Welcome (potential) lucid dreamer, meditator, or otherwise!

• If you're interested in lucid dreaming, but don't know what it is or how to do it, look at the practice guides chapters. "Lucid Dreaming Basics" is a good place to start.
• If you want to contribute to this book, see the "Contributing" section below on how to do that.

This book is a heavy work in progress. Feel free to add new guides haphazardly if you feel the book needs the subject and doesn't have it yet, other contributors will clean them up and organize them.

• Guides on lucid dreaming and related topics.
• Structured guides on various lucid dreaming techniques.

• A metaphysical focus. Metaphysical articles and guides are allowed but should be kept separated from the other articles. Different people have different believes, and this book should be open to all believes.
• Devices, supplements or other paid books. No advertising.

• Lucid Dreaming Subreddit
• Lucid Dream Hub
• DreamViews Forum & Guides

You can submit contributions to this book at the GitHub repository for it. There's various ways you can contribute new chapters.

This book is created using mdBook, and is written in the "Markdown" format. If you're familiar with Reddit's comment and post formatting you'll feel right at home.

Don't forget to read the style guide in the repository's README.md before writing.

Just create an issue with the title "New Chapter: [Title]", starting with the chapter you want it to be added to, followed by the text you want in it. A contributor will add it for you. This is the easiest but least flexible way to contribute.

The Markdown syntax used on GitHub mostly matches the syntax used by mdBook.

Contributions can be done using "Pull Requests", see the GitHub documentation on pull requests on how to contribute.

You can use the GitHub site for adding and editing files, it has a pretty good markdown preview. You can also use your own Git client to download the files and edit them on your own computer. (For example, GitKraken, SourceTree, or GitHub for Windows)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This is a collection of guides for various techniques for inducing and improving lucid dreams, and to work with other aspects of your mind.

Dream recall techniques are used to increase how often you remember your dreams, and how much you remember from them.

The staple of every lucid dreaming diet! Dream journals are a very reliable technique for drastically improving your recall. Even if you barely ever remember your dreams this will help you a lot.

The easiest moment to remember your dreams is in the morning right after waking up. When you wake up, the first thing you should do is stay in bed, and try your best possible to remember the dream you just had. Spend some time on this, it's alright if it takes a while, and it's alright if you can't manage to remember it.

Now if you remembered a dream, write it down somewhere. Write as many details as you can remember. The more details you write, the more you'll be able to remember this dream in the future, and the more you'll remember of dreams after this. As you're writing, you might be remembering even more, so keep writing all of that down. If you can't remember anything, just write down "No dream recalled". Just make sure you write something every single day, this will keep your journal as being important in your mind.

Doing this will signal to your mind that dream recall is important to you. Over time you'll find it easier and easier to remember dreams.

Lucidity techniques are techniques that help you gain (or maintain) lucidity in dreams. These techniques are used to induce lucid dreams.

Lucid dreaming as its very basic form is being aware that you're dreaming. This is also called being "lucid". If this sounds completely normal to you, you may be someone who naturally lucid dreams. Most people don't naturally do this however, and have to train themselves to become lucid in dreams. The term is also used as an umbrella term for actually making use of this lucidity. Being lucid gives you a lot of power over the dream world itself, you can do anything you want in a dream.

If you've never heard of this before, this may sound like a concept completely foreign to you, or even like pseudoscience paranormal gobbledygook. Lucid dreaming however is widely acknowledged as a real thing, even in psychology. Everyone can learn to lucid dream and there's nothing paranormal about it. While for some people it can be a jumping board into paranormal experiences, this book will not go into that or comment on the validity of it. If you're interested in these things that's alright, you do you, this book just won't help you with that beyond lucid dreaming itself.

It's technically all imagined yes, but that doesn't mean it's not real to your mind. Lucid dreams can feel incredibly real, or even hyper-real as your senses in dreams are not filtered interpretations of your real life sensory organs, but direct feeds from the dream world. People who wear glasses generally don't need them in dreams.

This is not to say that dreams are indistinguishable from real life, in fact there's a lot of things that are very different. These are just part of the experience, and allow you to change the world around you, your own appearance, travel to different locations quickly, or do various other interesting things you can't do in real life. Opening a door in a dream for example might lead nowhere, or somewhere completely unexpected.

Yes you do! Everyone has dreams every night, the hard part is remembering them. But you can train this!

Nope! Dreaming happens during REM sleep, which isn't meant to give you rest. You can spend every single dream completely lucid and not miss out on any rest at all. As well while lucid dreaming you may become more aware of how sleep works and how to better plan in your sleep to be more rested overall.

