The method I found to work most consistent in getting to a lucid dream is to wear a wristwatch with a vibrating alarm (noisy alarm clock makes you too awake) and then set it to wake me after I've slept something like 4-5 hours. Then I'll be really tired and fall asleep again almost immediately, but when I'm falling asleep fast it's easier to notice and focus on hypnagogic patterns. Hypnagogic pattern are patterns of light you can see behind your eyelids as you fall asleep and then they become more and more focused until they turn into a dream. It's hard to keep the focus, but doing after waking up just slightly from a vibrating alarm clock and then not moving the body at all, makes it much easier as the patterns then come really fast and quickly turns into a dream and if you manage to keep the focus you basically just go from being awake and straight into a lucid dream. The problem is it fucks up sleep a bit, so should have a few hours extra to sleep in the morning.

This is 100% the most effective way to do it for anybody interested in trying. It doesn't even take all that much practice. I got it on my second attempt.

I'd disagree slightly about how awake you want to get though. Obviously don't turn on any lights or stand up. But force yourself to be awake for enough time to get your bearings or you are going to lose consciousness too early.

Oh man I had that for the first time a few months back when I couldn't sleep for like 50 hours or so and it freaked me out as someone who doesn't visualize

I used to lucid dream regularly (need to get back to it - it's a lot of fun). I used a reality check where I would try to (lightly) blow air through my nose when my hand was closing it off. If I could I was dreaming. I did this randomly during my waking hours every so often when I had some indication that something was different and I needed to test reality.

Whenever I would come semi-aware when I was dreaming I would do this reality check and realize I was lucid and could do what I want. The interesting part to me is that blowing air through my nose and hand twigged me to the fact that I was dreaming, but the technicolor mega-gorilla screaming at the sky and throwing laser bolts did not.

It's amazing how casual the weirdest things are in dreams. For example my wife had a dream where an old women was sitting on stairs, she folded herself, became a hand, which climbed the stairs and disappeared. And it was OK but just weird enough to remember.

I had chronic sleep paralysis for many years. One thing I eventually figured out is that I still had control over my breathing, and I could hyper-ventilate myself awake. Sleep pararalysis then stopped either because I aquired that skill or because I stopped eating gluten.

Huh I actually don't recall ever having control of my breathing actually. Can wiggle wiggle a few fingers/toes and muted scream and some eye control is all I got i think.

Most of the time when I'm dreaming it never even occurs to me that I might be in a dream until I wake up.

I have even had some cases where it did occur to me, and I started lucid dreaming (which was very cool), but then I reverted to my default this-must-be-real dreaming state. That was very weird.

I've only ever lucid dreamed under conditions of extreme stress, nightmares where am being chased by murders etc.

For example I had this dream where I was the guy who got killed in the last bit of The Ring (they think things are OK but Sadako comes for him anyway) and then I was able to lucid dream, control it and beat her up.

https://medium.com/luminasticity/beating-up-sadako-82c5fb3f0...

If you want to get better at recognizing dreams one way is practicing a few times a day to check "am I dreaming".

I usually become highly aware I’m dreaming when I’m able to kind of float around (not fly, more like low gravity mixed with a near-floor hovering) but the “wow” of it turns into “this is just reality, no big deal” so fast I never get a chance to try to consciously shape the dream.

I can relate heavily. The recurring ability to hover by kicking my legs around is profoundly liberating and a deeply familiar sensation at this point. Dreams feel like living a parallel life :)

The ability to levitate in dreams is very useful, because dreams typically are unable to make your legs actually move. Thus, the feeling of walking is not easily fantasized realistically, and immobility of the main character is not something that many the unpaid screenwriter will refuse to take lying down.

True! Life finds a way. I wonder whether real-life athletes etc. benefit from a more realistic dream legs simulation experience.

that sounds like a description of scuba diving to me, maybe worth a try if you haven’t

Don't you ever wake up in your dream? as in dream within a dream.

I would look at my hands in lucid dreams and they would appear in extreme detail, as if I could comprehend both its general form as well as every single grove in my fingerprints. I’m pretty sure I tried to turn them over and was able to see all around them.

One thing I find fascinating about dreaming is that it seems that the dream wants to prevent you from staying lucid. When I become aware that I am dreaming I “wake up” and start going about my day, only to realise I am still dreaming, at which point I “wake up” again, and this cycle continues. This is a perceptual barrier that can be broken through, at which point you instantly gain hyper awareness awareness and control over you dream.

> the dream wants to prevent you from staying lucid

What we consider waking life, reality, etc. is the same. The mechanism of the hypnosis is the constant identification with phenomena, which creates the sense of being a person, which is nothing more than a conceptual abstraction.

