How to lucid dream—simple hacks that can help change your conscious and unconscious life

How to lucid dream, unlike the human mind, is far from a mystery—and something you can train yourself to do. 

Everyone is capable of achieving a lucid dream. If you have a brain and a consciousness, then you can experience lucid dreaming.  Some people experience them spontaneously and others work at it in dedicated practice.

Consciousness is a muscle that needs to be trained and evolved, which takes daily discipline and new habits. You can’t expect an overnight success rate when training your consciousness. 

It’s a bit like going to the gym and learning how to lift weights properly. You won’t achieve killer glutes in one week of training. It takes time, patience, and consistency.

In developing this training, the more conscious, aware, and present you are in your waking life then the more chances you have of becoming conscious, aware, and present within a dream. 

How to Lucid dream in 5 steps

1. Get to know your sleep cycle.
2. Aim for 7 -9 hours of sleep each night.
3. Begin to embrace self-awareness by observing, studying, and analyzing your day-to-day environments.
4. Write down your dreams in a daily dream journal.
5. Incorporate dream-enhancing herbs into your bedtime routine.

1. Get to know your sleep cycle

Being aware of the physical and biological aspects of sleeping and dreamtime is very helpful to the practice. Now we're not just talking how to get to sleep fast, we mean the fascinating neuroscience behind sleep itself.

Read up on the five stages of sleep, the five brain wave oscillations, and threshold states of sleep known as the Hypnagogic State and the Hypnopompic State.  This information helps to set a good foundation as you will begin to understand the optimum times during your sleep cycle in which to help trigger lucidity within a dream. 

Most lucid dreamers find they will naturally wake up for about 5 to 10 minutes just before their final REM cycle and when they go back to sleep, they usually go lucid.  You can experiment with this by setting your alarm to wake yourself up earlier than normal, then go back to sleep again. This is known as the ‘wake back to bed’ technique (WBTB) and has a high success rate among lucid dreamers! 

2. Aim for 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night

Look at ways to improve your sleep hygiene and get between 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night. This will mean ensuring your bedtime routine is really up to scratch.

If you're trying to learn how to sleep better there are many ways to do so. However, absolute musts are not having electronics in bed and avoiding caffeine, sleeping pills, and alcohol before bed too. 

Be mindful of your sleeping environment by creating an optimum space for sleep and dreaming in your bedroom. In other words, declutter your room!  

Basically, if the objects in your bedroom have nothing to do with sleep, dreaming, or sex, then put them in another room. Let your bedroom be your dreaming sanctuary and remember that according to feng shui, it's the one place you should never hang a mirror in your home.

3. Begin to embrace self-awareness by observing, studying, and analyzing your day-to-day environments

Begin to embrace self-awareness by observing, studying, and analyzing your day-to-day environments. This can help you create a mental habit of reality checking. 

By implementing more awareness in your daily life, you will soon find that this carries through in your dream realms and lucidity within a dream is more likely to happen. 

Set goals, intents, mantras before sleep. Perhaps it is to find your hands in your dreams, or a doorway. Perhaps it can simply be:  ‘I will go lucid in my dreams.

4. Write down your dreams in a daily dream journal

Begin to write down your dreams in a daily dream journal. This is the most important foundation for the practice of lucid dreaming. The more you record yours, the more you improve your dream memory recall and trigger more.

It also creates an overview of your dreaming themes, understand the meaning of dreams, and helps you connect the dots of what is going on in your unconscious realms. 

It helps you see clearly the different styles you experience and helps you work with various dream symbols, which can make great triggers for going lucid in a dream.

5. Incorporate dream-enhancing herbs into your bedtime routine

There are many dream herbs that can help bring about lucid dreaming.  They are known as oneirogens. The word oneirons comes from the Greek 'oneiros', meaning dream, and 'gen', which means create. 

Making these herbs into a sleep tea and consuming them in a bedtime ritual not only prepares your mind for dreamtime, the herbs themselves help activate more vivid dreaming and increase the potential of lucid dreaming.