Dream-Initiated lucid dreaming techniques (also called DILD), are techniques where you become lucid at the start of or during the dream.

So, how do you know you're in a dream? Easy, you check if you are!

Reality checks are the bread and butter of lucid dreaming. The concept is simple, when you're not sure if you're dreaming or not, you check! You might have however seen a problem with this, you don't just naturally tend to ask yourself if you're dreaming while in a dream. We'll get back to this in a bit but first...

A reality check is really simple. It's just a few steps.

• Ask yourself "Am I dreaming?". Don't ask it for the sake of it. You should really be doubting your reality. Even if you did a check just before, you always might be in a dream.
• Look around you, does anything look weird. If so, inspect it.
• Ask yourself "How did I get here", what did you do 5 minutes ago, how did you get to the location you currently are? Time often works differently in dreams, see if you can recognize a time skip, or if you can't remember how you got there.
• Perform the reality check itself, here you perform an action that should tell you for sure that you're dreaming. In this example we're using the classic "Look at your hands" check.
  • Look at your palms
  • Check if they look as they normally do, how many fingers do you have, don't yet assume what the correct amount should be.
• Say to yourself "Next time I am dreaming, I will reality check and realize I'm dreaming.". This will incubate the idea of doing reality checks in your mind and help bring that into your dreams.
• Re-try your reality check a few times and keep saying that to yourself every time.

When you go to sleep, you should also repeat "Next time I am dreaming, I will reality check and realize I'm dreaming." to yourself as you're falling asleep. The reality check example given is a classic and simple one, but there's various others you can do.

• Keeping your nose plugged/blocked and trying to breathe.
• Trying to push your thumb through your palm.
• Paying attention to gravity, see if it's harder or easier to walk than it should be.
• Try to change something in your potential dream.
• Try light switches, they don't always work right in dreams.
• Read some text, see if it's hard to read or doesn't make any sense. Look away and back and again and see if it changed.

In total doing a check shouldn't take you too long and it won't be interrupting to your overall day. You can do as many checks as you want and combine different ones, be creative!

Well, one thing that will help is the mantra above, repeating to yourself that you will be doing a check. But there's one important key thing to keep in mind when you start lucid dreaming.

You should never be sure you're not dreaming, always assume you might be no matter what. A reality check can't prove that you are in reality, it can only prove that you're not.

This is so incredibly key I can't make it bold enough text. You should always assume you might be dreaming, it is always a possibility. Living with this doubt may sound scary, but it isn't! Doubting your surroundings at all times makes you more aware of what's happening around you, and doesn't take away from the experiences you have while awake. Having this constant doubt about being awake is the first step to realizing that you're dreaming in a dream, but again we'll get back to that in a bit.

Before we move on I should make a quick mention, if you doubting your reality starts impacting your life in serious negative ways, you need to take a step back and re-evaluate if this is the right path for you. Some people suffer from mental disorders that make distinguishing between reality and non-reality (hallucinations, dreams, etc.) extremely hard and if you feel like you are experiencing that you should stop right then and contact a therapist. Prioritize your mental wellbeing over lucid dreaming.

Sure! A few more detailed tricks will be mentioned later in this guide but here's a few simple tricks you can make use of.

• Read back your dream journal (we'll get to what that is later), and see if you have any recurring dream signs that should help you recognize it's a dream.
• Perform a reality check whenever something common occurs that also happens in your dreams.
• Perform a reality check whenever you go through a door.

Basically, the trick here is to create triggers that will cause you to reality check. You can also meditate to incubate these triggers into your dreams. (More on meditation and incubation later in this guide)

Yes! Eventually. It's going to take time, takes a different amount for everyone. Some take a few days, others a few months. The key is persistence and staying positive. Say to yourself every night before sleeping that you will have a lucid dream. Really believe it, even if you've been going for weeks without success.

This technique is called "DILD" for Dream-Initiated Lucid Dream. Up next in this guide you'll read about another technique called "MILD" that will make it easier to become lucid as well. Both of these techniques benefit from persistence and time, it will become easier over time to become lucid.

Eventually, you'll get a successes. You'll start being more aware in dreams, thinking more critically. You start noticing things are weird, but perhaps not quite realizing yet. And one day, you'll suddenly be standing there, looking at your hands having 6 fingers.

An extra technique you could make use of to remember your reality checks is called "Prospective Memory", there's no guide on this currently in this book. Instead you could read this one.

The MILD technique is very beginner-friendly, and has been very effective overall, regardless of experience.

