Lucid dreaming — becoming aware that you are dreaming while the dream is still going on, and then taking the controls — is an acquirable skill. It is not a talent you either have or don’t. This guide collects everything that has actually worked for me over twenty-odd years of dream work, along with the traditional and scientific background that makes sense of it.

If you want the short version: sleep long enough, keep a dream journal, learn your dream signs, run reality checks during the day, and decide in advance what you’ll do once you wake up inside a dream. Everything below is an expansion of those five things. If you want to start tonight, skip to the quick-start section near the end.

A Short History of Lucid Dreaming

The practice is far older than its recent surge in popularity suggests. As far back in recorded history as we can go, we find discussions of the dream state as a place to receive prophecy, perform divination, and diagnose illness. A letter by St. Augustine of Hippo dated to 415 AD refers to the lucid dream state. In the 8th century, Bonpo practitioners in Tibet were already practicing Dream Yoga, a discipline aimed at full waking consciousness within the dream — approached through meditations performed as the practitioner falls asleep. In that tradition it is believed one can process karma in the dream state, and that working with lucid dreaming while alive makes the transition after death far easier.

Elsewhere, the route was botanical rather than meditative. In much of Africa it is common to work with dreaming herbs such as Entada rheedii and Uvuma-omhlope, both to bring on sleep and to enter the lucid space. Most African dream herbs are specifically linked to prophecy and communication with ancestors, and from working with many of them I do get a distinct sense of entering very deep states and communicating with beings outside myself. In Central and South America, the path ran through herbs like Calea zacatechichi.

The Western scientific account is much more recent. Lucid dreaming entered the cultural consciousness largely through Celia Green’s 1968 study Lucid Dreams, which analyzed their characteristics and concluded they were most likely associated with REM sleep. Through the 1970s, researchers worked on influencing lucidity in the lab, using alarm bells and eye-lights to nudge sleeping subjects toward awareness — and concluded that such techniques genuinely could facilitate lucid dreams.

Start With Belief and Motivation

Believing you can dream lucidly is probably the most important first step. Many people don’t put much stock in their dreams, don’t remember them well as a result, and never realize lucid dreaming is even a possibility. To have lucid dreams you must treat it as a natural ability you can develop; the rest follows from that confidence.

It also helps to ask why you want this. Examining your motivations surfaces any ambivalence you may have, either about your ability or about what you’d actually do once you got there. Cultivating greater mindfulness during waking hours matters for the same reason: increasing conscious awareness while awake has a carry-over effect into dreams. Have you ever had a day you couldn’t remember afterward? Meditating even fifteen minutes a day breaks that autopilot habit, and quiets the inner commentary most of us have running constantly. Quieting those inner voices at night also helps you fall asleep faster — and if you can hold a relaxed focus as you drift off, you may transition directly into a lucid dream.

Step 1: Get a Full Night’s Sleep

This is the single most important key, and the one people skip. Plan for at least a solid eight hours of undisturbed sleep; longer if you can. Lucid dreams are far more likely after six or seven hours have already passed, because REM periods lengthen during the later hours of sleep. The longer you sleep, the more dreaming there is to become lucid inside of.

Try to go to bed when you are mildly tired rather than completely exhausted. Exhaustion buys you depth of sleep at the cost of the light, REM-rich sleep where lucidity lives.

Step 2: Keep a Dream Journal

Next to your bed, keep a notebook and a pencil. Whenever you wake, record everything you can remember about the dream you were just having. Your ability to remember dreams behaves exactly like a muscle: at first you may catch only fragments, but with practice you will recall more and more.

Don’t get trapped trying to record the dream chronologically. Write down as much as you can in whatever order it arrives, then make sense of it afterward. A few refinements that have helped me:

• Write on the right-hand page only, leaving the left blank for details you remember later, plus sketches and diagrams.
• Record the conditions, not just the dream — which dreaming herbs you took (if any), your state of mind, what you ate and when, how warm or loud the room was. These reveal what actually induces vivid dreaming for you.
• Note anything that couldn’t happen in waking life. Those are the cues you’ll later use to trigger lucidity.

If nothing else, the simple act of keeping a journal has been shown to increase dream frequency. There is no shortcut to the recall and familiarity a journal gives you. For more on the practice, see my notes on keeping a dream journal.

How to Remember More on Waking

When you first wake, try to do it motionlessly — without opening your eyes or letting your thoughts drift toward the day ahead. Begin recalling immediately. If you remember only a fragment, that was probably the last scene before waking, and you can often recover more by working backward from it: ask yourself how you got to that place, or where a particular object came from.

Cycling through your sleeping positions helps too; you are more likely to remember a portion of a dream while lying in the position you were in when you dreamt it. And don’t be discouraged by a blank. I have often woken with one or two scenes only to find that the act of writing them down unlocked far more. A “dream checklist” of people and places you might have dreamt about can also prompt recall.

Step 3: Learn Your Dream Signs

Dream signs are the people, objects, settings or scenarios that recur in your dreams. They are the single most reliable doorway into lucidity, and your journal is what reveals them.

