in your lucid dreaming experience, so I will address each of them separately.

The first kind of mask is the traditional sleep mask. So what is it, how does it work, and

what is its relevance to lucid dreaming? Well, our sleep cycles are regulated by the hormone

Melatonin. This hormone releases when it gets dark, to let our bodies know that it’s time for

sleep.

At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. The trouble is that it is getting more and

more difficult to experience true darkness during the night. Many people use their computers or

phones right up until they decide to go to sleep, interfering with that Melatonin production.

Even those who know to shut off any external light sources during the hours before bed,

often don’t achieve total darkness. In a world full of electronics, most of us have at least one or

two standby lights shining from various devices all night long, and even this small light can also

interfere with your natural Melatonin production.

86
 Even if you pull the plug on all your electronics before bed, and completely cut off

power to the room, you might find that light creeps in under the door if anyone else in the house,

or your dorm, or apartment building is still awake. Or perhaps, like me, you have a street-lamp

right outside the window, shining light right into the room.

Now, you can go further, and buy blackout blinds for your windows, add seals to the

bottom of your doors, and essentially give yourself a pitch black room at night. The thing is, for

most of us, this is simply impractical, and it can be pricey too.

This is where the sleep mask comes in. Can’t get a pitch black room? Well, just cover

your eyes so none of that light gets in. It’s a simple solution, and it’s cheap. Good quality (and

comfortable) sleep masks can be had for as little as a few dollars or the equivalent in your local

currency.

Slip it on, and even if it’s not a perfect fit and some light gets in, you’ll still find that

you fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and feel more refreshed the next day. If you do get a mask

that provides total coverage and blocks out all light, then even better, and you’ll be astonished at

just how effective it is for improving your sleep.

I have to admit, the sleep mask I myself purchased, was some of the best money I ever

spent. I’ve tried all manner of supplements to aid a restful night’s sleep, but nothing works quite

as effectively as the simple sleep mask.

Now as well as improving your sleep, a sleep mask can aid with lucid dreaming. This is

because increased levels of Melatonin typically lead to us having more frequent, and more vivid

dreams. This can be fun in of itself, but increased clarity in your dreams can also make it much

easier for you to become aware, and realise that you’re in fact dreaming.

Another benefit for lucid dreaming comes from their original purpose of making it

easier to fall asleep. If you wake up during one of your REM stages of sleep, with the intention

of performing a technique like MILD, or WBTB, you may find yourself sometimes facing an all

87
too common issue: It’s hard to fall back asleep. A sleep mask makes this much easier, and can

allow you to get back to sleep quickly and easily.

What about the other kind of masks? Dedicated lucid dreaming masks that is. Well

there are a variety of them available on the market, and right now a lot of them are quite pricey.

They all work in different ways, and so I will specifically deal with one kind of lucid dreaming

mask, that I think is worth investigating.

Many of these masks, will simply wake you up by flashing lights or playing sounds, or

will attempt to use lights and sounds to influence your dreams, triggering a recognition that

you’re dreaming, and becoming lucid. In my honest opinion, this function alone, is not

sufficient to justify the cost of such masks. The masks I do think are worthwhile, are those that

make an effort to detect when you are in REM, before performing similar functions.

As we have previously discussed, the REM stage of sleep is where your typical dreams

and lucid dreams occur. It is the stage of sleep in which you also want to wake yourself up in,

before performing techniques like MILD or WILD. Some of these lucid dreaming masks are

capable of detecting (with varying degrees of accuracy) which stage of sleep you’re in. Then,

once in REM, they can go through the usual function of playing a sound, a recording, or

flashing lights, to try and let you know that you’re dreaming. Alternatively, they wake you up,

allowing you to perform a technique, since you’re already in the right stage of sleep.

If you have the funds to spare, and wish to explore this area, then do your research.

There are plenty of lucid dreaming masks out there that work and plenty that simply do not.

Find a model that does detect when you are in REM, and also, ensure that the model has a

suitable way for notifying you that you are in REM. People respond better to different cues. For

some, a flashing colour will appear in their dream, and result in lucidity, while for someone else,

this same cue may simply result in them waking up.

88
 You may also be pleased to hear that, should you not have the funds, nor wish to spend

so much on a tool that you’re not entirely sure will work, there are other options. There are

clever applications for both Android and iOS phones, that can detect your movement during

sleep, and so crudely detect whether or not you’re in REM. You can combine such tracking,

with having an application play a sound when you enter REM, or a recording. In fact there are

even apps out there that will do both for you, both detecting REM, and then waking you up in it

or playing a sound.

If your application of choice has no such feature, you can simply monitor your REM

stages for a few days, and then use the alarm function of your phone to trigger lucidity. You can

do this in the following manner: Find out when your longest REM stage occurs. Set an alarm to

go off right in the middle of it. Change the alarm sound to a custom recording of yourself in a

quiet voice repeating the words “You are dreaming” or “Perform a reality check” over and over.

Try it out for yourself! It really does work, and while it takes a little more effort on your

part than the lucid dreaming mask, if you already own a smart-phone, you already have

everything you need to perform this technique!

Dream Herbs

Next I would like to discuss the world of lucid dreaming supplementation. There are all manner

of lucid dreaming supplements out there, and the first I would like to discuss are the plant based

“dream herbs”. These are herbs that may increase dream recall, improve dream clarity, lead to

you having more frequent dreams, or even lead to you becoming lucid.

Dream herbs vary in their nature, with some providing short term effects, boosting your

dream recall on the night you take them, but not the next day. Others provide longer term effects,

or effects that build up over time.

89
 Since I have experimented with a few such herbs myself, I will first briefly describe my

experiences with those herbs. The first I will touch on is Mugwort. Mugwort can be made into

tea, which, as someone who loves herbal teas, is something I’d like to try some day. When I

tried Mugwort though, it was not in tea, but in an extract in capsules. I do not know the precise

dosage of the extract, since it was a proprietary blend, but one capsule seemed to be sufficient to

get the benefits of Mugwort.

Dream herbs are typically not particularly psychoactive. While there are many herbs,

plants, and substances out there that will produce all manner of wild effects, from euphoria, to

stimulation, to drowsiness, to hallucinations; dream herbs typically affect your sleep, with little

effect on your day.

Mugwort was no exception here, it may have made falling asleep a little easier, and

made me slightly more relaxed, but if it did, it was so subtle that it would be hard to tell from

placebo. The effects it had on my dreams however, were quite pronounced. For one, my dreams

became extraordinarily vivid, and they were very intense and long. Rather than plain boring

dreams that ended in a couple of minutes with nothing exciting happening, all of my dreams

were full of long winding adventures. Every dream I woke up from left me thinking: Wow, now

that was something!

Now I did not notice any increase in the frequency of my lucid dreams, despite the

increased clarity and length of my dreams. Perhaps such an increase would be made evident

with a longer experiment. I also found that the effects of Mugwort were acute. If I took it prior

to bed, I had crazy dreams that night, but it no longer had any effect on the dreams of the next

night unless I took it again.

Next up, I’d like to discuss a combination of two herbs, Silene Capensis, and

Synaptolepis Kirkii. The reason I’ll be discussing these herbs in combination, is when I had the

opportunity to try them, they were together in a blended extract that contained both. So I have

90
no way to definitively say which effects came from which plant. The majority of effects could

have come from one of the two, or perhaps they both played an equal part, it’s impossible for

me to say.

Once again these herbs were taken orally. The easiest way to do this is to buy some

capsules, place the plant matter into the capsules, and swallow them with a glass of water.

During the first week I recall that I experienced very little in the way of any

improvement to my dreams. I wasn’t sure if the herbs were doing anything, but I had read that

with at least one of them, Synaptolepis Kirkii, the effects take repeated daily use before they

kick in. So, I persisted, and continued taking it once each day.

Probably a little over a week, was when I first noticed the effects. I don’t even recall if

I’d continued to take the herbs at this point, or if I’d already stopped taking them, but I found

that I was getting extremely vivid life-like dreams, and the number of them was just.. out of this

world! I can’t even begin to describe the frequency of dreams I was having. I was having so

many that even though I was recalling most of them clearly, I was losing count each night. On

several occasions I noted down dream counts well into the double digits, 15, 20, or more.

What was perhaps the most interesting result from my experiment with these two herbs,

was that this effect persisted long after I stopped taking the herbs. I would say that my dream

recall, dream clarity, and dream frequency, all increased significantly and remained elevated for

months, or perhaps even years, after I experimented with the herbs. It was almost like they had

some kind of permanent positive effect on my dreams.

I’m not sure what mechanism could cause this, but this experience leads me to believe

that it was in fact Synaptolepis Kirkii producing most of the effects for me. What I said earlier

about being unable to say for sure which herb produced which effects still applies. However,

based on reading other peoples experiences with these two herbs, the delayed onset, and benefits

91
that persisted long after the herbs were no longer being taken, seem to fit with the effects profile

attributed to Synaptolepis Kirkii.

Others have stated that taking it for 1-2 weeks, or even an entire month every day, is the

best way to get the benefits of the herb, and that you can simply stop at that point and find

yourself benefiting from intense vivid dreams for a very long time.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely! Indirect credit for this book, and my teachings on

YouTube and elsewhere, could be attributed to these two herbs. That’s because the time when I

took them, and the crazy dreams that ensued, really renewed my interest in dreams and lucid

dreaming, after I’d previously taken a break from practising lucid dreaming techniques.

So what about other herbs? Well, there are a wide variety out there to try, and I suggest

simply searching the name of the herb, as well as “experiences”, and reading (or listening to)

what others have to say. One I feel needs mentioning before I move on to the next section of

this chapter, is Calea Zacatechichi. It is perhaps the most well known and popular dream herb,

but one I have sadly yet to have the pleasure of experimenting with myself.

Calea’s effects appear once again to be short term acute effects, improving dream recall,

clarity, and the subjective intensity of dreams on the days that you consume it. I have heard that

it is quite strong in this respect, but user experiences vary. Since it’s quite easy to find

information online about any of these herbs and supplements, I’m trying to keep this section to

my personal experiences with them, so I unfortunately can’t delve too much deeper into Calea’s

effects!

Huperzine-A & Galantamine

Another form of lucid dreaming supplementation would be Acetylcholinesterase Inhibitors, like

Huperzine-A, and Galantamine. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors are compounds that inhibit the

92
enzyme Acetylcholinesterase. This enzyme is responsible for the breakdown of Acetylcholine.

Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter with a multitude of functions, but the one area of relevance

it has to lucid dreaming is that Acetylcholine levels are elevated during the REM stage of sleep,

into which we’re trying to get when we wish to lucid dream.

Elevated levels of Acetylcholine appear to promote increased time spent in REM, but in

addition to this, Acetylcholine may have another benefit for lucid dreaming specifically. It

seems to be nootropic in its action, i.e. it enhances memory and cognition. This can mean

improved dream recall, but also increased awareness in your dreams which means a higher

likelihood of you recognising the dream state and becoming lucid.

So what does this all have to do with Huperzine-A and Galantamine again? Well, since

these two substances reduce the breakdown of Acetylcholine, you’re left with elevated levels of

this key neurotransmitter. This means taking either of these compounds will increase the time

you spend in REM, improve your dream recall, and best of all, significantly increase your

chances of getting lucid.

Galantamine has actually been studied for its abilities to induce lucid dreams, and the

study in question conclusively found that it did increase the number of lucid dreams participants

had. Due to the similar method of action of Huperzine-A, we can assume the same is true for it.

Is that the case though? Yes, it certainly is. I’ve had the pleasure of experimenting with

Huperzine-A on a multitude of occasions, and it is hands down my favourite lucid dreaming

supplement, particularly when combined with choline sources, that can boost its effects.

Huperzine-A has a relatively long half-life. The half-life of a compound is basically

how long it takes for levels in the body to decrease to half of what they were at their peak, so in

other words, the longer a compound’s half-life, the longer its effects tend to last. Huperzine-A’s

benefits seem to last for two days if the dose is right.

93
 The ideal dose in my experience seems to be 200-400 micrograms. Taking more helps

make certain that you’ll still be getting the benefits of Huperzine-A the next night, and not just

the first night you take it, but doesn’t necessarily make a huge difference to how likely you are

to get lucid. So if you’re strapped for cash, go for the lower dosage, but if not, try closer to 400.

