How Can Someone Have More "Lucid" Dreams, And Do These Have An Accepted Scientific...

Basis. I’ve only had maybe two or three dreams during my entire life where I “realized” that I was dreaming. It was quite an experience, and one that I have always wanted to replicate. Has anyone else designed a method for achieveing controlled lucid dreaming? Furthermore, is the concept even something that mainstream science acknowledges as real?

Check out this book: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen Laberge.

He mentions a lot of techniques you can use to make lucid dreaming more likely. The first step is to make a dream log: each morning when you wake up, write down anything at all you can remember about your dreams. You might not be able to write much at first, but soon you’ll be remembering more and more. Look for patterns in your dreams so you can recognize “dream signs” - recurring events, people, or themes in your dreams that you don’t encounter in real life.

Another thing you can do is get into the habit of asking yourself whether you’re dreaming, and take it seriously - try to read something and see if it changes while you’re reading it, try to use a machine or light switch, etc. It seems silly, and it can be hard to remember, but Laberge says you tend to act the same in your dreams as you do when you’re awake (except that while you’re dreaming, you don’t notice unusual stuff happening), so if you never question whether you’re awake during the day, you won’t question it at night either.

Of course if I’m awake and ask myself if I’m dreaming and a black cat happens to walk by twice… I think I remember reading that the Australian Aboriginees believe their “dream life” to be just as important as their real life. I wonder if there are any documented examples of people “dreaming” that they are “dreaming” while in their dreams?

How about mainstream science and lucid dreaming? I’ve also read that certain types of dreams occur not only during REM sleep, but also during deeper Delta wave sleep, any truth to this? How about a device that monitored your EEG and administered a very “slight” shock when it registered that you were in REM sleep (not enough to wave you, but enough perhaps to let you know you were dreaming). Imagine, being able to have at will sex dreams every night ( then again I hear real people actually have sex sometimes, but believe it to be an unproven rumor).

www.lucidity.com is another good resource… I think it’s connected to Laberge. The site sells a device called NovaDreamer that works on the same principle you suggest… you wear it to sleep, and when it detects REM, it flashes a light.

Most reality testing techniques don’t work because you will take it for granted that you are awake when you are, and will transfer that presumption to your dreams. Reading text, looking away, then checking to see if the text is the same, does work.
As others have mentioned you have to keep a dream journal. I used this repeating timer to get myself to do the text check every half hour (but I use it for a lot of things
so it’s worth it to me):

The best way to get lucid dreams is to set an alarm for about an hour and a half before you must get up and then just go back to sleep with a concious intention of lucid dreaming. Afternoon naps work too. So does caffeine. Google “lucid dreaming” and you’ll get tons of detailed info.

I don’t see “mainstream science” as having any problem with lucid dreaming or requiring to acknowledge it. You are not doing anything that contradicts science. It’s all in your head. It’s nothing more extrodinary than reading or writing fiction.

I have lucid dreams quite a bit. I found that I had them more frequently and to a much more intense degree when I took the herb skullcap to get to sleep (perfectly legal, available in most health food stores).

The weirdest and most intense lucid dream I had (which I pretty much consider an OBE): I slept. I was in a dream. I realized I was dreaming (went lucid) and thought I should wake up. I did so. I walked around the house a bit. No one was there. It was night. I went into the kitchen, where there was an old 1950s refrigerator. I reached out and touched the cool, green lacquer finish. My future wife was asleep somewhere.

Then I realized: I was still dreaming! I had to wake up–NOW. I did so and arose from my cot (I had to sleep apart from my girlfriend/future wife, owing to Catholic prudery in the house). It was still night. I looked at the bookcase and tried to pull something down from a high shelf. I fooled around in the dark house until…

I realized I was still dreaming again!

Then I really woke up. But there were two times within this long dream I thought I had woken up but hadn’t. Very weird/interesting experience!

Really? How do you know? Could you have dreamed it? :smiley:

Yes, well, that’s the paradox: you can “tell” that you’ve woken up in the dream, but you’re wrong, but once you’ve really woken up you realize that you are right now but were wrong then!

