Lucid Dreaming in Pop Culture: What’s Happened Lately
I’ve been paying attention to something over the last few years. Lucid dreaming keeps popping up everywhere. Movies, TV shows, music, video games, TikTok... it’s like the rest of the world is slowly catching on to what we’ve known for a long time :-)
So I thought it’d be fun to round up the most interesting lucid dreaming references I’ve spotted in pop culture since 2021 or so. Some of these get the experience surprisingly right. Others... well, they take some creative liberties. Which is fine! That’s what storytelling does. But as someone who actually practises this stuff, I can’t help watching with one eyebrow raised sometimes.
Grab a cuppa and let’s have a look.
Movies
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Marvel went and invented “dreamwalking” for this one. In the film, dreams aren’t random brain noise. They’re windows into your alternate selves across the multiverse. Wanda uses an ancient spell from the Darkhold to possess her counterpart in another universe, essentially “walking” through her dreams into a different version of herself.
Now look. As a concept it’s pretty wild. And it actually got people talking about whether dreams feel real in a way I hadn’t seen since Inception.
What they got right: The central idea that dreams feel as vivid and “real” as waking life. Any lucid dreamer knows this. When you become conscious inside a dream, the experience can be every bit as solid as sitting in your chair reading this right now. The film does a good job of portraying that intensity.
What they got wrong: Everything else, basically :-) You can’t possess other people through dreams. Dreams aren’t interdimensional portals. And the “dark magic” framing makes it sound dangerous in a way that real lucid dreaming simply isn’t. If you’re curious about what lucid dreaming can actually do, start here instead of consulting the Darkhold.
Lucid Dreaming (2023)
Director Tom Young put out a small indie film called Lucid Dreaming in 2023 that flew under most people’s radar. It’s a non-linear narrative that follows its characters through layers of subconscious experience, and the whole thing has a surreal, disorienting quality to it.
I appreciated it because it tries to capture what the inside of a dream actually feels like, rather than just using “dreams” as a plot device. The shifting logic, the way scenes dissolve into each other, the feeling that something is slightly off even when everything looks normal. That’s closer to the real experience than most Hollywood attempts.
Other Films Worth Mentioning
There’s a horror film called Lucid (2025) about an art student in the ’90s who discovers a lucid dreaming elixir that turns nightmarish. It premiered at Fantasia International Film Festival and has an art-punk, handmade quality to it. The “potion that makes you lucid dream” angle isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. There are supplements that can boost dream vividness and awareness, though none of them will send you spiralling into a horror movie. Probably ;-)
And the South Korean thriller Lucid Dream has been doing well on Netflix internationally. A father uses lucid dreaming to search for his abducted son by revisiting memories in his dreams. It’s more “sci-fi memory exploration” than accurate lucid dreaming, but it’s a fun watch.
Television
The Sandman (Netflix, 2022–2025)
This was the big one for me. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman finally made it to screen after decades of failed attempts, and the result was gorgeous. Tom Sturridge plays Morpheus, the literal lord of all dreams, who gets captured by an occult ritual and escapes after 106 years to find his kingdom in ruins.
The show treats dreaming as a real place. The Dreaming is a realm you visit every night, shaped by Morpheus, populated by his creations. There’s a character called Rose Walker who becomes a “dream vortex” with what amounts to supercharged lucid dreaming powers. She walks through other people’s dreams and accidentally breaks down the walls between them.
What they got right: The emotional texture of dreams, mostly. The way a dream can flip from beautiful to terrifying without warning, and the idea that you can become aware inside a dream and interact with it consciously. Gaiman has always understood that dreams carry weight and meaning.
What they got wrong: Well, there’s no actual Dream King. Sorry :-) And you can’t wander into someone else’s dream uninvited (though mutual dreaming is a fascinating area of research). But The Sandman was never trying to be scientifically accurate. It’s mythology. And as mythology about the dream world goes, it’s about as good as it gets.