So how exactly is Huperzine-A taken? Well, you take it orally, much like the previous

herbs I mentioned. Peak Acetylcholine levels are achieved not too long after taking it, so for the

absolute best results, you could wake yourself up just before one of your REM stages, and take

it. However, I’ve experimented with taking it at different times, and that doesn’t really seem to

be necessary. I’ve found that taking it before bed, and even taking it simply in the middle of the

day, still works great, due to the long duration it has.

Unlike the previous dream herbs that I mentioned which primarily increase the clarity

of dreams, and dream recall, Huperzine-A and Galantamine most definitely increase your actual

chances of getting lucid. I’ve recommended Huperzine-A based supplements to many of the

people I’ve coached with lucid dreaming. To date, as far as I can recall, every single one of the

students I’ve recommended it to got lucid at least once when taking it. Now of course I had my

students doing other things to promote lucid dreaming, but there was certainly a notable uptake

in lucid dream frequency during the periods they took Huperzine-A.

For myself personally, I find that on average for each dose of Huperzine-A I take, I get

an average of 2 lucid dreams. It varies of course, and it’s worth remembering that I’ve been

lucid dreaming for around 11 years at the time of writing this. Someone with less experience

might not get quite so lucky, but I would be very surprised if someone was able to take it for

more than 2 or 3 weeks without getting a single lucid dream. So if you’re someone who has

been struggling to get lucid whatsoever, it’s certainly something to consider.

One thing to keep in mind when taking it is that due to the aforementioned long

duration, you don’t need to take it every day, in fact doing so achieves nothing really. You’re

94
better off taking it every other day. I’ve experimented with less frequent than this, like every 3

or 4 days, and more frequent, like once a day, but I found once every 2 days produced the best

results. Of course, feel free to experiment for yourself, as perhaps your results will be different.

As for which brands of Huperzine-A based supplements to get, I personally can vouch

for the quality of two particular supplements, LucidEsc, and Dream Leaf. As I’ve had the

pleasure of testing their products numerous times, and have had a great experience with both

responsible companies, I will include links to both products here. These are affiliate links, so if

you’ve been enjoying these book, consider using these links if you wish to buy Huperzine-A, as

a small portion of the sales price will go towards me and my channel, at no added cost to you. In

fact, if you choose LucidEsc, you can use the code “letsdream” to get 20% off when you order it.

1. LucidEsc: https://vividream.com/#Tipharot (Remember to use code "letsdream" for 20%

off)

2. Dream Leaf (Or Galantamine): https://luciddreamleaf.com/#oid=50917_3274

Note that these links and the discount code mentioned are valid as of mid 2019 when

I’m writing this. If the links don’t work, simply search for “LucidEsc” and “Dream Leaf” and

you should be able to find them. You can also simply remove the end of the URLs if you prefer

not to use my affiliate links. In addition, you can find numerous other supplements containing

Huperzine-A, and even buy it on its own if you prefer. These are just two supplements I myself

have tried and can vouch for.

So what about Galantamine? Well this is one I only got to try more recently. In fact, this

section on Galantamine was written after the rest of the book was already finished. Originally

when I began work on the book I hadn’t yet tried Galantamine, and so wasn’t able to share my

own experiences here. Now I have some experience with it, and can offer some comparisons to

Huperzine-A.

95
 First of all, as I mentioned earlier, both are Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, and share

some similarities in what they do. They also have some distinct differences though. For one, I

found that Galantamine seemed to affect the contents of my dreams a lot more. I had a lot more

dreams that I would describe as having some twilight zone vibes. Think aliens, ghosts, and

mysteries to solve. If you’re the type of person who is fascinated by the paranormal or

unexplained, I think you’d be right at home with the kind of dreams I had when taking

Galantamine.

Much like Huperzine-A, I had a lot more lucid dreams than when I wasn’t taking it.

However, I would say that if I was going to rank them purely based on their ability to get me

lucid, Huperzine-A would be the winner. On top of that, I found that I didn’t feel quite so well

rested when waking up after dreams I had on Galantamine, as I did normally.

When it comes to which I actually preferred though, the answer is a little more complex.

I actually liked both supplements pretty much equally, for different reasons. I very much love a

good mystery, sci-fi, and the paranormal, so the actual changes to my regular dreams I

experienced on Galantamine more than made up for the slightly lessened improvements to

getting lucid. Especially since Galantamine still did a very good job at getting me lucid.

On the other hand, sometimes I just want more of a sure thing, and want the absolute

highest chance of getting lucid possible. In which case I’d take Huperzine-A before bed, and

then perform a few techniques.

The company that sells Dream Leaf also sells Galantamine, and that was where mine

came from. So it can also be obtained from the above link. In addition, it’s widely available in

online supplement stores. So if the link no longer works, or doesn’t ship to your area, simply

take a look around and you’ll be sure to find some place selling it. Unfortunately, I believe there

are also some countries where one or both of these supplements is regulated and not available

96
over the counter/as a supplement. If you can’t seem to find any places that stock one or both,

then that might be why.

A tip for both Huperzine-A and Galantamine to maximise their efficacy, is to combine

them with a choline source, whether that be Choline Bitartrate, CDP-Choline, Alpha-GPC, or

something else. These will increase the effects, and allow you to get the most out of your dose.

For Huperzine-A, the aforementioned supplements LucidEsc and Dream Leaf already

contain other choline sources, so there’s no need to add anything. If you buy Huperzine-A or

Galantamine on their own though, you should look to buy some alongside it.

A final word of advice regarding these two compounds is that if they are taken

repeatedly on a regular basis, like any compound, a tolerance to their effects will develop. This

means if you want to continue to see benefits from them in the long term, you should take

regular breaks, rather than just taking them all year around.

If you do want to make use of them with a high frequency, I would personally suggest

taking a break for at least a few weeks after every 30-60 doses of either that you use. Doing this

will allow you to always get the benefits from them, and never run the risk of them losing

efficacy over time.

Hypnosis

We’ve already established that dreams are a product of the subconscious mind, which naturally

means any tool we have available for influencing the subconscious, is also a suitable tool to aid

us in our lucid dreaming endeavours. The tool in question that I’d like to discuss now, is

hypnosis.

Hypnosis has a bit of a murky reputation, as many associate it with over-the-top stage

hypnosis acts, and think it’s just a great big sham. The truth however is that hypnosis is an

97
invaluable tool for implanting suggestions in the subconscious mind, and can be a great aid in

various forms of therapy, as well as in helping enact any sort of inner change the user wishes for.

For the purposes of lucid dreaming, hypnosis can be used to really enhance any area of

it. You can use hypnosis to improve your dream recall, to encourage your dreams to last longer,

to dream about subjects of your choice, or to simply get lucid more often.

Hypnosis can be conducted in a variety of different ways. The first, and perhaps the best

option, would be to see a licensed hypnotherapist, with years of training and experience. They

can write up a full script for you, and guide you through it, and it can have an profound effect

even after a single session. The downside of this route is that depending on where you live, it

may end up being expensive, and should a single session not be enough, it will probably be

impractical to keep going back there for more. Unless of course you have lots of extra cash to

spare, in which case, this option is probably actually your best bet.

So what other options are there? Well, you can buy yourself a hypnosis CD with various

tracks on it, although finding one with tracks specifically dedicated to dreams and lucid

dreaming may be a bit difficult. I’m sure there must be some out there though. In fact, it’s

something I’ve considered making myself, an album of lucid dreaming hypnosis tracks, so if

you happen to have got your hands on this book some time after its release, it may be worth

checking to see if I have anything like that in my store.

Not everyone wants to spend money on hypnosis though, and particularly if you’ve

already invested in other things like a sleep mask, and perhaps some lucid dreaming

supplements, it might be wise to save some money and look at the available free resources out

there. YouTube and other similar websites offer a wealth of different options, there are so many

different hypnosis tracks to choose from, and the good news is that this includes tracks

dedicated to lucid dreaming!

98
 In fact, and I do apologise for the totally shameless plug, but I do have several hypnosis

tracks available for free on my YouTube channel. I created these tracks both for my own use,

and for yours. You can find them in a playlist on my channel which should be titled “Hypnosis

and Guided Meditations”. To simplify finding it, I’ll include a link here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KOkPjpKc_Q&list=PLJcVz2-

eKH2okD2UosvoqiRrAMcNQgJEf

At the time of writing this, I have three tracks dedicated to lucid dreaming, and a couple

dedicated to other things, so be sure to look through the list and find the one that best suits your

needs, and how much time you have available.

If you decide to give one of the various free hypnosis tracks out there a go, then here are

some of my tips on how to make the most of them. First of all, wear headphones, and lay down

comfortably in bed when listening.

There are generally two kinds of people when it comes to hypnosis. The first kind of

people are those who listen and keep an open mind, accepting all the suggestions they hear

without issue. The second kind are those who are quite analytically minded, and find themselves

questioning much of what they hear “I’m not sure about the way he worded that suggestion..

will it work?”, “Something about that sounded off”, or “Is this even working?”.

If you find yourself in the first category of listeners, then you don’t have to do anything

special when listening to a hypnosis track. Just lay there, listen, and let the suggestions take hold.

If on the other hand, you fall into the second group, then you may need to take a different

approach to maximise your results. You see, suggestions pass through freely to the

subconscious mind, as long as the conscious mind doesn’t get in the way. So by over-thinking

and over-analysing the track while you’re listening to it, you’re interfering with the process of

hypnosis. This is why some people innately respond better to hypnosis than others.

99
 The truth is though, there are no hypnosis “non-responders”. Hypnosis works for

anyone, you just need to take the right approach if you happen to be an analytical thinker. The

approach you should use, is distracting your conscious mind.

While the first category of listeners can get away with paying attention closely to every

word, for the analytical thinker, I suggest the opposite approach: Let your mind wander. Think

back over the events of your day. Let your imagination run wild. Let your mind be occupied

with everything except for the track that you’re listening to. Basically, ignore the track

completely, as if it was just background noise, and focus on other thoughts and imagery.

When taking this approach, you may find yourself falling asleep during hypnosis all of

a sudden. If this happens, don’t worry, this is actually a sign that your distractions have been

working and allowing the subconscious suggestions through.

Since hypnosis tracks all include various suggestions to get you to relax and unwind,

falling asleep or at least feeling quite sleepy and relaxed is a very good sign things are working

just as they should. That said, don’t rely on how tired you feel as a metric of the efficacy of a

particular track, as you won’t always feel tired or relaxed when listening to hypnosis.

If you don’t feel at all relaxed though, it can often be a sign that you should be putting

your attention somewhere other than the words of the person guiding you through the hypnosis,

as you may be one of those analytical thinkers who needs to avoid over-thinking the hypnosis

process.

The next tip that I have for you when listening to hypnosis tracks, is that repetition is

very helpful. Remember when I taught you how to perform the MILD (Mnemonic Induced

Lucid Dream) technique in an earlier chapter? If you’re unsure, go back and check that section.

It was the technique involving repeating a mantra over and over.

Part of that techniques efficacy comes from the repetition of the mantra. While saying it

once might work, saying it over and over is certainly a lot more effective.

100
 The same can be said for hypnosis tracks, and hypnosis sessions in general. A single

session, or a single listen, will certainly implant some suggestions in the subconscious, that are

likely to take effect, but repeated regular sessions/listens will lead to much more significant

effects. For this reason, I suggest setting out some time each night, or every few nights, to listen

to one or two hypnosis tracks of your choice, if you do intend to use them to aid in your lucid

dreaming adventures.

Now alongside the various other sources of hypnosis, there is one final source of

hypnosis available to everyone: Self-hypnosis. That’s right, you can hypnotise yourself, you

don’t need someone else to do it. To become skilled with hypnosis it can take years of learning

and practice, but to be able to do it sufficiently to induce the desired effects, you can actually

learn the basics in under a few hours.

Now I’m not a licensed hypnotherapist myself, nor do I have endless training or

experience, so I highly suggest picking up one of the various books about self-hypnosis if this is

an area that interests you. That said, I can give you some really basic introductory tips that can

help you get started.

