Lucid dreaming

I occasionally have lucid dreams, but they happen on their own, not from following the steps in your picture. It's really an amazing experience to be aware that you're dreaming, and even just observing where your thoughts lead next can be trippy and really fun, but the real magic happens when you can control what happens next, and I barely succeed at that because I tend to wake myself up when that happens. :-/

It's pretty fun. It's like a customizable VR experience with few limits other than muddled creativity and logical reasoning.

I did it a few times, it was pretty awesome until I gave myself a case of sleep paralysis and never tried again.

I used to lucid dream at least twice a week, until I stopped trying and it stopped on its own. It started off well but I did it for a few months and my ability to control dreams wasn't really getting any better so I kinda lost interest.

I'm working on lucid dreaming for half a year now. I managed to get a lucid dream for a few times now, first two times were immediately aborted because of getting too excited. Third time I tried hard to focus and stay calm, and I managed to do so by flying, but it didn't last for too long (maybe 10 minutes at best).

Very enjoyable. I hope I'll manage to get a 4th time soon.

BTW, "not working" lucid dreams are in 99% caused by you not remembering them. I'm sure I had at least 3-4 more lucid dreams, but I simply couldn't remember them after I woke up.

Never tried, happened by itself several times, to different degrees. I haven't really tried to identify the when and the how, but I know that the first few times where I had my eyes closed and saw clear visuals it freaked me out and I had to open them. More recently I decided to embrace this, at least for somewhat longer periods, but it's not happening as often as I would like. My memory sucks, so I'm likely to answer any questions with - I don't recall exactly. Because I really don't. I can't even remember when it happens (e.g. right after sleep?), but I know it did happen. Weird, isn't it?

It increases chances of sleep paralysis. So no thank you :F

I used to have a ton as a kid, and strangely enough the trigger for becoming aware was actually the simple weirdness of the dreams. Randomly I would realise "Hey wait, houses don't line up on roads like this!" or "That isn't normal for a person to do!" and immediately go lucid. For some reason I was able to maintain lucidity for a long period while also being highly active. Normally when you become lucid your mind becomes TOO active and accidentally wakes you up, or alternatively your interaction with the dream serves as a 'snare' to pull you back into semi-consciousness. The drawback to this was that I would get occasional lucid nightmares, and they can be surprisingly hard to wake up from. It sucks when you can feel your eyebrows moving weakly in an effort to force your eyes open, meanwhile your dream self is still panicking at the onset of some horrible and usually humanoid thing. Usually I had to wait for my increased heartrate to wake me up, and that was like trying to survive an event timer on a game. You know, like evading pursuit forces in an old MGS game.

To make matters worse, those lucid nightmares always had a weirdly Silent Hill style theme. Familiar places and subjects, but just far enough out of place to unnerve without being overtly hostile (until things suddenly go south). Dumb things like being a near-perfect copy of your neighbourhood, but with nobody around and stuck in permanent night time. Then you realise that there is one specific house with it's lights still on, and that there are things watching you just out of sight (but if you go inside the house, they'll definitely see you). That kind of weird creepy. Recurring little themes in both dreams and nightmares had me learning weird 'survival' techniques, little tricks that the dream always seemed to let me use so that I could effectively dodge a nightmare. It sucks when you can tell a nightmare is going to happen shortly, even before it starts, but knowing your brain will let you 'cheat' in very specific circumstances lets you have a fighting chance. Yeah I know, that was kind of ensuring a nightmare would happen just by believing it, but meh, I was a kid. Once example of a 'dream cheat' was if I could find a ceiling light that had no lampshade and was turned off, I know that I can use those specific ones as a way to get to the floor above me. If I grabbed onto the bulb/cord and could swing my feet high enough to kick against the ceiling where it is attached to, I would get sucked through to the room above. That could be a bit tricky because lights didn't always obey the switches. Another trick was if I could find a specific kind of narrow high window and hoist myself up towards it, I would be able to fit through even if I was far too big. The drawback was the sheer drop on the other side, but that was a matter of fear rather than a belief I would actually get hurt. It's amazing how realistic a fall can seem even in non-lucid dreams.

One recurring situation was being locked in my own house with an unknown hostile entity. Each time, I knew it would eventually find me just by wandering around blindly, but also that it would be alerted to my presence whenever I found and picked up the housekeys because of how loud the damn things were, and that I would have to be quick if I wanted to get the door open before it could reach me (or break through whatever was in the way). Worse yet was that I would have to clear the street outside my house just to have a good chance of escape it or even hiding, as the hostile entity would nearly always run along the fence in front of the houses to check inside each front garden. Once I learned the ability to use the dream cheats, that all got a bit easier, so my brain decided to up the ante and pull worse stuff on me, like randomly paralyse me for no reason in supposedly empty houses, just so it could force me to listen to the corpse-clone of my mother drag her fingernails on bare walls, and then sprint out of an adjoining room only to halt inches from my face and stare unblinking at me, face contorted in some strange extreme of hostile but indescribable emotion. Not rage, not hate... but... something. Ugh. That only happened about three times, but I learned it triggered during lucid dreams in empty versions of my home, and only when I was about to descend a sub-stair while the lights were on. I stopped taking that risk :P

It's also pretty funny because I would get occasional false awakenings (lucid dream to lucid dream, thinking you're up again), and sometimes our power would shut off during the night. One of the tests I learned to perform to determine if I was dreaming was just to test the lights. A second was to try find someone else in the house without making much noise, and naturally if my parent's door was locked I wasn't going to shout through to them.