Behind Her Eyes (Netflix, 2021)
This one caught me off guard. Behind Her Eyes starts as a fairly standard psychological thriller. Love triangle, secrets, suspicion. And then about halfway through, one character starts teaching another how to lucid dream as a way to deal with night terrors.
So far, so good. That’s actually a real therapeutic application. Using lucidity to confront nightmares is one of the most well-established benefits of the practice.
Then the show takes a hard left turn into astral projection territory, and characters start swapping bodies through their dreams. I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say... it goes places.
The early lucid dreaming scenes are actually quite good. The character learns to recognise she’s dreaming, practises reality checks, gains control over her dream environment. That part tracks. The body-swapping astral projection? There’s no scientific basis for that at all. But it made for brilliant television. The show sparked a huge wave of interest in lucid dreaming, and my inbox got noticeably busier for a few weeks after it aired.
Music
Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams” and Its Ongoing Legacy
Juice WRLD released “Lucid Dreams” back in 2018, and he passed away in 2019. But the song’s cultural footprint has only grown since then. It was certified Diamond by the RIAA in 2022, meaning over 10 million copies sold in the US alone. It has over 3 billion streams on Spotify. Three billion.
Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams” music video has over 1 billion YouTube views. Directed by Cole Bennett.
The song itself uses lucid dreaming as a metaphor for heartbreak. “I have these lucid dreams where I can’t move a thing” is actually describing sleep paralysis more than lucid dreaming. In sleep paralysis, your mind is awake but your body can’t move. Lucid dreaming is the opposite sort of experience. You become aware inside a dream and can often control what happens. Two very different things.
Still, “Lucid Dreams” probably introduced more people to the concept of lucid dreaming than any single piece of media in the last decade. When a 17-year-old Googles “lucid dreaming” because they heard it in a Juice WRLD track, that’s a win for awareness. Even if the song’s description isn’t technically accurate.
The Ambient and Binaural Beats Boom
If you search “lucid dreaming” on Spotify or YouTube, you’ll find thousands of hours of ambient tracks, binaural beats, and meditation music designed to help you achieve lucidity. This has absolutely exploded since 2021. Artists like Brainwave Power Music and Astral Audio are pumping out albums with names like “Lucid Dreaming Transcendence” and “Deep Theta Waves for Dream Control.”
Does any of it work? Maybe. Binaural beats can influence brainwave patterns, and there’s some research suggesting they might help with relaxation and the early stages of sleep. But there’s no magic frequency that will make you lucid. If someone promises you that, be sceptical. The real work still comes down to proven techniques like MILD, reality checks, and keeping a dream journal.
Video Games
Dreams (PlayStation, 2020–2023)
Media Molecule’s Dreams on PlayStation deserves a mention even though it launched in early 2020, because its community kept growing through 2021 and beyond (live service support ended in September 2023, but the game and its creations are still playable). The game lets you build entire worlds from scratch and then explore other players’ creations. It’s basically a lucid dream simulator. You imagine something, you build it, you walk through it.
The creative freedom is staggering. People have built everything from short films to fully playable games to abstract art installations inside Dreams. That open-ended, “what do you want to create?” quality is the closest any video game has come to capturing what a real lucid dream feels like. In a lucid dream, the only limit is your imagination. Same deal here.
Lucid Dream VR
There’s a VR project in development that aims to merge brain-computer interface technology with virtual reality to simulate the lucid dreaming experience while you’re awake. It’s ambitious, and the science is still early days. But the concept is fascinating. Researchers at Northwestern University have been exploring whether VR experiences can actually enhance subsequent lucid dreams, with some promising initial results.
VR technology is starting to intersect with lucid dreaming research in fascinating ways.
I’ll be watching this space closely. The intersection of VR and lucid dreaming could end up being really significant for how people learn to become lucid.