Also, one weird thing about my lucid dream (which leads me to think of it more as an OBE) is that I “woke up” both times in the right place–the cot. Further, thereafter I explored a dream (partially real?) version of the environment I had been in had I actually woken up! Strange, odd, weird…

If someone had frequent OBE’s they could be validated (at least to the satisfation of that person and his/her SO). Here’s some suggestions:

  1. Have your SO place an “object” in a room that you normally don’t enter. In my case it would be the laundry room. Thus, my wife could place a monopoly board on the shelf above the dryer. If I should happen to have a “lucid dream” / OBE I go the laundray room and check to see what object is there. Do this correctly three or four times and one would suspect there might really be something going on.

  2. If you could visit “friends, relatives, or SO’s” during an OBE you could attempt to describe what they were doing during your experience. Of course since these tend to happen at night sleeping would be a good guess.

Here’s my question if you could REALLY have OBE’s could you visit the shower room in the girl’s dorm at a local college? If so that motivation enough to undertake some serious metaphysical disipline!

read “the Multiplicity of Dreams” by Harold T. Hunt

I too am a frequent lucid dreamer. Most of the key points have already been acknowledged by the previous posters. As for dreaming within in a dream, this is quite common and can infact be highly recurrsive (ie, many many levels).

Your OBE experiment is not new. Many supernatural-types have stated they’ve successfully done what you propose. There’s a similar thread about astral projection going on in GD right now. I think its all hogwash. I believe OBEs are just a form of lucid dreaming and that there is NO supernatural mumbo-jumbo going on. AFAIK, mainstream science is accepting of LDs - why wouldn’t they? As noted, there’s nothing “weird” about 'em.

A personal antidote: I have horrible insomnia, and sometimes I would fall asleep and dream that I was in my bedroom trying to fall asleep. Once I realized that these were dreams, I tried to make sometime totally bizarre happen in the dream so it would be obvious I was sleeping.

I don’t know why, but since then I have been shot, stabbed, run over, had various body parts cut off, and a bunch of other nasties. Why do these dreams end up in personal violence? I don’t know, but I think it’s because “such violent things could never happen to me.”

Wow, that’s pretty interesting. Maybe there are no real insomniacs, maybe they all sleep just fine, only they dream about not being able to fall asleep :smiley:

P.S. Thanks for the antidote!

I can’t control the content of my dreams, but I do very often realize that I’m dreaming. Usually the realization comes either as a relief or a disappointment. If something terrible is happening, I might realize I’m dreaming and calm down, realizing that it’ll be over when I wake up. Or something really good might happen – usually it involves having something I’d want. I might realize with some disappointment that I will wake up and no longer have it. A lot of my dreams involve mass-transit systems, and I might realize as I’m riding the train on some vast, extensive, architecturally beautiful subway system that there are no subways in the real world that are quite that cool.

One really strange example has to do with driving cars. I can drive in my dreams, but I can’t drive in real life. Almost invariably, if I’m driving in a dream, I will realize that I don’t have a license, and get worried about what would happen if I got pulled over.

pfft! I once counted 16 times I “woke up”, :smiley:

On many different instances I have actually dreamed I woke up and went to work, school, etc. In every instance, it feels real, I have control over my actions, or seem to anyhow, and everything goes just fine. I just don’t realize I am dreaming until I am awakened by my alarm. It is very wierd.

I’ve had a couple of lucid dreams. But I’ve never had the flying dream. The chase dream, the public nudity dream, I have those all the time. So the second time I realized I was dreaming lucidly, I tried to fly.

I couldn’t. Bugger.

Tentacle Monster

Very few people have spontaneous true lucid dreams. Although realizing you’re dreaming is an important part, its actually a very minor part. The realizing your dreaming stage can easily be falsified within the context of the dream itself. Thus, the realization of dreaming (which most people experience from time to time) is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Without sufficient pre-knowledge of what lucid dreaming entails, its nigh impossible to have a true lucid dream spontaneously. So in other words, the fact that you couldn’t fly is expected. You have to understand the “impact” of lucidity in order to create a fully interactive dream environment.