Have you all seen those videos saying: Don't do this in lucid dreaming otherwise you'll sell your soul to the demons and be trapped in an alternative dimension for the rest of your life!!!! (Well not exactly but y'all get the point)

I tried every single one here's my experience.

1. Time and Dates: I asked a person and they just told me non-real time like 7N0pm 57th August. It didn't turn scary or into a nightmare. Yk why? Cuz I don't believe in that sh

2. Looking in a mirror: even in normal dreams if I look into a mirror I js see myself. Not Satan himself or some dark magic things. Yk why? Cuz I don't believe in that sh

3. Saying 'you don't exist': ironically my first ever lucid dream was looking at my friend and saying "you're not real". And what happened? Nothing. I just did what I wanted and made a portal to a fantasy world. You know why nothing happend.

4. Asking 'are we in a dream': did that and they replied "tomatoes are my favourite fruit." And... Just that honestly nothing scary or supernatural.

5. Closing eyes: that's true you wake up lol. But nothing paranormal.

6. Ask their ages: they'll just tell you random age.

Conclusion: All of those videos are b^llshit. They only happen if YOU BELIEV THEM. There's no rules in lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams operate entirely on expectation and suggestion.

I’ve been interested in lucid dreaming for about 30 years ever since I first heard about it when I was around 16 years old. I read newsgroups on UseNet and bought EWLD when I was 18 years old. I tried everything unfortunately I’ve never been very good at lucid dreaming only having very few lucid dreams, most of them lasting a few seconds before my excitement woke me up.

After that I’ve gone back and forth on my interest in lucid dreaming, sometimes I’ll get back into it for a few months, start up the dream journal again, start doing reality checks, and then maybe have a lucid dream before getting discouraged and giving up for a few years.

About 9 months ago, I started getting interested in lucid dreaming again and decided to give it another shot. I bought some more lucid dream books as audiobooks and started using speech recognition to record my dreams (way less tedious for me).

This has gone reasonably well(probably the longest stretch for me), and I’ve managed to have about 8 lucid dreams since then. Unfortunately, most of them have only lasted a few seconds but I’ve remembered to try to stabilize things a couple of times, so I think I’m making progress.

The biggest change for me is realizing how effective WBTB and MILD are for me (when I get the chance to get up in the middle of the night).

When I read books or posts on lucid dreaming, it seems like everyone can do it easily, but that just doesn’t match my experience and sometimes makes it hard not to get discouraged.

So that brings me to my questions that maybe the subreddit can help answer:

• Does anyone have any idea what an average number of lucid dreams a month is? Is it too much to aim for five a month?

• Are there large numbers of people that can lucid dream at will or are most books and posts exaggerations?

• If anyone has learned to lucid dream at will, or significantly improved their skill at it, how long did it take using reality checks, MILD, and WBTB?

• Does age impact lucid dream ability? Now that I’m older, will lucid dreaming regularly be harder to learn?

What made you finally lucid dream? I'm new to lucid dreaming and the only times I've lucid dreamt was by accident..

I know about and tried some of the popular lucid dreaming methods, but unfortunately they haven't worked for me yet. I actually often lucid dream because of my Narcolepsy at night or when I take my stimulants at 7 a.m but decide to go back to sleep. But that's always accidental and never intentional.

So what clicked in your brain, when you've finally realized how to lucid dream on command? What works for you every time?

And most curious I'm about your lucid dreaming hacks/methods that aren't popular, but should be?

Would love if someone helped me out here :)

Hi! I wanted to share these! I thought I was the only one doing this.

I have 3 persistent realms with their own rules and logic. The characters are independent, there is a narrative coherence. It's like here.

Do others have this?

This is the second time this has happened to me this month, and both were nightmares. It’s been a long time since I was actively working on lucid dreaming, bc for a while I couldn’t even do any simple dream recall. But after some medication changes recently these keep happening to me and I just need to share. This happened just tonight only in the span of one hour of sleep.