Indie Games With Dream Themes
A few smaller games are worth knowing about. Lucid Dream on Steam is a point-and-click adventure where you’re trapped in a strange dreamscape and have to find clues to wake up. Oneironaut (great name, by the way) is built around actual lucid dreaming techniques. And there’s been a growing number of “dreamlike” indie games that play with surreal environments and shifting logic in ways that feel properly dream-inspired.
Social Media and The “Shifting” Phenomenon
The “reality shifting” trend on TikTok has racked up over 12 billion views.
This one is interesting. Starting around 2020-2021, a trend called “reality shifting” blew up on TikTok. Videos with the hashtag have racked up over 12 billion views. Twelve billion.
The idea: you can shift your consciousness into an alternate reality. Most “shifters” claim to visit fictional worlds. Hogwarts is the most popular destination. The Marvel universe is a close second. Methods include things like the “raven method” (lie in a starfish position, count backwards from 100 while visualising your desired reality) and the “Alice in Wonderland method” (visualise yourself chasing someone from your desired world down a rabbit hole).
Now. Is this lucid dreaming? Some of it looks a lot like it. The raven method in particular resembles WILD (Wake Initiated Lucid Dreams) with extra steps. You’re lying still, relaxing your body, focusing your mind on a specific scenario as you fall asleep. That’s pretty close to a standard lucid dreaming induction technique.
The community insists that shifting is different from lucid dreaming. Researchers who’ve looked into it tend to classify it as a “transliminal experience,” something that happens in the hazy zone between waking and sleeping. Whatever you call it, the trend has introduced millions of young people to the idea that you can be conscious and intentional about what happens when you close your eyes. And that’s a starting point.
My take? If you’re into shifting and want to go deeper, learn lucid dreaming properly. The techniques are well-tested, the experiences are extraordinary, and you don’t need to pretend you’re actually going to Hogwarts to enjoy them. Although... flying over the Forbidden Forest in a lucid dream would be pretty spectacular ;-)
Podcasts: Lucid Dreaming Goes Mainstream Science
One of the biggest shifts (no pun intended) in the last few years is how lucid dreaming has moved from “fringe” territory into serious scientific podcasting.
In May 2024, Andrew Huberman dedicated a full episode of the Huberman Lab podcast to dreams and lucid dreaming, with sleep researcher Dr. Matt Walker as his guest. They covered reality checks, intention rehearsal, the neurological basis of lucidity, and whether lucid dreaming might interrupt restorative sleep processes. It was thoughtful, balanced, and reached millions of listeners.
That’s a big deal. When the most popular science podcast in the world gives lucid dreaming a serious hearing, it shifts the cultural perception. This isn’t just hippie stuff anymore. It’s neuroscience. It’s real, measurable, and backed by decades of research.
So What Does All This Mean?
I’ve been involved with the lucid dreaming community for years now, and there’s been a noticeable change in how people find us. It used to be mostly through word of mouth, forums, maybe a random YouTube video. These days, people arrive because they watched a Netflix show, or heard a Juice WRLD song, or saw a TikTok about reality shifting, or listened to a Huberman episode.
The downside is that a lot of pop culture gets the details wrong. Lucid dreaming in movies is almost always more dramatic, more dangerous, or more magical than the real thing. Nobody’s possessing anyone else’s body. Nobody’s getting trapped in dream limbo. And you definitely don’t need an ancient spellbook to do it.
The upside? Awareness. Every film, show, song, or TikTok trend that mentions lucid dreaming puts the idea in front of someone new. And some of those people get curious enough to try it for themselves. That’s how most of us started, right? We heard about it somewhere and thought... wait, you can do that?
So I’m all for it. Keep making lucid dreaming movies. Keep writing songs about it. Keep posting TikToks. And when people come looking for the real thing, we’ll be here to point them in the right direction :-)
If you’re one of those people and you’re just getting started, have a look at our free 10-day lucid dreaming course. No spellbooks required.
Happy dreaming,
Jake
About The Author
Chris Hammond writes about lucid dreaming, awareness, the nature of consciousness, and cosmic existence. See him in action at The World of Lucid Dreaming Academy.