For me, flying — Superman style — has been a recurring theme, as has shooting or being shot. Both are powerful signs precisely because they never happen in my waking life. When I realize I’m flying, it often spontaneously triggers lucidity, leaving me free to keep flying while fully awake inside the dream. Amusingly, the moment I become lucid I often get worse at flying: I start losing altitude, trying to work out how to fly rather than simply flying. As The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy puts it, the trick to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss — distraction at the crucial moment is what keeps you up.

Noting dream signs in your journal lodges them in your subconscious. Eventually you’ll meet one inside a dream, think to run a reality check, and become lucid. Keep tracking them even after you’re dreaming lucidly regularly, because dream signs change over time.

Step 4: Test Reality

We mostly dream about the previous day’s events, so the way to improve your odds of realizing you’re dreaming is to build the habit while awake. A few times an hour, stop and genuinely ask: Am I dreaming? Then look around and check whether your surroundings are logical. Ask how you got here and where you’re going.

The check itself matters less than doing it sincerely. These are the ones that work best for me:

• Read text twice. Find something short, read it, look away, read it again. In dreams the text usually changes on the second pass — sometimes into something resembling hieroglyphs. If it changes, you are definitely dreaming.
• Check a clock or phone. Look at the time, wait a few seconds, look again. In dreams the time shifts wildly or reads as nonsense — I’ve looked at my phone and seen 32:87 — or simply disagrees with how late it appears to be in the dream.
• Flip a light switch. It is surprisingly hard to change lighting in a dream. In mine, switches never work; to turn a light on or off I have to think it. Flip a real switch during the day and really check the result.
• Try to fly. Not as a thought — actually try, seriously, to leave the ground. If it works, you’re dreaming.
• Jump. A small hop. Anything unusual about the height, duration or feel of it is a signal.
• Look at your reflection. Check a mirror for anything unusual or out of place.

You can also plant explicit triggers tied to your dream signs. I have a small sign on my studio mixing console that has been there for years: “If I see flashing lights of any kind, I’ll know I’m dreaming.” The same works for any recurring sign — if buses show up in your dreams, tell yourself that whenever you see a bus, you’re dreaming. I lost count of how many times I told myself “if I’m flying, I’ll know I’m dreaming,” only to realize mid-flight that I was.

Step 5: Have a Plan

This is the step I learned the hard way. Write down what you want to do once you break through, in as much sensory detail as you can — what you’ll see, hear, feel, smell and taste. Revise it periodically as you go.

My own first lucid dream is the cautionary tale. I was dreaming I was at work when a coworker touched her face and molded it like clay. At that instant I realized I was dreaming — and I was so excited that all I managed to do was jump very high into the air before waking up. I had done everything right except decide in advance what I actually wanted. In my excitement at becoming lucid, I excited myself straight out of sleep.

A clear goal also bolsters motivation and makes the dream easier to steer. Start modest: interact with objects, change small things like colors or gravity. As your confidence grows, plan bigger scenarios — the anticipation itself keeps you focused.

Step 6: Visualize and Set an Intention

Every night as you lie in bed, visualize yourself running a reality check and realizing you’re dreaming. Tell yourself you will wake inside the dream and take control, and rehearse your planned dream so you’re ready when it happens.

In honesty, pure intention-setting has never done much for me personally — I’ve tried telling myself I’m going to dream without noticing much change in frequency or intensity. But it demonstrably works for a great many people, so it’s worth your own experiment. Make it the last thought in your mind before sleep.

The Named Techniques

Lucid dreams split into two categories, and most named methods target one or the other. The difference is whether you pass through dreamless sleep before becoming lucid.

• DILD — Dream Induced Lucid Dream. You fall asleep normally, and become lucid later from inside a dream, usually via a dream sign or reality check.
• WILD — Wake Induced Lucid Dream. You pass directly from waking into dreaming without losing awareness, and are lucid from the very beginning.

MILD (Mnemonically Induced Lucid Dreaming), developed by Dr. Stephen LaBerge, combines reality checks with a nightly affirmation or visualization that you will have a lucid dream. As you fall asleep, hold the idea of becoming lucid continuously, and make “I will have a lucid dream tonight” your final thought.

EILD (Externally Induced Lucid Dreaming) uses an outside cue — most famously a dream machine emitting soft lights or sounds that bleed into the dream and signal you that you’re dreaming.

WILD techniques vary by person, but nearly all share a structure: set an alarm to wake during the night or early morning, then go back to sleep while deliberately keeping your mind conscious as your body drifts off. In practice, pay attention to the abstract shapes and images that appear behind your eyelids as you fall asleep. Don’t try to control them — just watch. Some people step straight into a lucid dream this way. It’s especially effective when you’re returning to bed after getting up briefly in the night, because you re-enter the dream state much faster.