I fall asleep quickly after talking to my boyfriend about dreams and texting a friend about the moment (won’t share due to subreddit rules). It was so quick which is unusual for me that when I awoke in bed in the dream I did not realize yet that I was dreaming. At first there was someone walking on top of the house, there’s no attic or easy way to get up there so it was scary to me. As I was freaking out I began to become lucid realizing that the house wasn’t quite right. Suddenly I woke up again in bed, my boyfriend and I walk outside and he says “I hope the guitar man doesn’t show up.” I look around confused and see a man lurking in the edge of the woods. I get scared again look around and realize the backyard isn’t quite right either. I wake up in bed, we go outside, and “guitar man” is closer than before. My boyfriend says he is a govt spy looking in on his parents and he gets as close as legally possible posing as a man who wanders playing his guitar for people. With each loop I become more lucid, more quickly, and realize this backyard is the same as the previous dream loop and it’s not right. I awake again, I am convinced to go out for something and when I come back to the driveway I see my dog hobbling towards me. I quickly grab her bring her back to the house lay her down and inspect the problem. She is missing a foot (very disturbing image) but it has been cleaned and somehow operated on, lucidity comes on and I realize this isn’t the correct way to fix this situation and there wouldn’t have been enough time for all this to have happened. I am so disturbed and lucid I begin trying to break out of the loop. Suddenly the tactic of the dream changes, I am lured to various buildings (ones I couldn’t possibly recognize as not right) but I am shown people of my past slightly different as to show me that they have changed since the last time I saw them. I become lucid much more quickly this time and try to begin to escape the dream. I go into an elevator. The elevator feels like it’s moving but it opens on the same floor. I begin looking for exits but they are barricaded. There are objects overhead that could fall at any moment. The more I try to escape the more dangerous the environment becomes and the more dream entities surround and follow me. I go into a room the other door is jammed shut with an object and I turn around to see someone behind me being squished by an object that is blocking the door. Finally I hear the theme song of my show (I always keep the tv playing throughout the night) and I’m able to break free from the nightmare loops. I arrive in the physical reality, check my surroundings and senses to make sure everything is familiar and correct, call out to my sleeping boyfriend who will always respond. I continue to lay there but my eyes slowly shut and I see images of creatures I can’t describe moving creepily, so I sit up suddenly.

What are some good ideas for persistent realms? I'm talking about media that would be fun to be in

Like a war or a cool and fun world

tried to visualize then did mantra (on some parts I stopped visualizing during mantra and on some I visualized) after a few minutes I stopped because my eyes felt a bit heavy, and then a few minutes later my body just tingled. I stopped and opened my eyes because my body was itching, took a 30 sec rest and went back at it, same routine as the first try and sang a few songs. But this time, my body was shaking, like an earthquake I could even see the shaking from my closed eyes. after a few minutes I stopped and will try again tomorrow or next night (Used MILD method, did this for 40 minutes). any tips?

Hello, I'm kinda new to this of lucid dreaming, I've been trying WILD with the counting method, I start counting from 1... I'm dreaming, 2... I'm dreaming. After a while, I feel like I lose consciousness for a couple of seconds and lose my counting, but when I start counting again, my whole body feels numb and I start to feel a tingling sensation, start seeing like lights with my eyes closed and my heart starts to race, but after some seconds all of this sensations are gone. Any tips of what sould I do when I reach that stage? Or it is just practice?

So yesterday I had this dream where I kept "waking up" and "falling asleep" again and again, but every time it happened the dreams became more and more strange (usually I'm lucid dreaming).. When I fell asleep originally, I've felt like I'm falling but I didn't woke up like usually, I couldn't stop it, then it began.. one of the dreams in the dream I've spent a whole a day with my father, just a normal day, nothing out of the ordinary, then I fell asleep again, I've dreamt about turning in my bed and when i "woke up" I shifted back in the original way I was laying, but this isn't the strangest part, when i finally woke up in full consciousness, i couldn't open my eyes no matter how hard I tried (I was facing the couch) my brain made a imagine of what im supposed to be seeing Infront of me, i stretched my hands and they went right through the couch and static noise started blasting in my ears, i moved them away but the noise didnt stopped, i focused on moving my body and when i finally did open my eyes i couldn't see normally for 1/2 minutes, my hands where in the same position as I moved them and then the noise stopped... Can someone explain wth is going on

Hello, I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to share my experience and talk with you.

To give some context: I’ve had a few lucid dreams before, but they were very short. They were either dreams I’d had before, so I chose to change certain events (and the dream followed the same sequence), or dreams that were so absurd that I realized I was dreaming. And I always ended up waking up from them automatically.

What happened in this dream:

The dream begins in my bed, where I had fallen asleep. It was daytime, and I was watching videos on my phone and they were very accurate representations of what I actually watch. I remember that my boyfriend was in the dream, though not the whole time; the video, however, didn’t change, it was as if it kept playing throughout the dream. I didn’t fully understand what the video was about because I was doing other things at the same time. I was tidying up my room and cleaning the furniture next to my bed. So I came across some objects that I liked because they reminded me of my childhood, and I started to feel strange and suffocated because the objects were multiplying more and more, and I found that weird.

