Lucid Dream Hub

Nighttime isn’t the only time that you can practice lucid dreaming skills. In fact, the best time to improve your skills to maximize your nigghttime success is DURING THE DAY. Such skills as prospective memory, reality checking, and meditation will greatly enhance your lucid dreaming practice and make inducing lucid dreams so much easier. I would argue that the most important lucid dreaming work is done during the day and your nighttime practice is just implementing everything that you have been practicing while awake.

And since I am re-starting my lucid dreaming practice from….basically zero… I am going to go over my current daily routine that I will use to improve my skills and work my lucid dreaming success rate back up to respectable levels!

Daily Routine

So let’s dive into the exercises that I do and explain how they help with my lucid dreaming practice!

1. Perform 12-15 thorough reality checks

Reality checks are a key exercise for lucid dreamers. If you are brand new to lucid dreaming, a reality check is basically a test to check whether or not you are awake or in the dream world. Now this may seem obvious to you now, of course you are awake! But when you dream, the areas of your brain that are responsible for logic and reasoning are less active, and you accept the whacky and strange dream events as totally normal. By performing reality checks during the day, you begin to develop a lucid mindset. You begin to train your brain to be on the lookout for dream signs and cultivate an attitude of critical thinking and awareness. And since your dreams often reflect your daytime state of mind, this lucid mindset will work its’ way into your dreams. Resulting in spontaneous lucid dreams!

The key is to be thorough in your reality checks, don’t just assume that you are awake or just ‘go through the motions’. Really take a moment to determine if you are awake or dreaming. How do you know? What were you just doing? Can you remember what you were doing two hours ago? Do your surroundings make logical sense? Perform some popular reality check tests like trying to fly, trying to manipulate text with your mind, or pinching your nose shut and trying to breathe. Perform a thorough reality check whenever something strange happens, whenever you see one of your dream signs, or just randomly whenever you think about it.

2. Prospective Memory Game

Prospective memory is the ability to remember to do something in the future. For example, remembering to take your medications at the right time or remembering to stop at the next gas station that you see. Prospective memory is essential for the MILD technique and I find greatly improves all of my DILD attempts. You also get the added bonus of improving your working memory!

To play the prospective memory game, pick 4 events that are likely to happen in the future. These can be anything, such as the next time you turn on a light, the next time you see an animal, the next time you hear music, or the next time you drink something, etc. Memorize these targets. Now set the intention to notice this event, the NEXT TIME IT OCCURS. The next time this event occurs, perform a reality check. If you realized that you missed one of your targets, count that as a ‘miss’ and perform a reality check. The goal is to recognize the very next time your event occurs and perform a reality check. To learn more about this game, I recommend reading Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming or check out my online course (shameless plug) 🙂

3. Analyze My Dream Journal

Every morning, I will take maybe 20 to 30 minutes to analyze my dream journal from the night before. I will record any lingering dream memories and analyze my dreams for dream signs. Dream signs are…..signs that you are dreaming! They are anything that is strange or out of place in your dreams that would be a red flag that you are dreaming. For example, a common dream sign for me is the dream being located in my childhood high school or at my parent’s house. I often have dreams involving family members that I don’t see often in waking life. If you take a moment to identify all the oddities in your dreams, and keep a running tab, you will start to see patterns. You can leverage these dream signs to inform when you perform reality checks during the day. When combining the exercises of reality checks and finding your dream signs, you begin to unlock your personal dream world and noticing when you are dreaming becomes a lot easier and natural.

Another important peice of information to derive from your dream journal is the time of night that you wake up from a dream. This will give you a ballpark idea of when your REM cycles end. You can then leverage this data to inform WHAT TIME OF NIGHT you attempt to induce a lucid dream.

Need More Help?

Does this sound like gibberish to you? Do you want to learn to create a complete and effective lucid dreaming practice that yields consistent lucid dreams? Shameless plug! Consider enrolling in my online course : Lucid Dreaming: Creating a Complete and Effective Practice. You will learn all the skills necessary to master lucid dreaming 🙂