The main two key principles of hypnosis are guided relaxation, and implanting

suggestions. There are many things you can do to make hypnosis more effective, by wording

and enunciating things in certain manners, but really, you can still get results from simply

giving yourself basic commands, spoken inside your mind.

When conducting hypnosis, refer to yourself in second person, I.e. “you” rather than “I”

or “he/she/they”. You can then slowly make statements about what is happening to you. By

simply saying something like “You are becoming more and more relaxed”, your subconscious

can let this suggestion take hold, and this effect become apparent.

Make use of your imagination. By telling yourself to imagine or visualise something,

and using mental imagery, you can have a much greater impact than if you were to simply rely

101
on verbal cues alone. You can also use this to trick yourself into feeling things that you tried to

command yourself into feeling with no luck. Let’s say you tried to command yourself into

feeling relaxed, and it didn’t work, you could instead say something like: “Imagine what it

would feel like, to be completely and utterly relaxed”.

This can be a simple way of generating feelings because you are capable of imagining

almost anything, and that can then turn into actually experiencing those feelings. You can also

use visualisation to help make your suggestions take hold. If you are suggesting to yourself that

you will become lucid in your dreams, why not also suggest to yourself that you visualise

yourself doing just that. Perhaps you could have yourself visualise the process of performing a

reality check, becoming lucid, and then taking off and soaring through the air.

Just as imagining or visualising things can actually help add weight to your words, your

words can add further clarity to the things you imagine and visualise. If you are having trouble

visualising yourself getting lucid during a self-hypnosis session, then try and use more

descriptive language.

You might recall that earlier on in the dream control section I talked about how

descriptive language can be useful, but just in case you skipped straight to this section or don’t

remember it clearly, here’s a quick example.

Take the two following phrases, and read them. “You see a dog”, and “You see a small

black and white puppy, wagging its tail furiously, jumping up and down on its little feet, clearly

quite excited”. Which of those two descriptions generated a more clear image? Naturally, the

more descriptive you are, the easier it will be to picture something.

Another tip for you is to make use of the word “and”. Normally when we use the word

and, we are assuming that the words on both sides of it, are either correct, or incorrect. Usually

someone is either speaking the truth, or talking complete rubbish. So when someone says

102
something we know to be true, and then follows it up with “and ___”, we subconsciously

assume that whatever follows the and will also be true and correct.

We can take advantage of this during hypnosis, by stating something we already know

to be true, adding an “and”, and then following that up with our desired suggestion. Here’s a

quick example. “You are laying in your bed and you can imagine what it would feel like to sink

into the bed, completely relaxed.” You’ve taken something that you know to be true, that you’re

laying in bed, and used the word “and” to add further weight to your next suggestion, making it

more likely to take hold.

You can add further efficacy to hypnosis by using disarming words. Sometimes if you

tell yourself something like “You feel relaxed now”, and you don’t immediately experience

relaxation, it triggers that sense of doubt that analytical thinkers deal with, and starts to prevent

your hypnosis from working.

I find that you can disarm your conscious mind’s nagging doubts by using words like

“perhaps”, “maybe” or “might”. You can say something like “Perhaps you are starting to feel

relaxed now”, or, if we wish to make use of “and” as in the previous example, we can say

something like “You are laying in your bed and maybe you can start to feel so relaxed, that you

almost feel like if you’re sinking into the bed.”. This way if you aren’t yet feeling relaxed, or

don’t feel like you’re sinking into the bed, it doesn’t ruin your immersion and make you start

doubting the rest of what you’re saying.

To put this all together, a basic self-hypnosis track should go through a few stages. The

first stage is to get yourself nice and relaxed. You can do something to get yourself relaxed

before hypnosis, like a nice relaxing bath, or meditation, or you can simply start with the

hypnosis right away. Once you do start with the hypnosis, spend the first 5 minutes simply

getting yourself to relax.

103
 When you’re finding yourself nice and relaxed, begin to implant your suggestions about

lucid dreaming (or any other goal you wish to achieve). Finally, after several minutes of making

these suggestions, dedicate a short segment to gradually starting to return your attention to the

room you’re in, shift, stretch, and get up.

As I mentioned earlier, it really is worth investing in a good self-hypnosis book, or at

least looking at the numerous free guides and tutorials online if you do wish to try it out. The

suggestions I’ve just given you can certainly help you get started, but you’ll go much further

with your self-hypnosis if you do have the patience and are willing to learn it in more depth.

If this is something you’d like to try out, I also suggest listening to hypnosis tracks

made by me and others, and just paying attention to the parts you like about those tracks. If

there’s something I say that you find to be very effective, or a technique I use that sticks with

you, then feel free to borrow it and use it in your own self-hypnosis recording.

Affirmations

Another way of influencing the subconscious mind is through the use of affirmations.

Affirmations are phrases that are repeated over and over, like the mantra that we use in the

MILD technique, for the purpose of enacting some kind of inner change.

Affirmations lack a key component that hypnosis offers to make this process easier: the

deep state of relaxation. That said, that doesn’t mean that they’re ineffective, it just means that

you may need more repetition with them to get results. While affirmations may require more

repetition, they do have a distinct advantage over something like hypnosis, and that is the fact

that they take almost no time at all to perform.

104
 You can have a list of several affirmations, and read them all off at any time in a matter

of seconds, before going back to your day. There’s no need to set aside 20-40+ minutes like you

would with hypnosis, so it’s something that can be made to fit into anyone’s day.

So what can affirmations be used for exactly? Well, more or less anything. Since this is

a book about lucid dreaming though, we’ll cover some of the potential uses for affirmations

specifically to aid lucid dreaming. I’ll give you some sample affirmations you can use for each

of these areas.

First up, is dream recall. It’s important that you have good dream recall, as if you don’t,

then you’ll find that even if you get lucid, you might not remember it afterwards. Keeping a

regular dream journal usually does the trick, but sometimes dream recall needs a bit of an extra

helping hand. Simply use an affirmation like “I remember my dreams clearly”, “I remember

many dreams each night”, or “I remember my dreams in great detail”. Repeat this many times,

and you should find your dream recall starts to improve.

You can also use affirmations to enhance your dream control. Now there are so many

different potential areas of dream control available, so I’ll give you guys a few examples. Let’s

say you want to fly in a lucid dream, and you’ve been trying, but everything you’ve tried so far

has failed. Well, I suggest you apply the tips I mentioned in the chapter on dream control, but

you can certainly make things easier by adding in an affirmation, like “I can fly in my dreams”

or “I find it easy to take off and fly when I am dreaming”.

It’s even possible to use affirmations to bolster a specific dream control technique. Let’s

say you didn’t just want to be able to fly, but you wanted to be able to fly by simply jumping in

the air. Well, by using an affirmation, you can help change the subconscious beliefs that might

be preventing that from happening. Simply use an affirmation like “When I jump in a dream, I

will start to fly”.

105
 One of my personal favourite uses for affirmations with regards to lucid dreaming, is to

remove the need for an alarm. I simply repeat an affirmation like “I will wake up in REM sleep”,

or “I will wake up in the middle of a dream”. This allows me to start waking up in REM

without having to meticulously time it and use an alarm to get there.

You can of course use affirmations to help get you lucid in the first place, or increase

how often you get lucid. Some ideas for affirmations you could use include: “I easily recognise

when I am dreaming”, “I always remember to perform reality checks”, “I regularly become

lucid in my dreams”.

You can even use affirmations to influence the content of your dreams (both regular and

lucid). Let’s say you wanted to dream about the home you grew up in, you can repeat an

affirmation like “I dream about my old home all the time”, or “In my dreams I find myself in the

home I grew up in”.

Now a little tip that you can use with all of these affirmations, is that while repeating

them often will produce the best results, you can also get pretty good results from just repeating

them while you’re in bed about to fall asleep.

This is because if they’re in your mind as you’re falling asleep, the suggestions are

much more likely to carry over into your dreams. This is why we use a similar principle when

practising MILD, or when making requests of the subconscious mind prior to sleep. This works

for any of the affirmations I listed too though, and anything else you can think of that’s related

to your sleep or dreams.

106
 Placebo

What do you think of when you hear the word placebo? I can’t speak for everyone, but to me

when I heard that word, for the longest time, what I thought of was something that doesn’t

actually work, but that someone thinks works.

That couldn’t be further from the truth though, you see placebo is the idea that our

expectations, and what we’ve been told, can create real tangible effects. If someone takes a

placebo medication, it’s not that they’re just thinking that it’s working, it’s that it really is

having a real effect, simple because of their expectation. So the idea of placebo being something

that doesn’t work is completely wrong. On the contrary, some rather effective medications that

have been approved and are widely prescribed, only slightly out-perform placebo. In other

words, placebo itself is already pretty powerful.

What use is placebo though? After all, for placebo to work, you need someone to

convince you that you’re taking a particular medication, or that you’re going to get a particular

result from something you’re doing, and you need to be in the dark during the whole process.

Right?

Well actually, no! You see scientists have found that when patients are given placebo,

even if the patients are told that what they are taking is just placebo, they will continue to

receive effects from it. That’s right, placebo works even when you know it’s placebo!

So how does this all tie into lucid dreaming? Well, we can make use of this, as yet

another tool in our arsenal, to help us lucid dream. We can create our own forms of lucid

dreaming placebo, assign them with a particular purpose, use them, and then gain positive

effects, for free.

Here’s an experiment for you to try. Get a piece of paper, and a pen. Now with the pen,

write something you wish to be true on the piece of paper. In this case, let’s use the phrase “I

107
have great dream recall.” Simply write that down on the piece of paper. Now tell yourself that

when you scrunch up the piece of paper and throw it away, whatever you’ve written on it will

come to pass.

“But that’s silly, all I did was write something down on a piece of paper, I don’t believe

it’ll work” I hear you thinking. That doesn’t matter though. Remember, it doesn’t matter that

you know it’s just placebo, it will still provide an effect. Now this doesn’t mean that if you

suffer from depression and you write down “I am no longer depressed” and scrunch up the

paper, that your depression will vanish.

If this was the case, we’d be solely prescribing placebo pills rather than medications,

with all of their side effects. No, placebo isn’t some cure all, or miracle, but it’s free, takes you

less than 5 minutes, and it will produce some effects. So, with the depression example, you

might find a small reduction in your symptoms. That said, even if it’s only a 1% reduction in

symptoms, for a couple of minutes work, and a piece of paper. It’s still a pretty good deal right?

Now if you’re planning to make use of placebo on a regular basis, wasting a piece of

paper every time isn’t the most economical solution, and it’s a good way to be wasteful. So an

even better way of achieving the same thing would be to get a whiteboard or blackboard. Any

time you want to enact some of that good old placebo magic, write down what you want to be

true on the whiteboard/blackboard. Then tell yourself as soon as you erase it, it’ll be true. Erase

it, and away you go.

Another option would be to write it on your computer, phone, or tablet, and then erase

or delete it. Feel free to experiment too, remember that placebo works through psychological

means, and so the actual method is less important than simply doing it. If you want to tell

yourself that bouncing a basketball improves your chances of getting lucid, and use that as

placebo, then go for it! It really can be more or less anything.

108
 One thing I will say though, is that you can harness what we learned in the earlier

chapters about the subconscious mind. While placebo will work even if you don’t believe it, it’s

still good to get your subconscious to believe it. You can take advantage of how easily your

subconscious will take things as fact, by using tricks like we use when lucid dreaming, such as

emulating fiction.

Another way to increase the efficacy of your placebo is to make the act more impactful

in some way. Just writing something on a piece of paper and then scrunching it up doesn’t really

feel like it should do anything, so if you make more of an occasion out of it, the subconscious

will be much more likely to take your suggestion to heart.

Try meditating or getting into a relaxed state first, dim the lights, meditate on and

visualise your desired outcome, and then go about creating your placebo. Setting the scene, and

adding a little drama or symbolism will make it feel more believable to the subconscious, and

it’ll have a greater effect.

109
 VII: Trouble Getting Lucid

The Importance of Timing

In this chapter I’ll be discussing some of the major issues you can run into that can prevent you

from lucid dreaming, or at least significantly reduce the frequency at which you become lucid.

The first major issue is timing.