MILD works by teaching your mind what should be happening in a dream, and affirming to yourself that you will lucid dream. This way you're training your mind to lucid dream without actually having to be in a lucid dream yet to do it.

With this technique it's important to do it every day. Persistence and consistency are the key to successful MILD. If you wake up in the morning after having done MILD and haven't gotten a lucid dream, it just means you've worked further towards one. Every night trains your mind a bit more and eventually you'll start to see results.

Every evening, put some time apart right before sleep to do MILD. You need at least 5 minutes, but for better results do roughly 10 to 20 minutes. Before you start, put your worries and thoughts about the next day away and clear your mind. Perhaps write them in your dream journal if you're worried about forgetting something. You're about to get some sleep, so you can't really do much with those worries anyways, set them to the side and relax.

If you fall asleep easily (within 10 minutes), you should start MILD sitting comfortably on your bed for roughly 5 minutes before laying down. You should be keeping your focus on MILD for at least 5 minutes, so if you fall asleep easily, laying down will make this harder for you. If you're not someone who falls asleep within 10 minutes, just lay down from the start. After those 5 minutes are over you should continue, but make less of an effort to keep focus. At that point you should start falling asleep and trying to keep your focus on it will keep you awake.

So, as you sit or lay down, start thinking about lucid dreaming. Imagine your last dream in as much detail as possible. Imagine becoming and staying lucid. Imagine exploring the dream, and what you would do when lucid. Imagine completing the goals you have for lucid dreaming. Believe that in a few minutes, this is exactly what will happen to you. Mix it up a bit what you're imagining every night, use different dreams, or entirely invent a dream of your own.

When the 5 minutes are over, try to continue, but let your mind drift. At this point you're trying to fall asleep. By the time you fall asleep you'll have ingrained the idea of lucid dreaming further into your mind. If you're someone who wakes up naturally during the night, or because of an alarm for another technique, you can also do MILD the next time you fall asleep. It will help, but all you need to keep improving is doing it once every night.

You can also boost your MILD successfulness by adding a mantra to it, or after it when you're trying to fall asleep. A mantra is simply something you repeat to yourself in your mind. Some good mantras are...

• I'm dreaming
• This is dream
• I will wake up in a dream
• I'll be dreaming soon
• I will have lucid dreams tonight

A thing to keep in mind with mantras is that the mind ignores negation in mantras. Avoid words like "not". "I will not fail to have a lucid dream" will become "I will fail to have a lucid dream" to your mind.

MILD by itself is very effective, but it also benefits from combining it with other techniques. All-Day-Awareness, Reality Checking, and Wakeup-Back-To-Bed all give you an added bonus in effectiveness and can be easily combined with MILD.

• Naiya's Simple MILD Technique Guide

Barriers is a technique to induce lucid dreams by creating barriers you can only pass through if you're lucid. This can be any kind of barrier, the technique works by preventing you from moving forward until you're lucid, and by triggering lucidity simply with the existence of the barrier. Eventually, because of the barriers, you'll do a reality check, feel or notice that something is wrong, or perhaps even notice the barriers themselves.

The barriers technique has to be done from inside a lucid dream. If you are not capable of lucid dreaming yet, take a look at other techniques that don't need to be done from inside a dream.

Once you are in a lucid dream, you're going to want to go (Preferably) to your bedroom, or to any place of your choice where you'd like to setup a spawning point.

Yes, either your bed or a place of your choice, when setting up the barriers, you will spawn there every dream, it will make sense as you continue reading the guide.

Now that you have chosen the place where you'd like to spawn, you need to demark the spawning zone in some way, and in this example we're gonna use "magical auras" to demark the spawning zone.

Wave your hands around as if you were going to do some magic, like energy manipulation, focus this energy and send it towards your spawn point as it slowly marks the contours of the spawn zone you wish. You should start to see a magical aura go out from your hand, and it will slowly trace the contours of your spawn point.

At the same time this happens, set up the following rules, either by thinking them, saying them out loud, or maybe even chanting it:

• "From now on, I will spawn in (Your place of choosing) in every single one of my future dreams."
• "I cannot go through the barriers, so long as I am not lucid."
• "If I am out of the barriers, I am already lucid."

That is about it, that's the general idea on how you should proceed for it, but of course you can get creative and use something else instead of "magical auras" or perhaps even differently worded rules.

And now your barriers are done! Congrats! But you're still not quite there just yet...

Now that you have setup your barriers, you'll need to make them persistent, so that it actually carries out to your future dreams.