Except that I was in my room doing normal things, and I felt weird, so I ran out of my room and into the next room. Normally that’s my brother’s room, but my sister is sleeping there while he’s away, and it felt just as real. I ran, I walk into the room, and there’s my sister standing near the window with one of our cats, so I run, I jump out the window, I go through the window because it was open, and there’s my sister trying to catch me, saying, “Don’t jump!” and and I jump, and I see the ground in the yard getting closer, and I think to myself, at worst it’s not a fatal fall (it’s maybe 4–5 meters), oh well, it’ll just be a bit of a crazy stunt or maybe I’ll break something, that’s it, and at best I wake up, either normally or by falling out of bed (a fall from my bed as imagined in my dream)

I open my eyes in the dark and hear a voice saying, “You’re not even waking up,” so I ask her to turn on my lamp, and since nothing happens (maybe she didn’t hear me), I decide to do it myself.

*********

Feedback on the dream:

I think what really messed with my head was falling asleep in my bed and then starting to dream while I was still in my bed.

I realize now that the timeline wasn’t the same (I fell asleep at night) and this was in the afternoon.

I didn’t fall asleep under the best conditions, so maybe that affected my mental state and led me to create a pleasant dream, hahaha

In any case, it was THE FIRST TIME I’d ever dreamed about my phone. Which made it feel even more real.

And in my dream, I even consciously tried to fly. It’s something I do often, I flap my arms and take off even though I don’t have wings. Usually, that’s a clear sign that I’m in a dream. But this time, I couldn’t fly (even though that technique doesn’t work 100% of the time, hahaha).

What made me panic was that I felt like I couldn't wake up from the dream, even for a brief moment.

Then, when I went into the next room, I knew it was a dream (part of the reason I jumped out the window was to create a sensation of falling and force myself to wake up) because my brother had come home that evening, and my sister no longer sleeps next door but in her own room.

Finally, when I woke up, I heard this voice talking to me. I thought it was my sister, but actually there was no one there. So I think I was still half-asleep and just imagined that voice. I turned on my lamp and then tried to go downstairs to really clear my head a bit before going back to sleep that dream was way too weird. I’m a little scared to fall back asleep, hahaha

Yesterday I had a very short dream where I went out into the garden and saw a hedgehog eating out of the cats’ food bowl. The setting was unusual, but it was plausible (plus, it was nighttime). So I like to think I have a superpower where I can see real things in my dreams, even if the setting isn’t 100% accurate. Something like this happened to me several years ago :( But I didn’t think I’d have that feeling of being trapped in a dream, it was scary.

Any advice is highly appreciated! I have this entire detailed world in my head that I would like to 'wake up' in whenever I dream. How do I accomplish this and keep it consistent to where I can pick up where I left off whenever I sleep?

I would love to hear advice from anyone who has been successful at this, or even people who haven't but have ideas! You don't have to read the rest but I added some info on what my dreams are typically like:

I have vivid dreams almost every night, some lucid, some not. Even when they are lucid, I'm not always able to control them, and when I can it's usually only partially. I can choose to change the scenery or summon characters, but it usually ends up being off if that makes sense. My dreams are usually very random, and they change plots quickly. One minute I can be shopping somewhere and the next I'm at a beach seeing sea monsters in the ocean. I am very creative and have had some pretty awesome dreams, the only problem is I only have a fun dream maybe 1/5 of the time. The rest are either nightmares or just random stuff that doesn't make sense. I'm working on learning to become lucid easier by doing reality checks during the day and visualizing before I go to sleep. My most recent lucid dream, I was at work and I questioned if I was dreaming and I became aware and started exploring elsewhere. I was able to open up portals but they never took me where I intended to go. Characters in my dream would be out of character, and not look or act right. Usually I end up at random houses or gross places. I love having this gift of being able to have and remember such detailed dreams, I just don't want to waste my potential by having shitty dreams the majority of the time.

Thank you again for reading! :)

So! I'm still trying to visualize a prehistoric island.

​I settle in and put on ambient sound. I start to relax a bit. I observe the blackness behind my eyelids, then the sound of wind in my head. My goal is to stop focusing on the body. It works because I can see small shapes through my eyelids. I observe them passively.

​At one point, I try to imagine myself as a point of consciousness, and then (to let go) I imagine falling into the center of my heart. There... I feel that I'm letting go completely (my body suddenly becomes heavy and I feel like I me falling), accompanied by a sudden drop/churning in my stomach. I continue my passive observation (and it works, I'm no longer afraid).

​I set the intention to visit the island and visualize being there (the atmosphere). ​And at one point, I feel a weight on me. As if an animal were climbing up my leg! Right then, out of surprise, I open my eyes and everything stops

Today I had the most absurd sleep experience of my life and I need to know if this was actual lucid dreaming or not.