In the previous chapter I have stressed the importance of being in the REM stage of

sleep when performing certain techniques like MILD, WBTB, or WILD. It is all too common

for people to watch or read a guide about one of these techniques, and completely skip that step.

Attempting WILD at the beginning of the night for example, when you have not yet slept or got

into REM. When this is done, the person in question usually finds they get no results

whatsoever, and they move on to the next technique, only to find the same thing happens.

This is further enforced by the fact that there are guides out there that neglect to

mention that you need to be in REM first, and some guides mention this, but don’t explain how

to get in REM or why it’s important. It is vital though, you need to be in REM first before

performing most lucid dreaming techniques, and as such this step cannot be omitted.

110
 REM stages typically occur every 90 minutes, so we use this as a guideline to help us

land in one when setting an alarm. We might set an alarm to wake us up after 6 hours of sleep,

so that we hit the 4th REM stage.

The thing is though, in the real world, your REM stages aren’t quite so precise. No-one

is sitting there in your brain and timing it and going “Okay it’s been exactly 90 minutes, time

for another REM stage!”. Every 90 minutes is a great guideline, but that’s all it is, a guideline

based on a rough outline of when REM occurs for most people.

There are variations in when REM stages occur between individuals, so some might

have them more frequently, and others less frequently. There are variations on any given night,

so for example you might get into REM quicker tonight, and tomorrow night your first REM

stage might be delayed. On top of that, certain factors like medications, sleep deprivation, and

naps, can all affect how quickly you enter REM, how long you remain there, and how often you

end up there. This means that while a 6 hour alarm might work for you, it also might not.

Another factor that can influence timing is how long it takes you to fall asleep. You

should always account for this when setting an alarm. When we talk about an REM stage that

occurs after 6 hours, we mean 6 hours of sleep, not 6 hours since you got in bed. So if it takes

you an hour to fall asleep, you should be adding an hour to your alarm time. If in doubt, it’s

generally better to slightly over-shoot the time, I.e. it’s better to end up sleeping 6 hours 15

minutes than it is to sleep 5 hours 45 minutes. Landing in the middle of an REM stage just

means less time to lucid dreaming, but waking up too early, before REM starts, means missing

your opportunity entirely.

If you’ve been performing one of the various lucid dreaming techniques that involves

setting up a 6 hour alarm (or a variation, like a 3 hour alarm, or 4 hours 30 minutes alarm), and

you haven’t had any results after 2-3 weeks, it’s time to experiment. Try shifting the time

forwards or backwards by 20-30 minutes. If you tried 6 hours last time, try 5 hours 30 minutes

111
for 1-2 weeks. If that still doesn’t work, try 5 hours. Each time give it at least a week, ideally 2,

to see if it’s working.

Now I mentioned sleep deprivation and naps, what do these have to do with anything?

Well, when you’re sleep deprived, you often didn’t fully complete your sleep last time.

Sometimes, your body is also so tired that it accelerates the process of sleep. What this can

mean, is that the usual rules of how long it takes to get into REM don’t quite apply.

I’ve found that if I’m sleep deprived, whether that be by not getting enough sleep, or by

staying up longer than I usually do, I enter REM much quicker than normal. This means that

techniques that might normally require me to first wake up in REM, like WILD, can actually be

performed right at the beginning of the night.

This effect however often leads to some confusion. A person, when sleep deprived,

discovers that WILD or FILD or some other technique works for them, despite not having slept

first, and so they assume that waking in REM is unnecessary. What they don’t realise is that it

was their unique state of sleep deprivation that meant they were able to enter REM right away,

and that normally, in regular conditions, waking up in REM is still important.

If you are sleep deprived, take advantage of it and try performing techniques at the

beginning of the night too, but ordinarily, you should make use of that alarm, or learn to wake in

REM without one.

As for naps, I’ve also observed a similar effect. It seems that for me personally at least,

when I take a nap, I appear to enter REM quicker. I mentioned in an earlier chapter how I use

this to my advantage, by setting alarms to go off every 10-15 minutes, taking a nap, and

continuing with the alarms until I wake up from a dream.

At that point I know I’m in REM, and so I can perform a technique as I usually would.

With all this in mind, I’ve had other people report that it still took them 90+ minutes to enter

112
REM when doing this, so if you’re trying the nap method out, and haven’t had any luck, try

extending the length of your naps.

Performing Techniques Correctly

Now it stands to reason that to achieve success when using a particular lucid dreaming

technique, you have to perform the technique correctly, however this is still a much overlooked

reason for failure to get lucid.

The trouble is, there are many potential reasons for a lack of results, so not getting lucid

doesn’t immediately indicate that there’s anything wrong with your technique. So it can be hard

to know if you’re doing something correctly, and for this reason, many people do in fact

perform a technique wrong for a very long time before realising they’re making a mistake.

The inconsistencies between various guides and tutorials don’t help matters. Different

guides will give different instructions. Sometimes instructions can be worded in such a way as

to be easily misunderstood. At other times, instructions are conflicting, with one guide telling

you to do things one way, and another specifically saying not to do that. At times, both

approaches are correct, and at other times, one guide might be correct, while another might be

wrong.

There are many guides that simply borrow information from other guides, and rehash it

in their own words. If the person creating the guide is just copying another guide, and doesn’t

understand it, then this can easily lead to information getting lost in translation. What you can

end up with, is very vague instructions that aren’t particularly helpful, or, are plain incorrect.

Something I would advise every budding lucid dreaming enthusiast to do, is to look at

several different guides for the same techniques. Yes, if you’ve read a guide I’ve included in

this book, then I still think it’s worth checking what other people have to say about the

113
techniques. When a technique is performed, there are usually several steps to be carried out in

sequence, but what people often fail to recognise is that there are various other subtleties at play.

When a person performs a technique, they’ll do it in their own way, and some things

might just happen automatically. So when this person goes on to create a guide or tutorial for

the same technique, they might simply not mention certain qualities of the process because

those things are just automatic to them, and not seen as actual steps.

By comparing a few guides from different individuals, you can often pick up on those

little things that come automatically to some people, but not to others. You might find that

you’re having no luck with a particular technique whatsoever, but then you read one new guide

about it, and a single sentence in that guide ends up being the missing piece of information you

needed to get the technique working.

On top of that, people just have different ways of doing things. When I teach someone

how to perform WILD, I teach it based on the obstacles I myself faced when trying to learn it. I

give cues that helped me break through the brick walls I ran into along the way, or that students

of mine faced. However, you might encounter a problem that I never faced, and so my

explanations for how to perform it, might prove insufficient.

The reverse is also true; If you’ve previously tried out one of the techniques I gave

instructions for in this book, and not had any luck with it, don’t just be content to skip over that

section in this book, feeling that the technique isn’t for you. You may find that my way of

describing things just happens to explain what it was you weren’t getting when you looked at

someone else’s guide. Often looking at two or three different peoples guides can fill in the gaps,

the details that one person thought not to be pertinent, another person might think to mention.

Now with all of this in mind, how do you know if you’re performing a technique

correctly? Well, if the technique requires you to be in REM first, then you have to address what

114
I talked about in the previous section first. Ensure that you’re in REM. A good sign that you’re

in REM is if you wake up and remember just being in a dream before you awoke.

Once you’re confident that you’re ready to perform the technique (I.e. waking up in

REM if need be) then you should try to perform it every day for 2-3 weeks. If you don’t have a

single success after this time, then this might be a sign that you’re doing something wrong.

It’s worth noting, that even a technique performed correctly every single day, can

sometimes provide no results. So not getting lucid doesn’t immediately prove that you’ve done

something incorrectly. That said, the longer you’ve gone without results, the more likely it

becomes that the problem is with what you’re doing, and not just bad luck.

Before the 2-3 weeks are even up, something you should ensure you do, is re-familiarise

yourself with the instructions you’ve been given. If you are following instructions from this

book, re-read them. If you’re following instructions from a video, re-watch it. This is because

with there being several different steps to each technique, it is very easy to forget something, or

mix up the instructions.

You won’t even remember that you’ve forgotten or been doing something incorrectly

until you go back and look at the technique’s guide again, and realise your mistake. As an

example of this, at one point as a beginner I totally forgot how many hours I was supposed to

sleep to get in REM. I thought it was 5 hours, not 6, and so for some time I was sleeping the

wrong length of time and not getting my desired results. It was only upon revisiting the guides

I’d used, that I realised my mistake. So regularly re-read, re-watch, or re-listen to guides, to

ensure that your information is correct, especially if you’re getting poor results.

Once you’ve practised a technique for 2-3 weeks, and have had no success, I suggest

going to another guide. If you previously used a guide you found online, try using the

instructions for that technique from this book. Or if you’ve used instructions that I’ve given here

115
or in one of my videos, try looking up a guide on one of the many lucid dreaming websites out

there instead.

Once you’ve found a new guide to use, follow the steps outlined by that guide exactly,

and don’t diverge from them at all for the next 2-3 weeks. I see this all the time with people new

to lucid dreaming: they try one technique one night, another the next night, then a variation of

that second technique the third. If you’re spreading your energy so thinly over all these different

techniques, it’s very hard to tell if you’re not getting results due to technique error, or simply

due to not using any of the techniques for long enough. So stick to one approach for 2-3 weeks

before deciding that you need to try something different.

As you get more experienced, you’ll be able to play around more, and switch up

techniques more often. This is because you’ll already know how to correctly perform techniques,

and you’ll have enough experience with each technique, that you can switch them up often

without it affecting your performance. As a beginner who is still learning how to do things

correctly, sticking with one and learning it is probably the better approach.

If after 2-3 different guides, and 4-9+ weeks of effort, you have not had a single success

with a particular technique, then you should definitely try a different one, if you haven’t already.

Some people will find that certain techniques work better for them than others, and on top of

this, you may find that certain techniques are difficult as a beginner, but easier later on. WILD is

one such example. I found it extraordinarily difficult when I first started out, and had little

success with it, but now with years of experience, it’s one of the easier techniques for me to

perform.

If you’ve experimented with more than one technique, and given each one enough time

to really evaluate if you’re doing things correctly, then that’s a sign that your issue is something

else, like one of the other troubles mentioned in this chapter.

116
 Struggling with Sleep

Another very common issue that people face when attempting to lucid dream is difficulty falling

back asleep when performing the various techniques that require you to wake up in REM. Some

people just naturally find it easier to fall asleep, while others like myself often take some time to

fall asleep, whether it’s at the beginning of the night, or later on after waking up.

There are several different things you can do to minimise the chances of having

difficulty falling back asleep. The first thing you can do is simply to go to sleep earlier. If you

wake up after 6 hours of sleep, and it’s already light outside, it will be a lot more difficult to go

back to sleep than if you got the same 6 hours of sleep but woke up while it was still dark.

If you bought yourself a sleep mask as per my suggestion in the previous chapter, then

you can avoid the issue of sunlight waking you up entirely, and just use the sleep mask to

achieve the same thing, regardless of when you decide to sleep. A sleep mask will also simply

make you more tired during those first few minutes after you wake up, so will make it easier to

get back to sleep even when light isn’t factored into the equation.

Another thing you should try is minimising the time that you’re awake during this

period. So, when you wake up in REM to perform a technique, try to be back to sleep as quickly

as possible rather than spending a long time awake. If you’re performing something like WBTB,

try using a shorter period of wakefulness like say 5 minutes, rather than say 20 to 30. If that

doesn’t work, switch to a technique where you go back to sleep quicker, like FILD or MILD.

You can also try using various relaxation methods to help you fall back asleep. I’m a

huge fan of listening to something relaxing to help me fall back asleep after performing

something like WBTB or MILD. Meditation also works well, if you just meditate while laying

there in bed, you may find yourself drifting off.

117
 For some people with severe insomnia, falling back asleep after waking up in REM may

prove too difficult at times. I have to admit that this has sometimes been the case for me, that I

simply wasn’t able to fall back asleep no matter what I tried.

When faced with this situation, your best option is to try and make more use of

techniques that don’t require you to wake up in the middle of the night. I also think this is a

great time to make use of supplements like Galantamine or Huperzine-A, as they don’t require

you to use techniques alongside them.