Doing so is fairly simple and may take anywhere from a day to a few days.

You'll need to meditate and visualize those barriers you've just made. Visualize possible scenarios about it might play out in your next dream.

Start your meditation, when you feel like it, start visualizing the beginning of a dream, you'll start at your spawn zone, still not lucid and unaware that this is a dream. However because of the rules you've just set, you'll be stuck in this spawn zone, so you might try to get out or wonder why you cannot get out, and that's the thing, that is the trigger for lucidity.

You will extremely likely start to ask yourself legitimate questions about why this is happening, may it be a dream? You will reality check at this point or just know you're dreaming. Tada!

Now you are able to go through the barriers and get out of the spawn point because you are lucid now!

That's it! The barriers have now carried over to your future dreams, and now you will be getting lucid every dream! You'll spawn at your spawn point, you will be stuck in this spawn point as the barriers do not let you through. You'll wonder why this happens and suspect this is a dream, thus doing a reality check, and becoming lucid!

Alright, it isn't that easy, you still have to maintain your barriers from time to time because they will slowly fade out eventually, leaving you with normal dreams again.

Once a week, simply go back to your spawn point and restrengthen your barriers by giving it some more energy, you can give some of your energy just like in the barrier induction part, or you can do something else that makes sense to you, get creative!

If your barriers start to fade, depending on the severity, you can meditate and visualize it to restrengthen it a little bit, go into a lucid dream, and restrenghten it from there. Or if it's too severe then I'm afraid you'll have to go back to setting up a barrier, pay attention next time!

Wake-Initiated lucid dreaming techniques (also called WILD), are techniques where you maintain your conscious awareness while falling asleep, starting the dream lucid.

Dissociation is the practice of "letting go" of your physical body, thoughts & other senses. Doing so can result in much more relaxed and focused meditation, much better visualization, along with easier dream induction via WILD or similar means.

You can dissociate pretty much any time you'd like, provided you are in a comfortable position and with minimal or no outside disturbances (Auditory, etc...), it is preferable to keep your eyes closed while dissociating.

For all of these methods, start by going into a comfortable position (If you're unsure, just do the corpse position, lie on your back, arms lying down on the sides, no crossing of the legs). Then close your eyes and begin some meditation at first, simply focus on your breathing for a few minutes.

When you feel relaxed, begin to slowly ignore your body in an incremental manner, first your toes, then feet, legs, hands, arms, chest, torso and finally head. If you keep focus on your breathing at all times, you'll find that it becomes much easier to dissociate.

If on purpose ignoring a certain part of your body doesn't make sense, that's alright. Not everyone can do that easily. Try one of the following two alternatives instead.

If dissociating through simply ignoring your body doesn't quite do the trick or takes a long time, you can try this method instead which may provide better results.

When you feel relaxed, begin to focus on your body (Stay aware of your breathing nonetheless) and "amplify" the feeling of your body, feel absolutely everything of your body, do that for a few minutes. Then just suddenly ignore your body, shift your focus to solely your breathing only and dissociation will carry out very fast.

When you feel relaxed, begin to focus on your body (Stay aware of your breathing nonetheless) and "amplify" the feeling of your body, feel absolutely everything of your body, do that for a few minutes. Then pretend that this body is in fact your new body, a body that is different from the real physical one and continue amplifying it as long as you wish, the more you do it, the more dissociation.

The most straightforward way to create the feeling of that body being different is to, well, feel it. Convince yourself that this new body you're in isn't the one you had just a few minutes ago. For possibly more effective dissociation, create the illusion that your new body has more features (e.g different body shape, wings, etc...)

Dissociation from your thoughts is rather easy, this is just simple meditation in the end. Focus on your breathing, keep track whenever your breathe in or out. You cannot block thoughts or emotions, but doing so will put them in the background, you acknowledge them, but you let them pass, you don't get stuck on a specific thought.

Done in conjunction of physical body dissociation, this is possibly the most powerful form of dissociation, it will very quickly lead to very vivid hypnagogia and possibly dreams.

This is going to sound quite weird, but in a nutshell what you want to do is to "visualize visualization" and you want to keep going down this path as much as you can. So in the end you may "visualize visualizing visualization" and so on... Don't worry too much about what this means or the details, just try to do whatever feels right.

What you can do for extra focus & relaxedness, you can perform the 4-7-8 breathing technique which is explained by this awesome man!

It helps you focus, it helps you relax, it helps you sleep faster, it relieves anxiety and you can get quite euphoric from it.

