Lucid dreaming

The teaching

As the craft of lucid dreaming, from Hervey de Saint-Denys to Stephen LaBerge teaches it.

The question a dream forgets

An ordinary dream is believed while it lasts. However strange it grows, a dead friend alive again, a house with too many floors, flight without wings, the dreamer takes it as it comes, because the part of the mind that asks whether this can be so is quiet in sleep. The whole art rests on waking that question inside the dream. When the question is asked and the dreamer sees that the answer is yes, the dream becomes lucid, which is to say clear: the dreamer knows where they are, and that their body lies asleep somewhere else.

The knowing is the mark of lucidity, not the control. A lucid dreamer may steer the dream or only watch it, and some ordinary dreams feel firmly steered. The knowing comes in degrees, from a passing suspicion that the dream sweeps aside, which Celia Green calls a pre-lucid dream, to a full clearness in which the dreamer remembers their waking life and what they meant to do if this ever happened. A lucid dream may begin inside a dream, when something odd gives it away, or straight from waking, when a sleeper passes into a dream without losing awareness. The branch on what it is gives these in full.

Two lineages

Two traditions teach this art. They share its first steps and seek different ends. The western craft is one of self-training. Hervey de Saint-Denys taught himself from boyhood, with illustrated dream notebooks, to know that he dreamt and to steer what followed; Frederik van Eeden recorded hundreds of his own lucid dreams and gave them their name; Paul Tholey and Stephen LaBerge turned such experience into methods that anyone can follow. For this craft a lucid dream is a place to explore, to rehearse a skill or a hard conversation, to face what frightens in ordinary dreams, and to enjoy.

Tibetan dream yoga, handed down among the six yogas that bear the name of the Indian master Naropa and kept also in the Bon tradition, uses the same knowing for another purpose. Its teachers hold that waking experience is like a dream, made by the mind and grasped as solid, and that to recognise the dream in sleep trains the recognition of that likeness by day, and at death in the passage that follows. It is a religious practice, taught within a whole path and under a teacher, and the branches show where its practices meet the western ones.

The shape of the night

Sleep is not one state but a tide that goes out and comes back. Falling asleep passes through light sleep into deep sleep, and then, about an hour and a half after sleep begins, into the first period of rapid eye movement sleep, REM, in which the most vivid dreams come. The cycle repeats four or five times a night. Deep sleep fills the early cycles and REM grows in the later ones, from a few minutes at first to half an hour or more toward morning. Through every REM period the body is held still, all but the eyes and the breath.

Nearly all lucid dreams come in REM sleep, most of them in the long dream periods of the last hours. From this the art takes its first rule, which is also its first method: a full, unbroken night. Cut the night short and the dreams most likely to become lucid are cut away with it.

How a dream gives itself away

A dream is a world built by the sleeping brain out of memory, feeling and expectation, with little help from the senses, and so it is unsteady in telling ways. Printed words change when read twice, clocks show nonsense, lights refuse to come on, hands have the wrong number of fingers, and scenes begin in the middle with no road behind them. These are the cracks through which a dream is recognised, and the art gives them two uses.

The first is the dream sign: an oddity that recurs in one dreamer's own dreams, the old school, the lost relative, the phone that will not dial, found by reading the journal back and sorted by LaBerge into odd feelings and perceptions, odd actions, odd forms and odd settings. The second is the reality test, a check that gives one answer awake and another in a dream: read a line, look away and read it again; look at the hands; ask how you came to be here. The dream journal teaches the first, and the branch on reality checks the second.

Four habits, one practice

The western method is four habits joined into one. Recall comes first, for a lucid dream forgotten by morning is lost, and a dreamer who does not know their own dreams cannot recognise one; the journal, kept every morning, builds it. Recognition comes second, as the journal is read back and one's own dream signs come into view. The question comes third: several times a day, in earnest, the student asks whether this is a dream, above all when something is strange or a dream sign appears by day. The intention comes last, a single sentence carried into sleep: next time I am dreaming, I will remember that I am dreaming.

Each habit feeds the next. The sign found in the journal becomes the cue for the day's question; the question asked by day returns at night; and the intention names both, so that when the sign appears in a dream the question rises with it. LaBerge's method of mnemonic induction, MILD, ties the intention to a rehearsed scene of becoming lucid, and the intention at night teaches it step by step. None of the four needs more than a few minutes a day, and every one of them depends on sleeping enough.

Inside the knowing

The moment of knowing is exciting, and excitement wakes most beginners at once. So the art teaches the first seconds in advance: stay calm, say quietly that this is a dream, and take hold of it through the dream senses, looking at the hands, rubbing them together, feeling the ground underfoot. Inside a lucid dream expectation shapes what happens, so the first aim is kept small and steady. Dream figures can be spoken to and asked who they are. A dream of waking in bed, the false awakening, often ends a lucid dream, and is met with one more check. Staying in the dream teaches all of this.

Dream yoga gives its own sequence once the dream is known: first not to fear it, since nothing in it can harm the dreamer; then to change it, and so learn that its forms are pliable; then to see it as empty of solid substance. Tenzin Wangyal also teaches three kinds of dream. In samsaric dreams, the ordinary kind, the dreamer is carried along by the traces of past action and feeling. Dreams of clarity come as practice steadies the mind; the dreamer is less caught in them, and teaching or guidance may appear. Clear light dreams, the fruit of long practice, come when the dreamer rests in awareness itself and is no longer caught by what appears.

How a student begins

The first weeks ask only for sleep and a notebook. Go to bed in time for a full night, keep paper by the bed, and write every morning before doing anything else: a few dated lines, a title, the strongest image. LaBerge advises building recall until at least one dream a night comes back before working on lucidity itself. Then read the entries back, mark what recurs, and choose two or three dream signs of your own; add a handful of sincere questions by day, and the intention as you fall asleep.

Patience is part of the method. Most people need some weeks before a first lucid dream, and some never have one, which costs nothing: the journal has gained its dreams, and the nights have kept their rest. A first lucid dream that ends in the moment of knowing is still a lucid dream.

Sleep comes first

Every method in this art is worth less than a good night's sleep. The house sets no alarm in the night, breaks no sleep on purpose, and takes nothing to force a lucid dream, though methods taught elsewhere do all three. The signs to pause are tired days, broken nights, waking unable to move, more nightmares, a growing preoccupation, or an uneasy sense by day that the world is not quite real, and a pause of two to four weeks lets sleep recover. Anyone who has had psychosis, or who finds dream and waking hard to tell apart, leaves the practice alone, and the question of whether one is dreaming is dropped at once if it unsettles the day.

Where the branches lead

The branches follow the order of learning. What it is gives the degrees of lucidity, the two ways in, the dream as the brain's model of the world, and the eye signals sent from inside dreams. The dream journal builds recall and finds the dream signs. The branch on reality checks teaches the critical question and the tests that answer it. The intention at night teaches MILD and the evening resolve of dream yoga. Staying in the dream takes up from the first seconds of knowing. The branch on when to pause teaches the signs that call for rest, and is worth reading before any of the others.