You may even find that rather than being faced with the issue of struggling to fall back

asleep, you have the opposite issue: You fall asleep too quickly. This is equally common, and

can present a problem when attempting something like WILD, where you are trying to remain

aware throughout the whole process.

The solution here too is typically the opposite of the solution to the previous problem. If

you are falling asleep too quickly, you can get out of bed, and spend some time awake and

active, so that when you get back into bed and perform your technique it takes you longer to fall

asleep. You can also try to sync your wake up time with when it’s light outside, and remove

your sleep mask if you’re using one, so that the light wakes you up somewhat and increases the

time it takes to return to your slumber.

While struggling to fall asleep is a much more common issue for me, I have had a few

occasions on which I found myself falling asleep too quickly. What I personally liked to do to

avoid this, was to simply get up and go on my computer for a few minutes, check my emails,

and do something that got my brain active. Once I returned to bed it was easy to remain awake

for as long as I desired, and I was then able to go about WILD or whatever technique I had

chosen without the danger of falling asleep prematurely.

118
 VIII: Beyond

Sleep Paralysis

The focus of the eighth chapter of this book is in relation to those other things that weren’t

covered in the previous chapters. Those things that perhaps relate to lucid dreaming in some

way, but aren’t part of the standard process of lucid dreaming itself. Things like dream analysis,

and false awakenings.

The first such thing I’ll discuss is sleep paralysis. We’ve already discussed the REM

stage of sleep in previous chapters, and you may recall my mention of REM atonia, the process

that paralyses your body during REM sleep to prevent you from acting out your dreams.

Occasionally, for one reason or another, you may find yourself waking up in REM, only

to find that REM atonia has not quite ended yet. You find that you are unable to move, no

matter how hard you try. In addition to this, your brain is often still producing a partial dream

state, leading to you seeing or hearing things that aren’t there. Since you’re paralysed, and your

fear response is heightened, these things can often be quite frightening.

It’s not unusual to see things like a demon sitting on your chest and pinning you down,

or a shadowy figure standing beside your bed, or aliens standing around you as if they had

119
abducted you to their ship. This is a typical experience of sleep paralysis, and it can be very

unsettling.

Fear not though, for no harm will come to you from this experience, and the things that

you see and hear during it are not real. By reading this section on sleep paralysis you can

prepare yourself for the experience before you encounter it.

While sleep paralysis is typically very scary the first time you experience it, this is

usually because you are unprepared. Most people experience sleep paralysis for the first time

long before they know what it is, and so they can be led to believe that the things they are seeing

and hearing are real. This can be terrifying, but for those who know better and understand that it

is just you waking up while still experiencing some dream-like hallucinations, the experience

becomes a whole lot less scary.

Much like anything scary, a large part of the fear component of sleep paralysis also

comes from our natural fear of the unknown. Since sleep paralysis is a new and foreign

experience for most of us, it heightens our sense of danger and makes us feel anxious and

uncomfortable. After you’ve experienced it a few times, it is no longer so unfamiliar, and the

sense of fear you experience gradually decreases. Eventually you may find that through repeated

exposure, it stops being scary at all, and can even feel comfortable or pleasant.

Sleep paralysis is also a short-cut to lucid dreaming. If a standard technique were to be

seen as taking the stairs to a lucid dream, entering a lucid dream through sleep paralysis would

be a lot like like taking the elevator. It can be done in a matter of seconds, and comes extremely

easily.

The tricky part is actually getting into sleep paralysis. Some people find it easy to do,

but for me personally, as I struggle to relax physically, inducing sleep paralysis myself is

something I usually have more difficulty with, and have to really work at. If you are fortunate

enough to be able to induce it more readily, or you happen to encounter sleep paralysis on a

120
regular basis anyway, then you can take advantage of it. If this sounds like you, you can use it

as a primary means of becoming lucid.

When you’re in sleep paralysis, simply watch what happens behind your closed eyes,

and use the normal process from WILD to enter a dream. Alternatively you can imagine your

most recent dream, as in DEILD, or simply imagine a scene and hope to enter it. The process is

usually very quick, and works quite well.

Another thing I’ve found to work for inducing a lucid dream very quickly using sleep

paralysis, is to imagine the sensation of spinning very rapidly. I discovered this technique when

investigating the validity of OBEs (out-of-body experiences) - and while it didn’t bring me any

such experiences, it did result in a lot of very vivid lucid dreams.

Spin around in circles before bed and try to really remember that feeling. When you’re

in sleep paralysis next, recall the feeling, and really imagine it as strongly as you can. You

should start to almost feel as if you’re spinning there in bed. Keep intensifying the feeling, and

you may find yourself slipping over into a dream.

As for actually inducing sleep paralysis, the process simply involves laying in bed

relaxed as if you were going to fall asleep normally. You need to first be in REM, since sleep

paralysis only occurs during the REM stage of sleep. Then simply lay there as if going to bed

normally.

Don’t make any special effort to lay still, as this often results in you tensing your

muscles, preventing the process from happening. Instead just lay normally, and try to pay

attention to your body as it falls asleep, while keeping your mind awake. Once you’re in sleep

paralysis you’ll usually know, but sometimes it sneaks up on you.

A sign that you’re in sleep paralysis is that you can see your room (or what looks like

your room) even though your eyes are closed. Another sign is feeling like there’s a weighted

blanket covering you, or someone is sitting on your chest. You might also feel the paralysis that

121
has come over your body. Don’t get this confused with simply feeling like your arms and legs

are becoming numb though, as this is normal and happens when you haven’t moved for a while.

The feeling of paralysis you get with sleep paralysis is much less subtle.

Finally you might hear or see some of the familiar hallucinations associated with the

state. If you see or hear any of these things, you can then perform WILD, DEILD, or use the

spinning technique I just outlined, and try to enter a lucid dream.

If you find that you are incredibly afraid of sleep paralysis, then this may be an obstacle

that interferes with lucid dreaming. Many people have the irrational fear that lucid dreaming

will make them experience sleep paralysis often, and so that can put them off from practising

regularly. If that sounds like you, then my only advice would be to face that fear. Fear is almost

always due to unfamiliarity, so as soon as you become more familiar with sleep paralysis, you

will stop fearing it.

If you are afraid, I do suggest following the steps I mentioned previously to induce and

encourage sleep paralysis. Once there, rather than attempting to enter a lucid dream, simply

remain there for as long as possible. Pay attention to the feelings in your body. Pay attention to

what you can hear, and what you can see. Just notice everything that is going on, and try to

observe it in a calm and neutral manner.

Repeat this process a few times, and you’ll quickly find your fear reducing, until you

actually start to feel quite comfortable with sleep paralysis. This has the added advantage of

making it easier to use sleep paralysis as a gateway to lucid dreaming. One common issue

people face when trying to induce lucid dreams through sleep paralysis, is that they get scared

right away when they successfully get into it, and so they struggle, and break free from sleep

paralysis before they have a chance to get lucid. By eliminating your fear, and getting

comfortable remaining in sleep paralysis for longer periods of time, the process of entering a

dream through it becomes second nature.

122
 False Awakenings

Another common experience for lucid dreamers, is the “false awakening”. As the name suggests,

this is an awakening that isn’t real. This is when you dream about waking up, but it’s just that, a

dream, you aren’t really awake.

You might have had one of these experiences before. You wake up in your bed, you

stretch, get up, head to the bathroom, look in the mirror, and then: wham, you wake up again,

only to realise that this was a dream. Sometimes, even the second experience of waking up is

also a dream, and in fact it’s not unusual to have 4, 5, or more of these experiences in a row.

You might find these experiences frustrating, but you shouldn’t! If you’ve been

experiencing false awakenings recently, you should rejoice, because they too are a fantastic way

to get a lucid dream. You can train yourself to recognise these experiences as dreams and

become lucid, by performing one simple step: Every time you wake up in the morning, before

doing anything else, before even reaching for your dream journal, do a reality check!

It’s as simple as that really. Perform a reality check (or better yet, a series of them) as

soon as you wake up. If you make this a habit, then the next time you have a false awakening,

you’ll do your usual thing, begin your series of reality checks, and surprise surprise, you’ll find

out you’re dreaming.

You should also be mindful when you’re in a lucid dream to be careful when you wake

up. Having a false awakening after a lucid dream is quite common, and so if you don’t apply

your normal approach of doing a series of reality checks, you might find yourself missing out on

many golden opportunities to keep lucid dreaming.

123
 Dream Analysis

You may have heard of people analysing their dreams for meaning and wondered whether or

not there was anything to it. The simple answer is: yes. Your dreams absolutely can be analysed,

and can provide you with valuable information about what’s going on in your subconscious.

This is because it is your subconscious that is the source of your dreams, so inevitably, what’s

going on in your subconscious, will influence the content of your dreams.

So does that mean you should head to the local library and pick out a selection of books

on dream meanings? Well, maybe not quite. I mean take a moment to think about it. I like to use

the example of dogs. Dogs in a dream could symbolise something like loyalty or friendship to

one person. To someone who owns a dog, it could simply symbolise their dog. Yet to someone

who’s absolutely terrified of dogs, seeing a dog in a dream could mean something more

unpleasant or sinister. So the meaning of any given symbol or theme in a dream can be highly

individual.

Now that doesn’t mean dream meaning books should be tossed out and ignored. They

go into detail on some archetypal, stereotypical meanings of various symbols. These meanings

can still be useful, as many of them are things we subconsciously believe. Things like

associating the sun with warmth are universal things that are unlikely to change from person to

person, and so in this respect, dream meaning books can still provide some valuable answers.

However ultimately I think the source of your dream meaning interpretation, should be

you. More specifically, I think it should come from your subconscious, the very same place the

dreams themselves originate. How exactly do you find out from your subconscious what your

dreams mean? We’ve already discussed how difficult it can be to ask your subconscious a

question, and how lucid dreaming can make that easier, so is that what we should do? Should

we get lucid and ask our subconscious what a dream means?

124
 Well that’s certainly one option, but I’d like to suggest that there’s a much easier

solution that only takes a few seconds! All you have to do is ask yourself the following question:

What do I feel this represents? Notice the emphasis on the word feel, that’s there on purpose.

The subconscious is associated with gut feelings after all, rather than thoughts. What you

intuitively feel the dream represents, is almost certainly what it does represent! It’s really quite

simple.

Now sometimes you might find that this doesn’t give you an answer straight away, so

there are a few more things you can do to help elucidate an answer. The first is to put yourself in

the role of a movie director. Rather than just asking yourself what the dream represents, imagine

that you’re a director and the dream was a movie you created. What would each of the things in

the scene be representing in the movie - why would they be there? A little role-playing exercise

like this can get your conscious mind out of the way and allow you to get the answer right from

your subconscious.

Usually when you have a dream there are lots of different things going on, and so it can

be helpful to analyse individual elements and not just the dream as a whole. I would start by

using one of the previous two approaches to get an overall idea of the general meaning of the

dream, but then move on to each element you encountered in the dreams. Each character and

location. Every object that you saw or paid special attention to, all the emotions you felt, and

any actions you carried out.

You can use this same process of asking yourself questions to find the meaning of each

individual object or element. Let’s say you encountered a particular person. Ask yourself: What

does this person represent to me? Why could they be here? Then write down your answer.

Apply this same approach to anything else that grabbed your attention during the dream. Maybe

you saw a particular colour, or maybe you felt an emotion really strongly in the dream - what do

you feel those represent?

125
 Sometimes it can also help to get a second opinion. While ultimately only you know

what certain symbols and themes represent to you, hearing what someone else thinks a

particular dream represents can make a missing piece click. This is because the subconscious is

just that, beneath the conscious, out of sight, out of mind, and as such we sometimes aren’t

immediately aware of our feelings about the symbols we encounter.

For example we might subconsciously associate the colour red with blood and violence,

but it might not be the first thing that comes to mind. This is because we associate a lot of things

with any given symbol, and some of them we simply take for granted. By getting perspective

from another person, or even consulting one of those dream meaning books mentioned earlier,

you can get some perspective on some of the meanings you might have been putting out of mind

and not considering.