I was... a fun child!
Lucid dreams? Fuck yeah. \:3/
But my spoopy advice is to avoid mysterious towers made out of familiar stairs. There is a reason they break up and become more like crumbling climbing pegs the higher you go. It's not because they're badly maintained. It's because there is a hammer in one of the lower rooms. Sometimes there is treasure in that singular room at the top, but treasure is just boring in a dream. More often, the 'person' you meet will surprise you with how good he is at missing vital organs. Yes, that's a tent peg. No, he doesn't need a hammer.

I don't know if it's lucid dreaming. But I can pretty much control my dream. I once almost had a nightmare, dreamt that I was falling, I instantly imagined there was a sea under me, fell inside me then I saw a shark appraoching me and I was like nope, bad dream and it instantly changed to a dolphin.

Yep I had them a few times. But it was also more of an accident.
The scariest thing was that I once woke up but I could move my body. I was totally awake but my body wasnt.
Was just 15 seconds or so but it is still scary as hell.

Never put in the effort to try, I almost never remember my dreams so I don't really care about them. Also I doubt I could tell I was dreaming because my dreams are pretty realistic and I can't really tell the difference between them and reality most of the time, except in nightmares, and I really don't want to have those just to have lucid dreams.

Hmm, not really something I've done. Sometimes I can sort of control my dreams. Sometimes more than others. I remember multiple occasions where I could almost control the dream, but something didn't go quite right, so I would rewind time a couple of seconds (because for some reason that was easier than actually getting things to go how I wanted them to) only for the same wrong thing to happen again and again forever.

I notice a lot of talk around lucid dreaming is about working out if you are in a dream. I find this odd, because most of my dreams are very obviously not real. For example I frequently experience dreams in 3rd person. Also I had a dream recently where I was 2 people at the same time, which was interesting. Also another one before that where I wasn't even in the dream at all.

Once or twice I realized that I was in a dream but it was for a very short period of time and it was still very much dream-like, I wasn't conscious as much as in real life so I don't know if it was lucid dreaming or not...

It happened to me once. I didn't do much, I was in my house and walked around and talked to my family. I was like struggling to keep control the whole time. I walked by my bathroom door and started to fall into it like it was sucking me in, I think because I was terrified of lucid dreaming ending up being scary. I thought of pink elephants though and a herd of miniature pink elephants ran down my hallway and I stopped falling through the door. The dream went on for a bit after that lol.

I asked a friend after that dream if he had ever had a lucid dream. He got incredibly flustered and I was confused for a bit before it was realized he assumed lucid dream meant a wet dream.

I managed to lucid dream a few times by doing reality checks. I also succeed once with WILD, which was awesome and intense. I also enjoy sleep paralysis state. I love to read my old dream journals, but now I'm too lazy to write my dream recalls. I can't lucid dream now.

There is a thing called Aurora iWinks, which I am following for a few years. It will be released this year. It's basicly detecting whenever you are dreaming and then sends you visual signals. Do any of you know if that headband is accurate? It only helps, or actually gives you ability to lucid dream?

never tried it, only had one, i set myself on a windy valley having a picnic with someone i was very interested in, talking... and then flew a plane... it was beautiful everything was warm colors, and so calming...

never had one since.

I've never been able to do it intentionally, but I have had lucid dreams

I remember my first lucid dream when I was five years old. When I took a psych course in college I had to keep a dream journal, so I did a lot of experiments trying to induce lucid dreaming when I wanted to. I got pretty good at it. I usually had to get up first in the morning and still be tired (not difficult when you are in college) and then go back to sleep about an hour later. I could remain under for around 30-40 minutes this way and have some vivid lucid dreams.

As I moved away from experimenting directly it happened less often, but since my dreaming mind is more attuned to the "signs" I still have regular lucid episodes. Usually a few times a month, although I often don't dwell on them so I soon forget the details.

As for what my lucid dream were like? Well as a kid having superpowers was a lot of fun. Many years later when I finally saw "The Matrix" and I swore it was the closest thing I'd seen on film to the sort of stuff I experienced. :)

The graphic hits pretty close to what I figured out on my own.

• You've got to be tired but not too tired.
• You have to isolate yourself as best as possible from distractions.
• It's much easier for me at least to lucid dream laying on my back even though I'm a side-sleeper.
• Sleep paralysis is part of your body's sleep level you transition through.
• During or immediately following the paralysis stage, I heard all manner of noise akin to someone flipping through channels on a radio real fast.

It was at that point I could "open" my eyes and be dreaming while fully conscious.