Timing: The Twilight State and Your REM Cycle

Lucid dreams typically occur when one hemisphere is in a Delta (deep sleep) state while the other is in Theta, where vivid imagery happens. That combination shows up most often in the “twilight” state — just as you’re drifting off, or as you’re surfacing in the morning. For me the morning twilight is by far the most productive window.

You can engineer that window. REM periods recur roughly every 90 minutes, so setting an alarm 4.5, 6 or 7.5 hours into sleep tends to land you at or just after a REM period — which matters because the brain erases memories of dreams during the stages between REM. Even though I haven’t woken to an alarm in years, I’ll deliberately set one for about five hours in when I’m working on lucidity, then drift in and out. That drifting is where the lucid dreams find me.

Tools: Machines and Binaural Beats

Most lucid dream machines are worn like a mask and emit lights and sounds at intervals, on the theory that you’ll perceive the stimulus inside the dream and recognize it. They work considerably better in combination with the psychological techniques above than on their own.

The best of them include sensors that detect REM onset and only fire then, which avoids breaking your sleep at useless moments. That’s also why fully assembled units get expensive; simple versions can be built at home cheaply, and kits are reasonable. The Nova Dreamer has been the most successful one for me — paired with that mixing-console sign, it has worked so consistently that it began to seem as though my mind knew the lights were coming before they did. That said, I’m a light sleeper, and plenty of people find these devices more annoying than useful. Your mileage will genuinely vary.

Binaural beats are auditory processing artifacts that stimulate the brain in specific ways; theta-range beats in particular seem to encourage sleep rich in lucid dreams. There are no solid scientific studies on their efficacy for lucidity yet, but the anecdotal reports are consistent and I’ve had excellent results with them — they reliably help me fall asleep and become lucid. Downloading a track geared toward lucid dreaming costs nothing to try.

Dream Herbs

Little do most dream explorers realize how long some plants have been used to induce lucidity. Broadly, the dreaming herbs fall into three groups: those that sharpen memory and cognition to improve recall, those that relax you into sleep, and those that increase REM frequency and make lucidity easier to reach.

• Calea zacatechichi is the best known, and the one that effectively taught me to lucid dream. Smoked and taken as a tea before bed, it produces a REM-heavy sleep that is easy to surface from — which is exactly why recall improves and lucidity becomes easier to hold.
• Uvuma-omhlope appears to do something different: deepening sleep while still allowing intensely vivid dreams.
• Entada rheedii, the African dream bean, has a long prophetic and ancestral tradition behind it.
• Celastrus paniculatus is traditionally used for mental enhancement rather than dreaming, but is frequently reported to increase lucid dreaming as a side effect.

Relatively little is known about the mechanisms of most of these plants, though research continues. Working with herbs is in no way required for lucid dreaming — but it can shorten the runway considerably, particularly at the beginning. You can browse the full Dreaming Herbs section for the rest.

How to Lucid Dream Tonight

Everything above is the durable foundation, and it typically takes a month or two to produce reliable lucidity. But if you’ve never had a lucid dream and simply want to try the experience soon, there is a faster path. It may not give you a long or easily controlled dream, but it can absolutely give you the experience.

1. Prime a reality check all day. Pick checking the time. From early in the day, keep making a mental note that you are going to check the time in your dream, more often as bedtime approaches. The earlier you start, the better it works.
2. Carry the intention into sleep. Take long, deep breaths and hold that single goal as you drift off. Repeat something like “I want to lucid dream tonight.”
3. Use the hypnagogic images. As you fall asleep, watch the abstract shapes behind your eyelids without trying to steer them. This is the WILD approach, and it works best when you’re going back to bed after briefly getting up in the night.
4. Consider a fast-acting dream herb. For a first-timer, Calea zacatechichi, Silene capensis and Entada rheedii produce the most dramatic and immediately noticeable effects. When I first became interested in lucid dreaming I bought some Calea extract, smoked it before bed having never done any dream work at all, and had my first lucid dream that morning — in complete control, remembering every detail.

For a slower but steadier lift, supplements such as celastrus seeds or blue vervain increase vivid dreaming and recall over time. Many of the other herbs on this site work gradually or subtly enough that only experienced dreamers notice them.

When You Wake Up Too Soon

Realizing you’ve become lucid is frequently enough to end the dream. This happens to everyone — my excitement has ejected me more times than I can count. Don’t take it as failure. As you drift back off, the dream often picks up where it left off, or you find yourself lucid the moment you fall asleep again.

When it does work, resist the urge to do everything at once. My longest and most vivid lucid dreams have always been the ones where I simply went with the flow of the dream rather than seizing it by the throat.

How long all this takes varies enormously. Some people become lucid within a night; others need months. People who already recall their dreams well get there faster. Recall, practice and motivation are the only truly essential techniques — everything else is optional tooling. If one approach isn’t working after a fair trial, drop it and try another. Stay focused, keep exploring, and enjoy it; lucidity tends to arrive not long after you stop straining for it.

Happy dreaming.
— Keith Cleversley

Still working out the basics? Start with what lucid dreaming is.