How to Become Lucid in Dreams: A Beginner's Guide to Self Awareness

For many people, understanding how to become lucid in dreams is a major hurdle. Until you have your first lucid dream, the whole concept may seem entirely elusive, causing some people to give up before they've even begun. So I thought it would be helpful to define exactly how I enter the lucid dream state.

So far, I've observed five different ways to have a lucid dream naturally, by increasing my self awareness in the dream world. Some of these methods are easier or more likely to occur than others. However, once you become experienced at lucid dreaming, you will probably learn to use all of them.

Method #1 - Become Lucid in Dreams
via Spontaneous Lucidity

This is the most common kind of lucid dream in beginners. In fact, your first lucid dream was probably caused by spontaneously lucidity. This occurs when you suddenly realize "I'm dreaming!" for no apparent reason. Or perhaps your dream became so strange that your conscious self awareness kicked in.

Spontaneous lucidity relies mostly on luck. However, by increasing your self awareness during the day time you can train yourself to recognize the dream state better, and thereby learn how to become lucid in dreams with ease. Through regular meditation and lucid dreaming, I have become a lot more self aware. This helps me recognize the dream state even when it is mimicking real life, because I can pick up on more subtler clues.

Method #2 - Become Lucid in Dreams
via Dream Characters

The prevailing wisdom says that dream characters are part of your unconscious psyche (as opposed to conscious beings interacting with your dream). So this method relies on your subconscious mind helping you out.

Here's how it works. I set the intention to lucid dream by meditating before I go to sleep and firmly telling my subconscious "I will lucid dream tonight." I wake up around 5am (naturally, or with an alarm clock) and repeat my intention. For the next 2-3 hours I'll have long periods of REM sleep with vivid dreams. This is when I'm most likely to lucid dream, and if I'm lucky, a dream character will tell me so.

For instance, once a psychology professor came up to me in a dream and said "let's try some lucid dreaming now." It worked! The professor triggered my conscious self awareness into action and my dream became lucid.

Method #3 - Become Lucid in Dreams
via Dream Events

This is similar to the concept described above. Simply do some lucid dream incubation before you go to sleep (meaning, tell your subconscious that you want to recognize the next time you are dreaming). Then go to sleep thinking about what you might do inside your next lucid dream.

When a dream event triggers you, it's usually because you are dreaming about lucid dreaming! (Note: this isn't foolproof. I've dreamed of giving a lecture on dream control and still remained unconscious the whole time.) Recently though, I dreamed of being in a movie theatre and as the opening credits rolled up, I saw a string of incomprehensible letters. Then something clicked - the letters were an anagram of "LUCID" with a few random letters thrown in. BAM!

You may not have this kind of self awareness in dreams yet, but as you improve your dream recall and have more conscious dream experiences, you'll find this is a neat way to become lucid in dreams.

Method #4 - Become Lucid in Dreams
via Reality Checks

This technique is great for a first lucid dream. Doing reality checks programs self awareness into your regular dreams, thereby creating spontaneous lucidity. A reality check is simply trying to do something impossible in the real world - like pushing your hand through the wall. Making this a force of habit will create reality checks in dreams, giving you the opportunity to recognize the dream state. (In a dream, if you try to push your hand through the wall, it will go straight through.)

Check out my full article on reality checks and find the best ones for you.

Method #5 - Become Lucid in Dreams
via Wake Induced Lucid Dreams

In my view, the more you practice meditation and self awareness skills, the easier it is to have Wake Induced Lucid Dreams (WILDs). This is unlikely to produce your very first lucid dream because, unlike any of the above techniques, WILDs occur when you walk your brain from a waking state directly into a dream state. While difficult to achieve at first, this kind of lucid dream is the most vivid.

In essence, it works by putting your body to sleep while remaining consciously aware. This way, a lucid dream scene evolves around you and becomes 3D and extremely realistic. Another exit technique is to step "out of body" by imagining you have a physical body and a dream body. You can learn how to become lucid in dreams via the WILD technique with Lucidology's excellent Video Tutorial.

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