Can you please elaborate more, our provide some sources for further inquiry?

Recently I switched from taking a lions mane supplement in capsule form to mixing some powder into my morning tea, since I can get the powder for far less $$ and it's usda organic on top of it.

For some reason this has resulted in persistent lucid dreaming before waking up, daily, for over a month now. The capsules rarely caused this, but something about the tea seems to be affecting the bio-availability, or maybe the powder is just different.

Whatever the root cause, it's been quite fun. But a bit distracting as it makes completely waking up difficult, now that there's this incredible interactive mind-movie I'd rather continue playing vs. start my day...

It does seem like a state of mind worth exploring with some potentially huge utility if mastered. I can't produce such immersive and vivid visuals to navigate mental models in my regular conscious thinking. I'd much rather do the equivalent of lucid dreaming to navigate things like interplaying algorithms and data structures for example.

"Some powder"?

So... you either don't know what you're taking, or don't want to say in a public forum?

It was meant as a non-specific quantity appropriate for adding to tea, of the same material in powdered form.

No, they meant lion's mane in powder form. Cheaper to buy it in bulk.

Have you noticed any differences in your ability to form internal imagery while awake? There’s a post on Reddit where the subject appears to have had that ability affected by Lions Mane.

Not sure, got a link to the Reddit comment/thread?

I read a guide that suggested looking at your hands - that night I dreamt and recalled that and it worked. I guess most people do not see their own hands accurately while dreaming and it acts as a cue.

Just a little tangent!

My theory is that when the thinking mind acts on what is being seen, that is what triggers the awakening in the dream.

My thinking is not coherent enough while asleep to run all those experiments. A few times I've asked "am I dreaming?" in dreams, but following any step-by-step process after that thought is just not in the cards. My thought patters are just as disjointed as the scenery and events "inside".

It’s a first step for sure.

Look at the time or look at letters. They are all fractal gibberish if you look at them closely during dreaming.

But that might just be part of the dream.

I’ve more than once floated into letters that would reveal more and more shapes just like zooming animations of fractals. But it hasn’t caused me to realize it was a dream, let alone take control of it.

Lots of crazy and spacey things happens in dreams, that you just accept.

Light switches and steering wheels never work properly in my dreams. I have to concentrate really hard to get things to follow the rules. Then I wake up.

Nope, nope, nope. Light switches never work properly in my own dreams either, but I find that testing the lights or just even noticing they aren't working is a guaranteed one-way trip to night terror land, even in adulthood. Not even realizing I'm dreaming is enough to stop it at that point.

Whenever my wonderful dog from 30 years ago appears in a dream, I start to do the math and realize that she would now be 41. And then I wake up.

The technique a few people mentioned of looking at words or writing and then looking away and looking back is pretty effective for me. You would have to have some reason to suspect you were dreaming first.

I can do it, I first figured it out when I was 6 or 7, but why? Might be better to just get some sleep.

Just a few nights I had such happen during a dream in which I was playing cards with three or for opponents. I was counting the cards played, and I realized that I had played a card that I had not been dealt. Refusing to believe that I was cheating, I deduced that I were dreaming and awoke at once. But I cannot explain the stack of chips that I found on my night table.

Had similar things happen but usually when I was drinking, not dreaming.

Another way to tell is to try to read things or look at a clock/numbers in your dream. Often time the information will not make sense, and will change if you look away and back.

I've done this myself once or twice in a dream and I actually was able to tell I was dreaming but the shock of my realization woke me up.

> Often time the information will not make sense, and will change if you look away and back.

Yeah, I've done that a few times and it's been reliable for me.

One time I remember, I was absolutely sure I was awake, so I did the "reading text" test, I read something, looked at something else, then read the thing again, they went "Wait, those aren't the same words. Ah, crap."

I've had dreams where I found myself traveling and was presented with maps (in one my car had a HUD where I saw the map on the windshield as I was driving) that seemed to be quite accurate when I recalled them after waking. Even freeway signs with names of towns, roads and freeway numbers that matched reality.

Unlike most I can see things in great detail, including text in my dreams. Consistency in time is absolute mess, for sure, but then again, I don't find this odd to begin with. In fact I kind of expect this. As in I realize I'm dreaming, and yet I don't.

The method that works most reliably that no one talks about is to pinch your nose closed and try to inhale through it. If you’re dreaming, you can still inhale through a pinched nose. Always a useful check to perform before hurling yourself off a cliff to see what it feels like.

I've tried that but am always foiled; the bike falls over or I'm distracted at the last minute by something else within the dream. Its like the mind is creating excuses not to wake up.

I am almost constantly trying telekinesis. If it works, I'm dreaming. It not, I'm here. It's a fun game to play during the day to day as well.