This has probably been posted before, but I thought I’d share my experiences with you. I’ve had 15 or more lucid dreams over the past year. The majority of these dreams have been induced by taking naps in the late afternoon, and going to sleep at night…already rested. I’m an extremely deep sleeper which seems to affect my ability to have lucid dreams. It took me a while to figure this out, but taking a 1+ hour nap 2-6 hours prior to going to sleep for the night has dramatically increased my ability to dream lucidly. For example, I was at a conference last week in San Francisco. Every day was spent standing, walking, and sitting in uncomfortable chairs, especially for my boney @$$. By 6:00p, I was pretty tired each day. One day, probably the most exhausting day of the conference, I went back to my hotel and took a nap from 7:00p until about 9:30p or so. Then I stayed up for a few hours, watched a late night show, and went back to sleep. This was the only night that week that I experienced lucid dreams. I had one after the other that night…a few of which were the longest lucid dreams I’ve had thus far…each of which I maintained a very high level of control throughout. If you are a deep sleeper, and even have a hard time with dream recall, give this method a try. Again, this has worked for me over and over again. To be honest, I can’t think of a lucid dream that I had where I hadn’t taken a nap earlier in the day. If this doesn’t work the first time for you, don’t get frustrated, and don’t set extremely high expectations. It WILL work, just be patient. I mentioned previously that I’ve had 15+ lucid dreams in the past year which may not sound like much, but it’s not very often that I sleep outside of my typical nightly hours. If this is a well known technique, I apologize…if nothing else it’s just another experience that can make you that much more confident. Good luck, and let me know what types of experiences you’ve had with this technique.
Good on you for finding your own Lucid Dreams. Keep it up.
And yes, this is a well know technique. It’s the Wake Back To Bed technique. Usually though, the Dreamer will go to bed at the usual time, wake up in the middle of the night, stay up for about an hour (or however long one wishes) while doing stuff related to LD’s to get oneself in the mindset of Lucid Dreams. Then, they will go back to sleep and try to have one.
Never really intentionally tried it myself and the one time I did do it (where I woke up by accident and decided to try the technique) I had a Lucid Dream where I realized I was dreaming and woke up.
If one WBTBs and has good DR, LDs basically spontaniusly occure.