Now this sort of dream analysis can be very therapeutic and provide immense value, as

you can get to the bottom of troubling emotions, or resolve inner conflicts. It can also offer

value for anyone wishing to lucid dream. This is because as you become more familiar with the

inner workings of your mind and your dreams through analysis, you’ll start to more easily

recognise when you’re dreaming.

On top of that, during this process you’ll be sure to notice more dream signs than you

ordinarily would through the standard process of searching for them. This is because dream

signs aren’t always as straight-forward as seeing a particular character or object again and again.

Sometimes dream signs can be more subtle and nuanced. You might have several dreams that

on the surface seem completely unrelated in their content, but once you begin analysis, you

discover that they all share similar meanings, and thus this meaning in itself can be seen as one

of your dream signs.

For these reasons, I personally think everyone should conduct regular dream analysis.

You don’t necessarily have to analyse every single dream that you have, but perhaps take one or

126
two of your more vivid dreams each week and analyse those. I’d also take the time to analyse

any particularly emotional or memorable dreams as those are typically the ones you’ll be able to

extract more meaning from. It’ll aid with your lucid dreaming, that’s for sure.

Dream Incubation

So it’s great being a lucid dreamer, with the ability to control your dreams, and use them both

for working on yourself, and for pleasure. One thing I’ve often had people ask me though is

“What about my regular dreams? I have some pretty wild dreams, will I stop getting those if I

start lucid dreaming?”. Well, no, of course not, you’ll still get regular dreams even if you’re

quite an experienced lucid dreamer.

In this little segment though I want to talk about how you can actually get even more

from those regular dreams, and even subtly influence or alter them without having to be lucid at

the time. You may recall I touched on using mantras before sleep to get your subconscious to

answer a question for you in your dreams, well you can use this same approach to alter the

general flavour of your dreams too.

Let’s say you want to dream about visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Well one way you

could go about this is of course the most obvious way: getting lucid, and travelling to Paris. The

problem is that relies on you getting lucid in the first place. Now if you’re more experienced,

getting lucid might not cause you any trouble, but if you’re new to lucid dreaming, that could

take you a while to do. By the time you do get lucid, you might forget about the Eiffel Tower,

making it difficult to achieve your goal.

So the alternative approach is to use something known as dream incubation. This is

basically where you try to influence what you’re going to dream about. There are numerous

ways you can do this, but the first I’ll discuss is of course the mantra.

127
 Before bed, you can simply repeat a mantra like “I will dream about the Eiffel Tower”,

or “I am climbing the Eiffel Tower” or something similar, over and over. Just like anything, this

doesn’t necessarily have a 100% success rate. It may work the first time you try it, or it may

need a few nights of repetition. I think you’ll be quite surprised at just how often it does work

though.

You can use this approach to dream about anything: people, places, emotions, past

memories. Whatever it is you desire to dream about, or to feature in your dream, simply repeat it

in your head before sleep. Now you can further improve upon your chances of this working by

combining the mantra with visualisation. Rather than just repeating the phrase on its own, start

to actually imagine the end result. Picture yourself there at the base of the Eiffel Tower, staring

up at it in all its glory. Or see yourself reliving that memory you wanted to re-experience during

your dream.

When using visualisation, try to combine seeing with feeling. Try to really feel like

you’re there. What does the ground feel like beneath your feet? What can you hear around you?

Maybe you can even smell or taste something? Let yourself really do your best to imagine the

experience of whatever you want to dream about, and engage all of your senses as thoroughly as

you can in the process. The more engaged you are with what you’re imagining, the deeper its

roots will take hold in your subconscious, and the greater the likelihood that you will actually

dream about the subject matter of choice.

Visualisation and mantras aren’t the only ways you can influence what you dream about.

If you’ve ever stayed up late watching a horror movie, you may have had the unfortunate

experience of having a series of nightmares afterwards. Why is that? Well it’s simple really, the

movie made an impression on you, and some of its contents stuck around and made their way

into your dreams.

128
 You may have also noticed that you often dream about things that happen during your

day to day life, or things you’ve encountered recently. Everything you’re thinking, seeing, and

feeling, is all passing through the subconscious. Much of that material will be recalled or

referenced later during your dreams. So one of the simplest ways to influence your dreams is to

just fill your subconscious with the material you want it to use.

If you like the thrill of a nightmare, then do that: put on a terrifying movie (or several)

and you’re providing just the right building blocks for your subconscious to create some scary

dreams for you.

If you’d prefer to dream about the town you grew up in, spend some time travelling

through the town on Google Maps’ handy StreetView feature, passing through locations you

used to know and love, and recalling all the memories they bring to mind. Do this before bed for

an hour or so, and there’s a very good chance you’ll find yourself there in your dreams. Better

yet, if you actually have the opportunity to visit that place for real, do it.

If you want to dream about your favourite fantasy universe, then why not begin filling

your mind to the brim with information about it? Pick up the books, and read them! Put in the

DVD, and re-watch the movies! Or just head to the internet and read up on the lore of that world,

or discuss it with others in forums and the like. Fill your head with content related to what you

want to appear in your dreams, and there’s a very good chance it will.

Another way to influence your dreams is through creative pursuits. I enjoy writing, so if

I wanted to dream about something in particular, one approach I might take is to write about it. I

could literally write out what I wanted to happen in my dream like a story. The act of writing

something out or saying it to someone, often has more impact on you than simply reading or

hearing it (This is one of the reasons why I love to teach, because it’s great to share your

knowledge with others! The act of you sharing that information will help you learn in the

process).

129
 Not a fan of writing? Well you don’t have to be, you can just as easily draw, paint, or

even turn your desired dream into music that represents the experience you want to have. Let

your imagination run wild, and don’t be afraid to use abstract representations either, remember,

we’re working with the subconscious here, which likes to think in terms of symbols and

metaphors.

Nightmares

While dreaming can be a whole lot of fun, it can also sometimes be quite troubling. Almost

every single person who can recall their dreams, can also remember having the occasional

nightmare. For some people it’s not an occasional thing either, and nightmares can be a regular

occurrence, to the point that you begin dreading sleep.

One way of looking at nightmares is as a troublesome nuisance, something to be feared.

We can then try various things to reduce the likelihood that we’ll have nightmares. Some such

measures are obvious, like avoiding watching horror movies or unsettling TV shows before bed.

Others are less direct and involve working on being happier and less afraid in your day to day

life, so that fear is less likely to be a factor in your dreams.

The way I see it though: Nightmares aren’t something to be feared. They’re an

opportunity. The fact is, no matter what you do, you’re probably going to have at least the

occasional nightmare sometimes. If they’re happening, whether we like it or not, then why not

get some positive use out of them? Instead of fearing them, harness them for some good.

How exactly can nightmares even be used for good? Well for one, I touched on dream

analysis earlier in this chapter, and that should be your first port of call when you have an

unpleasant dream. Analyse the dream in depth and try to figure out why you’re having this

dream. At the end of the day, something buried in your subconscious, is causing you to have

130
fearful experiences in your sleep. By finding out exactly what that thing is, you may in fact be

able to address the issue and work towards resolving it.

An important factor when analysing unpleasant dreams is recurrence. If you’re seeing

the same negative themes cropping up over and over again: like running from a monster, or

being crushed, or drowning, then it almost always points to an unaddressed issue or fear of

some kind.

Let’s take the example of running away from a monster. You can follow the usual steps

for dream analysis here, but this one is usually a pretty easy one to decipher. What does running

away from a monster represent to you? For most people, the answer is staring you right in the

face: Running away from a monster, probably quite simply represents running away from one of

your problems in waking life.

As a personal example, I had several dreams about running away from negative

characters associated with my past. This to me immediately suggested that I was in fact trying to

run away from something or someone in my past, which was true at the time. I had been failing

to deal with and integrate some of the lessons from past experiences, and the dreams, once

analysed, made that incredibly clear.

Beyond analysing and using nightmares as a source of introspection, is there anything

more you can do with them? Yes, absolutely! In fact, this is where your new-found lucid

dreaming abilities will come in handy. While regular nightmares are a passive experience, if

you’re able to become lucid, you now have the ability to control and interact with said

nightmare.

One option at this point is to simply end the nightmare. There are two main approaches

to doing this. The first way to end a nightmare when lucid, is simply to wake yourself up. This

is the most easy way to end it, requires little effort on your part, and ensures you don’t have to

131
experience anything uncomfortable or unpleasant. The second way to end a nightmare is to try

and change the dream into something more positive.

There are a multitude of different ways to change the dream, from transporting yourself

to a new location, to using superpowers to defeat any of the monsters or enemies that you might

be facing. Use your imagination, and a little effort, and you’ll be able to regain control over

your dream scene. This can be great when you have other plans for your lucid dream, or simply

want to have fun.

Again though, much like with dream analysis, there is also the possibility of harnessing

the potential of the nightmare, rather than simply stopping it in its tracks. Let’s take the example

of a nightmare in which you’re running from a monster again. Rather than ending the dream, or

continuing to run from the monster, what could you do differently?

Keep in mind what we said about the possible meaning of such a dream earlier.

Running away from a monster in a dream could represent running away from some of your

problems in waking life. With that in mind, what’s the desired end result? Wouldn’t it be better

to stop running away from your problems? Maybe then we can use that as our plan of attack in

the dream itself.

Yes, instead of running, try turning around and facing the monster! Face your fears,

figuratively, and literally, at the same time. Not only can this have a somewhat mirrored effect

in waking life, giving you the confidence to turn and face your fears there too, but it can also

provide additional insight into your issues.

What happens when you turn around and face the monster is going to depend on the

deeper reason for you having the dream, but you might find some surprising results. I had a

nightmare not too long ago in which I was surrounded by scary pitch black darkness on all sides

except one, and so I was trying to escape the darkness and move towards the light.

132
 After becoming lucid, I decided I would instead turn around and head straight into the

dark. I expected a monster or something terrifying to jump out any moment. I expected to be

consumed by the darkness and wake up with my heart pounding and an intense sweat. Instead I

found the darkness clearing in front of me. As I walked deeper into the darkness, it lit up in

front of me. Even when I walked into areas that were pitch black, there was no monster, nothing

to be afraid of after all.

It can be compared to fearing a monster under the bed as a kid, and then finally bravely

looking under the bed and realising there is no monster. When you face your fears, you may

discover that there is no monster after all! This can often be representative of your real life

issues too, and suggest that in fact the problems you’re running away from, are not quite as

scary or problematic as you’ve made them out to be.

Keep this approach in mind and experiment with facing your fears in any nightmare

where you become lucid. See what happens, and then afterwards, take the time to write down

your dream in some detail, and analyse it thoroughly. See if you can gleam any valuable lessons

that can then be applied to the root fears and worries that are the cause of said dreams.

A final use for nightmares, is to actually use them as a means to get lucid. In fact this is

often one of the reasons for many peoples first lucid dreams. They experience some recurring

nightmares as kid. They then tell their parents, who reassure them that those are just dreams,

and not real. The next time they have the recurring dream, they recognise it as a dream, and

become lucid. This seems to be one of the most common ways people get lucid at an early age.

If you want to replicate this yourself, simply make note of what you’re having

nightmares about. Then remind yourself that the next time you encounter it, you’ll remember

that it’s just a dream. If all goes well, you’ll soon find yourself treated to some lucid dreams!

133
 Lucid Sleep

Beyond your typical dreams, in which most or all of your senses are engaged, there are also the

other stages of sleep, in which you tend to remain unconscious of anything happening. It would

at first appear that these other stages of sleep are irrelevant to us. No imagery, no dream scenes,

so no real potential for lucidity. Based on my own experiences though, that does not appear to

be the case.

With the right set up, and correct practice, it appears to be possible to become lucid and

aware even during non-REM sleep, or at least during some dreamless phase of sleep that very

much resembles it. I like to call this lucid sleep. You’re asleep, and you’re aware that you’re

asleep, but you’re not quite inside a dream, so I don’t quite like putting it under the lucid

dreaming umbrella.

What does such an experience even look like? Well, it doesn’t quite look like anything.

To me the experience was much like being inside an empty void. I could see black, or nothing at

all, and I could not feel my body in bed. It was like a limbo state between dreams and waking

life.

I was able to simply remain there without the desire to wake up or change anything,

simply observing the emptiness. It was incredibly peaceful, much like a deep meditative

experience, but without the trappings and distractions of feelings in my physical body.