I've had agency in some dreams some times but never anything I would call "lucid" (i.e. nothing (")trippy(") about them, no crusty drawers the next morning, etc.)... actually there was this one dream several years back in which my stillborn sibling (the middle child) came to me as a star-person and told me significant existential truths (which I prodded with my own questions and musings). This, of course, after having participated in certain events and watching Xavier: Renegade Angel for hours straight, resulting in the memory being one of "I know it happened, but not of the specifics."

TL;DR "Lucid" dreaming is, more often'n not, used by New Agers in the same way "cinematic" is by game devs what try to justify their shortcomings.
Watch Waking Life

I am always too sleep-deprived to try lucid dream. If I lay on bed for 5 minutes, I will be in deep slumber pretty quickly.

I read a ton of stuff and tried a bunch of things.

• The whole "training" yourself to recognize the fact that you're dreaming by doing stuff like counting fingers, reading stuff, breathing with your nose pinched... I did it for a while and I ended up recognizing those things in dreams, but not realizing what they meant. Aka I'd look at my hands and they were green. I'd notice it was weird and remember after waking up, but I wouldn't connect the dots while asleep.

• Sleep paralysis thing you linked. Shit was spooky. I tried it a few times. I usually see colors or shapes and give up. I read about this method of setting an alarm midway through your sleep so that you'd wake up and go back to bed right away. When in bed, you follow the steps in the picture but because your brain is still in "sleep" mode things happen much faster. After a few minutes I was seeing colors and shapes. I could also hear some weird noise.Shapes turned into things. Random things. Scary things. I didn't enjoy it and I didn't really "dream". I got up and had a coffee. Haven't tried that again.

• Writting about your dreams when you wake up. Make a list of common factors in your dreams and use them to recognize the fact that you're dreaming. Same thing as the first point, honestly. After a few days I noticed in many of my dreams a friend would show up but she was living in another country at the time. So I knew if she was with me I was in a dream. I noticed it, but didn't connect the dots. Honestly this method seemed to work the best. It only took 1 minute to write a quick summary of my dream after waking up and worked fairly quick. I'm sure if I continued doing it for a bit longer it'd have worked.

But I lost interest and stopped.

Yes, I've had lucid dreams, they just happen every now and then(never did any training).
It will most likely be because either something in the real world almost manages to wake me up or because something got "broken" in the dream, it's hard to explain but my conscious mind suddenly kicks in and goes "that doesn't makes any sense, this must be a dream".
I remember one dream I had where I was supposed to open a door and go to the next room, but got curious for what was behind another door nearby so I opened that one instead... and I just broke the dream, the room that was "loaded" there couldn't possibly be there (impossible space), it was obvious that my mind just tossed the first thing that it found to fill in the void so I realised that it was a dream.

Uhh so this might sound weird but I have them as much as people have "regular dreams".

Ever since I was a kid I'd always been able to control my dreams, mainly because some of my dreams were boring and I wanted to enjoy the world of dreaming. I just do this thing all the time where I snap my fingers (its my "totem" if you will, for those who have seen inception) and if a flame appears I'm dreaming. Sometimes though I can't control my dreams, every single one of them is a nightmare and most are the same nightmare, being shot by a shadow figure at point blank range. Only I don't ever "die" just sort of move away and I don't wake up either right away. In those dreams when I snap my fingers sparks appear instead of a flame, like a lighter that just wont light itself.

Some people believe me when I say I lucid dream almost every night, others don't. I don't mind because I know that I can. It was always fun doing superhero stuff, or like really evil stuff just because I knew it was a dream and wouldn't hurt anyone. Since it started when I was watching Dragon Ball Z as a kid I used to fight like they do, power up, shoot energy blasts at mountains and houses, sometimes cities. I don't know how else to describe it. Though one of the things that I was always interested by was the fact I had to "teach" myself how to fly.

Some explanation: When I was first trying to fly, I would jump and glide a couple of meters, so I kept at it, gliding more and more each night until eventually I just never touched the ground again in one of my attempts. Now I can just do it whenever I want, as fast as I can imagine it. It still is the weirdest thing to me. Especially when people tell me they just have a dream where they are flying.

So yeah, I mean, if anyone has questions feel free to ask. But some people have mentioned that feeling of not being able to remember a dream from what really happened and I've had that a lot right near the end of a dream, where I wake up and something that only just happened before seemed to be real or vice versa.

If you mean conscious that you're dreaming and able to alter parts of the dream - then yes, I have, but not that I remember recently. It all happened when I was much younger and even a small child. I grew up (with a younger brother and younger sister) in an extremely physically and mentally abusive household, and I think some of that bled over into my dreams pretty often. I distinctly remember several dreams where I would tell my brother and sister "this is a dream - we can do anything we want" (but it was me changing things to what they wanted). More often than not in the dreams, the three of us were "escaping" the house or our parents, and I would grant them "powers" - flight, speed, strength, invisibility (all kinds of things) - to aid in escaping.

I've blacked out large portions of my childhood, but for some reason I still remember a lot of the more common dreams and nightmares I had back then.