Lucid dreaming: knowing you are dreaming

What is lucid dreaming?

In an ordinary dream you accept everything. Your dead grandfather drives the school bus, your house has an extra floor, and none of it strikes you as odd. In a lucid dream, something clicks: you realize this is a dream. The scene usually stays put, often brighter and sharper than before, and you are there inside it with your waking mind switched on.

Lucidity comes in degrees. At the lightest level you know you are dreaming but carry on with the plot. At deeper levels you remember who you are and what you wanted to do, you can choose where to go, and you can change parts of the dream. Even experienced lucid dreamers rarely control everything, and dreams have a way of pushing back. The Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden gave the experience its name in a paper in 1913, describing dreams in which he had full recollection of his waking life.

Is a lucid dream real? What the science says

For a long time, lucid dreaming was dismissed as a half-waking state. That changed when researchers found a way for dreamers to signal from inside a dream. The body is paralyzed during REM sleep, but the eyes still move. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the British researcher Keith Hearne and, independently, Stephen LaBerge at Stanford, had trained lucid dreamers make a planned pattern of eye movements once they became lucid. The signals showed up on the recordings while the sleepers were clearly in REM sleep.

Since then, labs have used the same eye signals to time dream actions, compare dreamed and real movements, and even send simple questions into a lucid dream and get answers back. Brain imaging studies suggest that areas linked to self-reflection are more active during lucid dreams than ordinary ones, which fits the experience of being awake inside the dream. The science is still young, but the core finding is settled: a lucid dream is a real, distinct state of sleep.

What a lucid dream feels like

People describe the moment of lucidity as a jolt of recognition, often triggered by something impossible: a clock that keeps changing, a light switch that does nothing, text that rearranges itself, the sudden thought that you never left your bedroom. Colors often brighten. Many first-timers feel such excitement that they wake up within seconds.

Once lucid, common first acts are flying, walking through walls, looking at your hands, or asking a dream character who they are. Some people use the state to rehearse a skill or face a fear. Others simply sit in a beautiful place and enjoy it. Lucid dreams can feel deeply meaningful, and many people remember them for years.

Who has lucid dreams?

A 2016 meta-analysis led by the psychologist David Saunders, pooling surveys from five decades, estimated that about half of people have had at least one lucid dream, often in childhood or adolescence, and that around a quarter have them monthly or more. People who already remember lots of dreams, who play video games that put them in immersive worlds, or who practice meditation are often described as more likely to become lucid, though the research on each of these is limited.

If you have never had one, it is a learnable skill. The usual starting points are better dream recall, reality checks during the day, and a few nights of setting a clear intention before sleep. Our step-by-step guide on how to lucid dream explains the main techniques in the order to try them.

Benefits of lucid dreaming

The best-documented use is for nightmares. Becoming lucid in a nightmare lets you remember that the threat is not real, and many people find they can turn to face a pursuer, change the scene, or wake themselves. Lucid dreaming has been studied as one approach to recurring nightmares, alongside imagery rehearsal, the technique of rewriting a nightmare's ending while awake.

• ✦Easing nightmares: knowing it is a dream takes much of the terror out.
• ✦Rehearsal: some studies suggest practicing a simple motor skill in a lucid dream can help the waking skill a little.
• ✦Creativity: artists and writers describe using lucid dreams to explore images and ideas.
• ✦Self-knowledge: asking a dream figure what it represents can bring surprising, useful answers.
• ✦Joy: flying, visiting places, meeting people you miss. For many, that is reason enough.

Is lucid dreaming safe?

For most people, occasional lucid dreams are harmless. The concerns come from how people try to induce them. Setting alarms through the night fragments sleep, and too much of that leaves you tired. Some people who chase lucidity hard report more false awakenings or episodes of sleep paralysis, which are frightening but not dangerous. A few researchers have raised the question of whether frequent practice could blur the line between dreaming and waking for people who are already vulnerable to that.

A sensible approach is to keep your sleep schedule steady, avoid interrupting sleep more than a couple of nights a week, and stop if it is making you anxious or tired. If you live with a mental health condition that affects your sense of reality, talk it over with your doctor first.

Lucid dreaming vs sleep paralysis

The two are often mixed up because both sit on the border of REM sleep and awareness, and one can turn into the other. In a lucid dream you are fully inside a dream world, you can usually move freely there, and the scene is a dream scene. In sleep paralysis you are awake in your real bedroom, unable to move your real body, and any figure you see is dream imagery leaking into waking. Lucid dreams are mostly pleasant or neutral; sleep paralysis is mostly frightening. Practiced lucid dreamers sometimes use a calm episode of sleep paralysis as a doorway, relaxing until the bedroom dissolves into a dream, but if the paralysis scares you, there is no need to try.

How to wake up from a lucid dream

Most lucid dreams end too soon rather than too late, but if you want out, these are the methods dreamers report work best.

• ✦Close your dream eyes and focus on the feeling of your real body lying in bed.
• ✦Blink hard or try to open your real eyes, which often brings you straight up.
• ✦Call out for yourself to wake up, or ask a dream character to wake you.
• ✦Fall asleep inside the dream: lying down and dozing in a dream often ends it.
• ✦If you wake into what looks like your bedroom, check once more that you are not in a false awakening.

An old practice with a new name

People knew about lucid dreams long before labs did. Aristotle noted that a sleeper is sometimes aware that what appears is only a dream. Saint Augustine described a physician named Gennadius who learned, inside a dream, that he was dreaming. Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga has trained awareness in dreams for centuries as a spiritual path, and in nineteenth-century France the scholar Hervey de Saint-Denys wrote a whole book on observing and guiding his own dreams. The modern research simply confirmed what these dreamers had reported: that waking awareness can switch on inside sleep.

Lucid dreams and dream meaning

A lucid dream can still be read like any other dream, and the moment of lucidity itself carries meaning. Many dreamers become lucid during a recurring dream, as if the mind finally recognizes a familiar scene. What you chose to do once lucid, and what the dream did in response, often says a lot about where you feel in control in your waking life and where you do not.

Questions people ask

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