I'm not really sure I have ever had actual lucid dreams before. Usually my dreams are hazy and I can control some things. For example, in a lot of my dreams, I just kind of know I'm in a dream, and I can just fly around no problem when I want to, but other things are mostly out of my control. This time was completely different.

These were dreams that felt hyper realistic. Not just visually, but in how intensely I could feel things. And the wild part was I had full (TOTAL) control. I could imagine exactly what I wanted to happen next, and it would just... happen. Not vaguely either, it responded instantly, like the dream was reading my mind in real time.

At some point it got so real that it actually scared me. Like a "wait, this isn't right" kind of fear. So I woke myself up on purpose.

I got curious and closed my eyes again and I was instantly back again dreaming. Same thing, total control, insane intensity. I got scared again, woke up again. Did this a total of three times. Each time, eyes closed, and boom, right back in.

I don't remember the fine details. But in one, I "spawned" in the middle of the sky. So I thought: "I need a helicopter", and one came to me. When grabbling the controls I was surprised how I could actually feel them. I started flying it and got curious: "I want and entire black hole to appear at the horizon", lo and behold, there it was, a perfect black hole. It was almost indistinguishable from real life, so I got too scared of the experience and woke up.

The last time I finally pulled myself out for good, and in doing so, I saw something strange in the middle of my vision as I was coming out of it, shapes, almost like flower petals spiraling and being plucked one by one, just hanging there for a second before fading out completely. I can't recall exactly but there was also something colorful/rainbow-like in the peripheral vision.

My biggest fear was being trapped in this state forever. But honestly, I kind of want to go back.

Has anyone else experienced this?

hi everyone, i (22F) almost nightly have severe nightmares where i know i’m dreaming, but it feels more like being stuck in a horror movie because i can’t control anything. also, even though i know i’m dreaming i still get scared which may be due to my PTSD and OCD. how do i change this? i’m seeing a sleep specialist because i sleep upwards of 12 hours a night and wake up exhausted, so maybe they can help but that isn’t until September. last time i was put on meds for it i had sleep paralysis, so i’d like to avoid that.

So this is maybe a common post (im not entirely new but only ever suceeded once). But i havent really tried.

The question is anyways what Kind of scenarios can i Put myself in.

Like ofc i know anything is possible in your Dreams but what If i wanna willingly Put myself in a Horror Chase and escape scenario or Fight in the Battles of WW2 or have an Sword Fight in the middle age.

Hello I want to share my experience in Lucid Dreaming.

Every day, I go to bed at 12am at night and wake up at 5am in the morning.
After that I usually do light activities such as lifting small objects, eating light food, drinking water, until I felt sleepy.

I usually sleep again at 7 am then wake up at 8 am.

During my second sleep at 7 in the morning I was always lucid dreaming.
Even it has several layers.
On the first layer, I fell asleep then dreamed (became the second layer). On the second layer, I can control the dream. Sometimes dreams on the second layer are often interrupted and wake up on the first layer.

Honestly, this makes me a little dizzy when I wake up from real sleep.
This lucid dreaming incident didn't just happen once.

Every day, if the sleep pattern is like that, I definitely lucid dreaming.

Hello, so I just found out about this and I’m really interested in trying it out, seems very interesting.
If you guys have any tips or techniques, I would really appreciate it. One thing you should know about me is that for the last years, I barely remember any dreams, maximum 2-3 I could say, in the last year I’m pretty sure I never dreamed (that’s what it felt like). I mean I’m just going to sleep and… BOOM, it’s daytime, feels like I’m disappearing for 8 hours. Anyways, if anyone is willing to help I would really appreciate it, thanks!

I used to lucid dream a couple years ago when I was 16 almost every night until something made me stop. I would think about waking up so I would get out of the dream and I would open my eyes in my bed, but something in my room would be in the wrong place or something would feel off. There was a monster type thing that would always attack me when I noticed I wasn’t waking up in reality. It was a loop of waking up in a dream that would happen over 8 times every time I would lucid dream. Has anyone else ever been caught in a loop of waking up in your dream? This made me stop lucid dreaming because I would lose control of the dream and be attacked by my parents, dog, and other entities I didn’t know in my dreams.

I used the vild technique and induced a lucid scene strongly focusing on it, first person view of the scene. I did this at bedtime and did not see normal eye shadows but I saw a bright star light across my eyes and obviously woke up from excitement. I didn't fully enter the dream but is this a sign of success? For reference I did this at 10pm bedtime so I don't know. What was this? It was a single bright light spec that went across my eyes and disappeared. Please help me understand this so I know for next time. Thanks.