This is a simple technique that gives you a significant boost to your lucidity. It is also generally considered a requirement for WILD techniques during the night, as you want to be close to REM to do WILD.

To do WBTB, you wake up 4-5 hours after you've gone to sleep. Then, you spend a brief amount of time raising your awareness, preferably without making yourself more awake overall. Go to the bathroom, get a glass of water, or spend a few minutes meditating.

The duration you're awake depends on what you want to do and what works for you, it can be anything from a few seconds to half an hour.

These are various structured guides aimed at giving you a starting off point, instead of having to dive head-first into the big list of techniques.

So you're interested in lucid dreaming, great! Welcome to the start of your journey into entirely different worlds.

If you don't know what lucid dreaming is, first read the chapter What is Lucid Dreaming. That will give you a good introduction.

This guide will explain the basics of lucid dreaming, basic terminology, and how to get yourself started with the most basic of lucid dreaming techniques, "reality checks". From there it will guide you into what to try next in your lucid dreams, the basics of dream control, and what other lucid dreaming techniques to try. This guide is ordered in sequence of what information will be most relevant to you at your level of understanding after reading the previous chapter, but it can be read in any order you want.

Woah there, calm yourself down a bit. Lucid dreaming certainly is very appealing, and a great experience, but rushing to it won't work. There is no fastest way or quick easy way to reach a lucid dream, it takes time and persistence, and figuring out what works for you. (No matter how much some supplement sellers would like to convince you otherwise)

If you're not feeling comfortable in your own body, or are suffering from problems in your life, you may feel like you absolutely need to learn this. This however will work against you. Take a step back, figure out your life, talk to a therapist. Escaping into a lucid dream won't solve any problems for you, no matter how much it sounds like a panacea.

You need to approach lucid dreaming with patience. It's likely that it's going to take some time before you get into a lucid dream where you can actually do the things you want to do. Enjoy the journey. Enjoy the benefits you get from all the techniques that help you achieve lucid dreams. Enjoy the weird experiences you get that aren't lucid dreams but still something different, something unique.

Take your time, enjoy the small victories and benefits, and before you know it you're suddenly standing in your own personal world, able to do whatever you want.

To learn to lucid dream you need to work on two fronts, recall and lucidity. Both of these have well known techniques you can start out with.

A key thing to remember here is persistence. Learning to lucid dream takes time, not just a few days, but likely a few weeks, or in some cases months. It's important that you stay persistent, any technique is going to work eventually.

Starting out with recall, you may not be remembering any dreams at all. This is normal as you've not trained your mind yet that dreams are important to you and that you want to remember them.

Starting out, it's good to start keeping a Dream Journal. This is a technique almost every lucid dreamer uses to increase their recall.

Lucidity is the tricky part. A good place to start is the bread and butter of lucid dreaming, Reality Checks.

As well it's a good idea to practice MILD. This technique has shown to be very effective, especially for new people in comparison to other techniques.

You will also most likely want to make use of Wake up, Back to Bed to boost your lucidity. This technique significantly increases your chances of lucid dreaming on the night you do it.

These techniques are a good place to start. Remember that persistence is key here, don't fall into the trap of technique switching. Pick a technique (or two, if you can combine them) and stick with it every single day and night.

You may have heard about Wake-Initiated techniques as well. Wake-Initiated techniques have a tendency to be extremely hard to learn, unless you already have significant previous meditation experience. It is not advised to start there as a beginner.

So you've suddenly realized you're in a lucid dream, what next? You'll likely be very excited, the world around you may suddenly become a lot more vivid. Some however, then might wake up.

A common theory is that the excitement is what wakes you up, but this doesn't seem to line up with the experiences of regular lucid dreamers. Rather, it seems that this theory has come from that beginner lucid dreamers are all the more excited when they get their first lucid dream. Rather, it's just more likely to become lucid at the end of the dream, while you're already about to wake up. As a result when you're starting it's likely that this is where you realize it's a dream.

If this happens to you (it may not), don't worry about it! You just managed to get another step closer to your goals and whatever you're doing is working! Just keep going, eventually you'll get longer lucid dreams!

What also may happen is that you don't remember all (or any of) the things you wanted to do when lucid dreaming. This is normal as well, and it can really suck, but once again remember that this is still a success! You've managed to stick in the dream, that's great! Eventually you'll get more aware of what you're doing. What also will help is using incubation to set a goal of what you'll be doing in the lucid dream. More on that later in this guide.

Regardless of what happened, if you made it to this step you've done great! You've set the first steps into your lucid dreaming adventure. If you haven't yet, that's alright. Just keep trying!