At any time I could wake myself up, but I felt no need to. Despite the lack of any sort of

positive stimulation in this state, there was nothing really negative either. Just calm, and peace,

as I said before. There was however something else that I could do, a second option. I could

dream.

Yes, at any point I could simply begin imagining a dream scene, and it would form

around me. This is the SILD, or Sleep Induced Lucid Dreaming I talked about earlier in this

134
book. The moment I visualised a scene, it was there, solidifying until I could touch and interact

with it.

This state seemed to be quite persistent too. Once my dream, or series of dreams ended,

I once again returned to this void, in which I still remained conscious and aware. From there I

could simply rest peacefully for as long as I liked, or once again create a new dream scene.

I have never had quite so much ease in inducing lucid dreams, as during nights where

this state of “lucid sleep” occurred. There was no question of whether or not I’d get lucid, and it

often led to me having several long vivid lucid dreams over the course of the night. Naturally I

think this is something to aim for if you really want to achieve the maximum frequency of lucid

dreams possible, however it’s a little easier said than done.

For me, while I would consider myself quite an experienced lucid dreamer now, I have

not yet reached the stage where I’m able to consistently maintain this state of “lucid sleep”

every night. Sometimes I’ll experience it regularly for a long period of time, and then I’ll get an

equally long period of time with the dreamless portions of my sleep being as unconscious as

they used to be. Other times I’ll get instances of lucid sleep that last for a night or two and then

disappear.

The one connection I did observe is that the periods in which this state has occurred for

me, seem to be connected to the periods in which I’m spending the longest time meditating, and

attempting to be present during my waking life. It seems these positive habits also carry over

into our sleep. Just as we become more conscious while awake, it appears we too become more

conscious while asleep (and not just in our dreams!).

If you would like to attempt to attain this state yourself, then my best bet is to continue

with all your usual lucid dreaming practices, but most importantly: be consistent. Then couple

that with regular long meditation sessions I suggest at least a 30-40 minute session, ideally two,

each day. Or you can even do more than that if you can find the time. Be patient too, and try to

135
really go deep with your meditation sessions, rather than spending the entire time thinking

“How long has this been? Should I stop yet?”.

Lucid Dreaming Myths & Misconceptions

In this book we’ve gone into quite some depth about how to lucid dream, and what it even is,

but what about what it isn’t? It’s quite important to remember that as little as 60 years ago, lucid

dreaming was still completely unproven. So if you’d never done it yourself, you quite probably

assumed it was a load of old rubbish, a made up fairy-tale, or pseudo-scientific nonsense. That

means lucid dreaming is still very new to us, and there’s a LOT of room for misinformation.

I’ve touched on these myths and misconceptions briefly in earlier chapters, but I feel

they’re worth having their own section to talk further about. If there’s one lesson to take away

from this section of the book, it’s that you should double check anything that sounds ridiculous

or too good to be true.

One surprisingly common concern beginners often express, is a worry that they’ll get

hurt in a lucid dream. This comes from the misconception that lucid dreams are somehow

different from regular dreams. They aren’t, you’re dreaming all the same, the only difference is

that you’ve become aware of this, and hopefully also taken control. Just as you have nothing to

fear from your nightmares or regular dreams, nothing changes about this when you become

lucid.

The things you experience in your dreams are simply happening inside your mind. If

you run into a monster in your dream, it’s not real, and you have nothing to fear. If you find

yourself in the middle of a sword fight in a dream, and you lose an arm, when you wake up,

guess what, your arm will still be there (Not to mention, if you’re lucid, you can even regrow

the lost arm in your dream!).

136
 You might also recall a popular myth about death in dreams. I’m sure you’ve heard it

before: Many of us have dreams where we find ourselves falling, only to be jolted abruptly

awake. The myth goes something like this: “The reason we wake up suddenly, is because if you

experienced death in a dream, you’d die for real.”

This too is complete nonsense. I’ve experienced many a death in my dreams, and as I

talked about in the first chapter, you are both at no risk, and you also absolutely can continue a

dream after experiencing death in it. Sometimes dying in a dream will wake you up, or send you

into a brand new dream. Sometimes you’ll experience something akin to a rebirth in the dream.

The experience can vary, but you’re never in any real danger, as once again, it’s just a dream.

Another all too common lucid dreaming myth comes in many varieties, but always

follows the same formula. “The best way to do [a] is to do it by doing [b]”, or “Doing [a] will

never work”. Many people find that in their lucid dreams, certain dream control techniques

naturally work better for them, or others seem not to work whatsoever. They then make the

mistake of assuming that this is just the way dreams work, and that this applies to everyone else.

This neglects the importance of the subconscious mind. Your dreams are ultimately

shaped by your own subconscious, and so the individual rules any given dream appears to

follow, and the dream control techniques that work best, will vary from person to person. Just

because you find it difficult to fly in a lucid dream, doesn’t mean someone else will. Just

because you find that the best way to spawn objects is to imagine them appearing in front of you,

doesn’t mean someone else will, and vice versa.

Earlier I mentioned, how many of the misconceptions surrounding lucid dreaming, stem

from how not long ago we didn’t even have proof it was real, and this next misconception is

very much a symptom of that.

This is the idea that lucid dreaming is some kind of black magic, or involves demons,

spirits, or ghosts. There seem to be a small minority of individuals from religious communities

137
who have taken their time to put out videos and blog posts warning people that if they lucid

dream they’ll become possessed by the devil, or lose their soul.

As ridiculous as those ideas rightfully sound, I can understand where they originated.

Imagine telling someone 300-500 years ago that we could create a world in our mind, and

physically visit it, and do whatever we liked. If they didn’t think you were mad, they’d probably

call it witchcraft, and try to have you burned at the stake. It’s no wonder then that there are

many who haven’t experienced lucid dreaming, and based on the description assume there must

be some kind of witchcraft or trickery going on.

The only demons you have to fear in a lucid dream, are whatever your own mind can

conjure up. While it is quite rare, it is certainly possible to have frightening or unpleasant lucid

dreams, if you focus solely on negative and fearful thoughts during a dream. Even those

experiences can provide great value and insight though, helping you face your fears, and

become more comfortable with them. As I’ve said before, you’re never in any danger.

We’ve discussed some fearful and negative misrepresentations of lucid dreaming, but

what about some of the overly optimistic and positive ones? Well, there are plenty of those too.

One I’ve heard all too many times is the idea that using dream control, you can slow down time

and remain in a lucid dream for months, years, or even forever. If that was true, I would not be

here writing this book, but would instead probably be off living some eternal adventure in my

own dreams!

Alas though, dream control, while quite broad in scope, is not unlimited in its potential.

You are limited by certain things, and one of them is time. Time does not stop passing when

you are asleep, and so there comes a time when your dream ends, and a new one begins, or you

wake up. REM cycles are limited in length, and so you can only spend so long dreaming.

Where does this idea even come from in the first place though? Is it just something

someone pulled out of the air with no basis whatsoever? Well, not quite. There’s definitely a

138
reason that this myth persists so well even today, and it can be summed up in two words: Time

dilation.

Time dilation is where we perceive time to be passing faster or slower than it actually is.

You’ve probably heard the saying “Time flies when you’re having fun”, and this is an example

of time dilation in action. Sometimes when you’re having fun, you’re paying so little attention

to the time that it almost seems like it passes quicker. On the other side of things, when you’re

quite bored, it can feel like every second is dragging out.

The perception of time can be altered much more dramatically than this though. Certain

medications and drugs can drastically alter the perception of time. For example, dissociative

anaesthetics like Ketamine can cause an hour to feel like several days.

The mechanisms behind time dilation aren’t yet entirely understood, but my personal

theory is that it has a lot to do with information and time markers. Ordinarily we receive a

certain amount of information from our environment at any given time, from our eyes, our ears,

our nose, from the people around us, and so on.

When this amount of information decreases below that threshold, it feels like time is

passing slower. Example: You’re watching paint dry. Not much is going on, so your brain is

receiving little in the way of new information. There is just so little new information each

second, that it feels like each second is dragging on.

When this information increases beyond that threshold, it feels like time is passing more

quickly. Example: When you’re scrolling your social media feed, your senses are being

bombarded with information, you’re seeing images and words left right and centre, and the

brain is being overloaded. This, combined with your hyper-focused state, leads to time passing

by in the blink of an eye.

This would also explain the previous example of time dilation with an anaesthetic like

Ketamine. Ketamine, being a dissociative anaesthetic, causes a disconnection between various

139
parts of the brain. As these connections are temporarily broken, less information is getting

through, and once again we get a situation similar to watching paint dry, only amplified a

hundred times over.

With our dreams, we’re not being bombarded with quite as much information as we are

during waking life, and any information that is there, comes from our own subconscious. So

perhaps a similar incidence of the paint drying effect can occur for the same reason.

I also mentioned “time markers”, these are events we use as milestones to remember the

passing of time. If you recall in the first chapter, when I talked about the duration of dreams, I

gave an example thought experiment, where you imagined key past events from your life, and it

built a picture of your whole life to date.

“Time markers” are what I sometimes call these memorable events that we use as

milestones when retelling stories or recalling events. We probably can’t recall what time we ate

breakfast on June 3rd 2013, nor do we have time for those kinds of minor details. So when

looking back at a longer period of time like weeks, months, or years, we sum them up with

those key events.

As I said before, a similar thing can happen in our dreams. We experience several key

time markers, that lead to an experience of time dilation. For example, in just a few minutes, we

could experience being at school, then high school, then college, then work, and then in a

retirement home. We’ve only experienced a few minutes of real time, but because we had

several key time markers, or milestones normally associated with a human lifespan, it feels

almost like we lived a full life in that dream.

This leaves the misconception of year long lucid dreams only a half-myth. You can

certainly experience time dilation, and dreams that disguise themselves as longer than they are,

through you experiencing many key events in a short period of time. However, if you’re hoping

140
to actually spend days, weeks, or longer in a dream, you’re out of luck. Time is going to be the

biggest limiting factor in many of your more ambitious lucid adventures.

Another rather optimistic misconception, is that the characters you encounter in your

dreams, are real people. I think every lucid dreamer will be guilty of falling into this trap at least

once, and I’m no exception. When lucid, if you encounter someone you know in the dream,

there’s an extraordinary temptation to tell them about it. To let them know that this is a lucid

dream, as if they too were dreaming alongside you. In that moment you feel that maybe if you

just tell them, they’ll realise they’re dreaming and you’ll have a shared dream together!

Often this simply comes from you being in a lower state of awareness, lucid enough to

know it’s a dream, but not lucid enough to have your wits about you. So upon recognising

someone, you assume they’re real and dreaming with you. Other times though this comes from

a genuine belief that the people you see in your dreams are real. This again neglects the

importance of the subconscious mind. The people you see in your dreams, are made by your

subconscious.

Now that doesn’t mean these characters are worthless or should be ignored. The very

fact that they are creations of your subconscious mind, makes them incredibly useful. They can

give you some real insight into your subconscious deep-seated beliefs about a particular person.

If for example you regularly encounter someone in your dreams, and they’re always aggressive,

and mean, it might show that subconsciously you feel they are this way in real life, or that

you’re secretly a little bit afraid of them.

Not only can these characters be a representation of your beliefs about any given person,

but they can also be a reflection of your beliefs about yourself. If all of the characters in your

dreams mistreat you, it may be a sign that you’re highly self-critical, and low on self-esteem. If

all of the characters in your dreams are loving and cheery, it may be a sign you’ve developed a

healthy sense of self-love.

141
 Still, as I mentioned, these characters are created by the subconscious, and when you

interact with them, it is all occurring entirely inside of your head. The only person it can affect

is you. If you’ve been meaning to get something off your chest to someone, or you want to say

something to someone, but would like a little practice first, you can certainly do it in a dream.

Just be aware that you’re talking to your subconscious, and not the real person in question.

Don’t be surprised when you tell someone something in a dream and they have no

recollection of ever hearing it in waking life. That’s because they never did. It was only the

character in your dream that did.

This also applies for things characters say or do to you. Remember that dream

characters are not the real people they look like, and so if a character wrongs you in your

dreams, the real person in question hasn’t done anything wrong.