È la seconda volta che scrivo questo post ma ho ricevuto 0 risposte quindi spero che questa volta vada meglio.

Ultimamente sto avendo dei sogni lucidi, capita quasi casualmente dato che la tecnica che sto provando cioè la WILD, (so che non è propriamente una tecnica però dico così per far capire brevemente di cosa sto parlando), non ha ancora funzionato mentre invece durante alcuni sogni ad un certo punto mi rendo conto di star sognando, mi conto le dita e quindi so che è un sogno, tuttavia, una volta che mi sveglio non mi sembra che in quel momento fossi lucido come da sveglio e infatti anche il ricordo del sogno è un po' strano.

Questo pomeriggio mi sono addormentato e so di aver fatto un sogno lucido, tra l'altro durato tantissimo solo che dopo essermi svegliato da quello mi sono riaddormentato quindi non lo ricordo molto bene. Durante questo sogno ricordo di aver pensato cose che realmente penserei nella realtà dato che riguardano cose che ho visto da sveglio però quando lo ricordo ho ancora l'impressione che non fossi davvero cosciente come da sveglio.

Anche a voi succede?

E poi fare un sogno lucido attraverso la WILD può aiutare ina questo dato che letteralmente entri direttamente in un sogno mentre sei ancora cosciente?

Modificato: inizialmente ignoravo questo problema pensando, "ma si non ero completamente lucido", solo che dopo questo pomeriggio sono sicuro al 100% che io fossi molto cosciente, solo che lo sono solo perché ricordo alcune azioni o alcuni pensieri che ho fatto, ma se dovessi basarmi solo sul ricordo del sogno o su quest'ultimo in sé non saprei distinguerlo da uno normale qualsiasi. Per questo ho questo dubbio.

So, I have discovered that I have the ability to re-enter dreams. Specifically, I can re-enter a dream using Hypnagogia (suddenly returning to the dream), so the AI told me that I could use the WILD technique and it would work.

Do you have any advice on how to use WILD, or any other advice or things I can do?

I keep a dream journal, but not very often. Sometimes I memorize my dreams in my head, but I don't write them down much. As for reality checks, I always forget to do them and have never succeeded at them at all.

Thanks! :)

To sum everything up: I’ve been dream journaling for over a month and remember my dreams most of nights. I do about 10-15 RCs/day, and once in a dream a month ago I realized that I was in a dream but couldn’t control it and I woke up pretty fast. I am also trying MILD + WBTB most nights currently.

And last night I pinched my nose and breathed through it and I thought « oh so yes air does go through when you pinch your nose in dreams ». But I wasn’t conscious at all I didn’t think that since I was in a dream I could do whatever I wanted or anything.

So I guess I am on the right track? What now?

Hi. (Sorry if my English sounds strange, it's not my first language.) I've been trying to have lucid dreams for a few months now; I started trying in mid-2025, but stopped after a while and recently started trying again. I've had a few terrible lucid dreams after a lot of training and dedication, but the main reason I'm thinking of giving up again is because... it's simply difficult to learn anything related to the subject. Many say it's easy, but others say it's difficult, and that's okay. There are dozens of different tutorials for the same technique I'm trying to learn, with many people telling me to do this and others telling me not to do that, which makes learning anything confusing. Just when I feel like I'm making progress, someone comes along and says I'm doing it wrong, and another person says I'm doing it right. It's simply very confusing. Sometimes I wonder if lucid dreaming really exists, because all the information seems to contradict each other.

Since I quit my job and started taking care of my dad I've been dreaming that I'm often carrying painfully heavy baggage around in my dreams. The metaphor is obvious, however during the day I feel light and happy a lot of the time, and when I'm doing things that need to get done I just feel determined, and my life feels meaningful. I would like advice on how to put down the heavy luggage in my dreams so I can simply enjoy and explore my dreams. I haven't been able to lucid dream recently, but I only just started trying a few days ago, for the first time in years. I used to be able to lucid dream easily when I was younger. I'm trying the sensory meditation that brings on lucid dreams, and I'm trying to remember to flip light switches, read words in dreams, put my fingers through walls and frequently ask myself in life if I am dreaming right now to see if I can establish that pattern and have a lucid dream. Once I have a lucid dream should I just put down the pack and say "I don't always need this"? Perhaps reassure myself that "I can find what I need as I go"? Is there a more powerful thing to do or say?

Weirdly, the baggage changes form in each dream, and I'm often carrying a lighter bag as well with different unusual items in it and someone usually helps me out with the lighter bag but not the heavy one.