I’ve seen many accounts of people getting into fights with their significant others over

dreams they had. One person has a dream that their partner did something wrong, then upon

waking, they get angry at their partner for the perceived slight against them that happened in the

dream. This is silly, since it’s one of your mind’s own characters that wronged you, not your

partner!

Nonetheless, these dreams can also provide wise warnings that are worth heeding.

Sometimes our subconscious can get a better feel for a person than we can, and if we’re

regularly having dreams that someone close to us is dishonest, or taking advantage of us, it

might be a sign that they really are. It might be a sign that we’re just consciously unwilling to

admit it, and that’s why the subconscious keeps bringing it up.

On the other hand, it could also mean that you’re simply experiencing insecurity, and an

inability to trust someone. So don’t jump to any conclusions, but study those dreams closely.

Speaking of signs, there are numerous popular misconceptions with regards to dream

signs. Perhaps the most common misconception, is simply that any given sign in a dream has

142
one particular meaning. Yet again, this fails to account for the subconscious mind. Everyone’s

mind is different, and so it is wrong to apply the same dream interpretations to everyone.

As I’ve said before, there certainly are some universal interpretations of dream signs,

that apply to most people, most of the time. The misconception is simply that these

interpretations always apply, or apply to every single person out there.

Using the example I talked about earlier in this book in the section about dream

interpretation. Dogs might be a symbol of loyalty to much of the world, and that’s fairly

universal, but dogs could mean something entirely different to someone who is deathly afraid of

them.

So always exert some degree of caution when turning to one-size-fits-all interpretations

of dream signs. They’re certainly a good start, but definitely use your own intuition as to

whether or not the interpretation fits your dream. Sometimes a dream meaning book’s answer

might be dead on for you, and the universal answer might apply, but if your gut feeling is telling

you otherwise: trust it!

These are just a few of the many misconceptions out there, and if I were to list them all,

this book would be at least twice the size it is now. My final word of advice here is to fact check

anything that sounds too good to be true, or a little out there.

Lucid Living

Much of the focus of lucid dreaming practice is on our sleep, for obvious reasons. That’s when

our dreams occur, and so that’s when we’re trying to become lucid. Personally though, I think

there’s much more benefit to be had from lucid dreaming, if we broaden our horizons a little,

and look at becoming more lucid all of the time. Even while awake.

143
 I briefly touched on this earlier in the section about meditation, but ordinarily we spend

much of our lives on auto-pilot, both while awake, and in our dreams. With lucid dreaming

practice, we are trying to make an effort to no longer perform our dreams on auto-pilot.

That’s great, and we’ve already established how wonderful lucid dreams can be, but I

think we should also consider our waking life. What’s the point of getting lucid in our dreams, if

we still spend our waking lives on auto-pilot?

Not only that, but can we ever truly fully become present in our dreams, if we have yet

to do the same while awake? I think instead of looking at our dreams and waking life as entirely

separate, we should view them together as parts of a whole. Instead of trying to figure out “How

can I become more lucid in my dreams?” or “How can I become more present during the day?”

we should try to figure out how to become more present all of the time.

One strategy for pursuing this is of course meditation, as stated before. I think

meditation is a fantastic practice because it tends to have a ripple effect that improves almost

every area of our life. While some things will only benefit you while awake, and others will

only affect your dreams, meditating each day has a dramatic positive effect on both. Everyone

can benefit from it, no exceptions.

In addition to meditation, we can also take a look at some of the lessons we learn from

lucid dreaming, and apply some of them to our day to day lives. One example of this is the

mechanism behind dream control. In our dreams, our subconscious beliefs rule. If we

subconsciously believe something is possible, it is.

The waking world provides a different rule-set, but this mechanism still proves to be

partially true. No, believing you can jump up in the air and start flying won’t do anything for

you in waking life, but, your subconscious beliefs can still be a limiting factor in everything you

do. Just as not believing in your abilities can prevent you from using them in a lucid dream, in

the waking world, a lack of belief in your potential can lead to many missed opportunities.

144
 To use a real world example: Let’s say someone is applying for university. Let’s also

assume that they are making the choice about where they apply, and that their parents are not

pushing them in any particular direction. If they have low confidence in themselves and their

abilities, are they likely to apply to Harvard, MIT, Oxford, or somewhere similar? Even if they

have the grades and abilities to get in, they may simply assume that they’ll never get in, and

never make an application, instead applying to safer bets.

If you think back over your own life so far, I’m sure you can find many instances of this

happening. Times where you didn’t even attempt something, or go after something, simply

because you felt you weren’t capable, or that it wouldn’t work out. You might also be able to

recall some examples of the opposite, times where you truly believed in yourself, and pulled off

something incredibly challenging or difficult in part thanks to that confidence.

See now how even in the waking world, limiting beliefs can stop you in your tracks,

and positive ones can empower you, similar to in your dreams? Belief might not be the be all

and end all like it is in our dreams, but it is certainly an incredibly powerful factor in your day to

day achievements.

Similar to belief in ourselves, our dreams also teach us the power of positive and

negative thoughts. Enter into a lucid dream with a mindset full of fear, anger, or negativity, and

you’ll quickly be treated to more of the same, as your dream becomes a nightmare. Enter a lucid

dream with excitement and happiness, and your dream will almost certainly be equally joyful.

Much like before, your thoughts aren’t the only factor involved in the real world.

Having a bad day where you have only negative thoughts, isn’t going to cause the whole world

to come crashing down like it might in a dream, but those thoughts can absolutely have a

negative effect on you.

We as humans have a limited scope for focus at any given time. We can only really pay

attention to a handful of things. Once we go beyond that, our brain has to decide which things

145
we care to prioritise, devoting much less (or sometimes no) attention to anything else. Our

thoughts help direct this focus.

If our thoughts are full of negativity, focused on what we don’t have, what’s ailing us,

and how we’re suffering, then that’s all our mind becomes capable of seeing. That’s where our

focus is, so even if something good happens, our mind is too focused elsewhere to notice it.

On the other hand, if our thoughts are more optimistic, and we’re focused on being

grateful for what we have, on seeking new opportunities, and on the good in the world, then

we’ll be sure to find more good along the way.

That’s not to say we have to ignore the real world, pretend everything is okay, or that

we’re not allowed to feel negative at times. However there is no benefit to be had from

remaining negative all of the time.

Even if you have to fake smile at times, and you can count the good things on your life

on the one hand, do it. Gradually, your brain will shift focus, and start looking for more of those

few positive things, until the few become a few more. Eventually this can snowball, and you can

find a previously negative life shifting more towards the positive. All a ripple effect of you

shifting your thoughts.

With that in mind, there are a few practices you can adopt to help steer your thinking in

a more positive direction. The first one, I already mentioned: Gratitude. Take a few minutes

each day, to think of 5 things you’re thankful for. Do not stop the exercise until you’ve thought

of at least 5 things. They can be big things, like a loved one, or an amazing event that happened.

Or they can be small things, like the fact that it’s sunny outside today, or that you got an extra

30 minutes of sleep. Sometimes, just being alive and breathing is something to be thankful for.

The second practice you can try to adopt is doing something small but kind for someone

else. We often have a hard time being kind to ourselves, especially if life is overwhelming us;

146
yet most of us are actually surprisingly good at brightening other peoples days, if we put our

minds to it.

It doesn’t have to be anything big or dramatic. Smile at people on your way to work.

Tell someone how much you appreciate them. Send some good wishes to an old friend you

haven’t spoken to in a while. Thank someone for something they did that you’re grateful for.

Not only do you make someone else feel good, but sometimes that reflects back on you, and you

start to feel better about yourself too.

Next, I propose questioning your thoughts. Something you’ll quickly become aware of

if you develop a regular meditation practice, is that many of your thoughts are automatic.

You’re not making any conscious effort to think, and yet there they appear. Often this can be

extreme, as in the intrusive thoughts experienced by people suffering from OCD. The important

thing to note here is that just because you had a thought, doesn’t mean it’s what you actually

think, or that it’s actually true.

When you catch yourself having negative thoughts, try to notice the fact that you had a

negative thought. Then, realise that most negative thoughts are automatic, and try to replace it

with something better.

Let’s say you have a thought that you’re worthless and have done nothing with your life:

Don’t allow that thought to fester. Realise that you’ve had an automatic negative thought, and

then counter it. Make a list of some things you have done with your life, no matter how small.

Even things as simple as having made it this far!

I mentioned how we often have a hard time being nice to ourselves, but an easier time

being nice to others. This can be a useful thing to remember when questioning our own thoughts.

Simply ask this question: Would you say that to someone else?

147
 Imagine your friend was like yourself, and had accomplished the same things as you in

their life. Would you call them worthless? I imagine not. So then there’s no way you can

rightfully call yourself worthless either.

Spend some time correcting negative thoughts, and over time as you practice, you’ll get

better at it. Eventually the negative thoughts will start to lessen, and your self-esteem will start

to shift in a positive direction.

Lucid dreaming teaches us that our beliefs, thoughts, and feelings all matter, and that

our actions and results often depend very much on them. Just as we spend time cultivating the

right beliefs, thoughts, and feelings in our dreams, we should very much do the same while

awake. I promise you, you’ll be glad you did. Try and live as lucid a life while awake, as you do

while asleep.

148
 Epilogue
Over the course of these pages, I’ve provided you with a great deal of information. What you do

with that information, is ultimately up to you.

Information alone can only get you so far, and I strongly urge you to not just sit on it,

but to put it into practice each day and night. It is only through continued consistent practice,

that you will gradually begin to master lucid dreaming (Or anything for that matter).

Beyond that, while all the information you need might be contained within these

chapters, there is still more to learn. There are some things that simply couldn’t be written down

here, as they are not universal. Only you can learn the inner workings of your own mind, and

your own dreams. So this will inevitably be a journey of self-discovery for you.

I’ll let you in on a little secret too. That journey never ends. There will be always be

more to learn, more to try. A world awaits you in your dreams, and it is a world too vast for any

one of us to fully explore or conquer.

Still, even if none of us will ever know every in and out of our dreams. I leave you with

a lofty goal: Try. Try and explore your dreams so thoroughly that there’s nothing left to explore.

You spend a third of your life asleep, so you may as well make it as interesting and exciting a

journey as possible!

149
 I urge you to also go above and beyond, and take this into your waking life too. Your

dreams at night shouldn’t be the only dreams you explore thoroughly. If you have a dream, a

goal, or many, pursue them in their fullest.

In our dreams, we have an almost unlimited potential for accomplishment, with our

main limiting factor being time. Our dreams are fleeting, and can end quickly, so while we can

do almost anything, we must act fast. I believe the same to be true while awake. You can

accomplish almost anything if you really put your energy and heart into it, but our time here is

limited too

So don’t delay. Pursue your dreams while you’re asleep, and pursue them while you’re

awake. Start now, start today.

Finally, before I leave you to your own devices, I’d like to ask a small favour. Well,

actually, I’m going to ask two.

First of all, if you’ve made it to the end of this book, and it has helped you to become a

better lucid dreamer, I’d love to hear from you. If you have time, and the will to do so, feel free

to drop an email to tipharotfeedback@gmail.com letting me know how the book has helped you.

You can also reach out to me on Twitter (@Tipharot) but as my Twitter inbox is usually flooded,

email is a far better place to send your feedback. Whether it’s a word or two, or something

lengthier, I’d love to hear from you!

The second favour I’d like to ask, is that as you become more experienced with lucid

dreaming, you teach others how to do it too. After all, I didn’t just magically suddenly know all

of the things in this book. I had to learn them over the course of years, through a mix of other

peoples lessons, and my own experience.

If my teaching has benefited you, then your teaching can potentially benefit someone

else down the line. Lucid dreaming is becoming more and more popular, but there are still many

people out there who don’t even know about it. So when you learn how to lucid dream, teach

150
your friends and relatives! Encourage them to do the same for others too, and eventually lucid

dreaming will become much more commonplace.

Oh alright, did I say two? I meant three. I have one final favour to ask, but I promise

this is the last one: Have a fantastic day, and a wonderful night filled with amazing dreams! &

Many more after it!

151