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Comment by 3abiton | Hacker News Reader

I am curious if anyone knowd "manual" techniques to induce and maintain lucid dreaming?

Yeah. Read "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" book by Stephen LaBerge. It proposes a number of techniques, some of them works better than other for different people. If you are not predisposed to lucid dreaming (some people are), then the main obstacle is will or motivation to keep practicing.

One that worked for me is having a mechanical counter of some sort (like lap couter or just miniature code lock so you can use it as a counter), which you reset every morning and increment during the day every time after you ask yourself "Am I dreaming?" and doing some basic "reality check" (e.g. trying to breathe in through your nose when you pinch it, or checking clocks twice in a succession and validating that it makes sense, or just looking at your hands). The goal is to consistently do a number of reality checks during your waking life, which inevitably will increase the chance that you will do it in your dream. That will likely would cause you to wake up immediately for couple of times, but then you'll get used to it. It works simply because "if you don't ask yourself that you are dreaming during your waking life, what is the chance that you'll ask yourself it during sleep?".

There are number of other and more advanced techniques that borderline with "magic" to me, like falling asleep without loosing conciousness (and then waking up the same way), but I had this experience only a couple of times I guess.

It’s not the getting to lucid dreaming that’s the problem, it’s the “oh! I’m dreaming!” part. Wakes me up every time.

That and I have dreams about flying, but as soon as I realize I’m having dreams about flying, I wake up and the flying dreams stop.

It is a common problem when you starting to get lucid dreams. There are number of techniques to combat that too, but it will generally go away after you become used to it. You just get too excited when you get lucid dream.

Maybe sound absurd, one technique that worked for me is to just "start spinning" around in your dream, so you can't focus on any specific part of the dream for a long time. Continuous attention to one detail in a dream somehow starts to breaking it apart.

> Continuous attention to one detail in a dream somehow starts to breaking it apart.

But that doesn't make for a very interesting experience. I actively attempted lucid dreaming about 25 years ago, and was succesful after a while using the various reality check techniques and dream diary. And the habit has weirdly stayed with me over the years such that I still occassionally realise I am dreaming even now. But all I can ever do is wonder around for a minute or two. Over all that time I've never managed to do anything interesting like fly or conjure things or really scrutinise the dream. Those wake me up every time. I've tried the spinning technique, but that just dissolved the dream and then woke me up.

I guess it is a matter of experience and practice, as with anything else, really.

There is a very subtle mental state between "I am too aware that I am dreaming" and "there is no awareness of dreaming at all". I don't really know how to put it in words, but it seems that you BOTH need to supress part of the brain that wakes you up and prevent loosing awareness at the same time. It is very apparent during "ordinary" falling asleep, when you suddenly catch yourself that you are "seeing pictures" (hypnagogia phase) and become fully awake again. The trick is continue "falling asleep" without loosing awareness. Same applies during the lucid dream. You need to maintain balance.

You basically need to continue experimenting to notice those subtle changes to know which mental state would wake you up and which would not, so you'll get more precise control.

There are other factors at play for sure, like if you will manage to get your lucid dream right after first deep phase of sleep, your body would likely be not rested enough to quickly reach wakefulness, so you'll have more time.

I don't think that lucid dreaming is easy, and it was never easy for me. It was actually pretty hard work. It was almost impossible to get lucid dream if I was already mentally exhausted during the day. As soon as I stopped to practice, lucid dreams stopped too.

> It’s not the getting to lucid dreaming that’s the problem, it’s the “oh! I’m dreaming!” part. Wakes me up every time.

Yes, same here. I can sometimes manage to keep the dream going for what feels like a few minutes, if nothing extraordinary happens. If it is just mundane walking around and feeling the dream, it is fine. But when I start trying to make something interesting happen, I wake up.

I learned how to lucid dream regularly and taught a few others.

These are the things that work the best:

1. Record or note down your dreams right after you wake up.

2. Put an alarm clock every hour or so and do a reality check: cover your nose and try to breathe (in dreams it works), turn off and on a light (in dreams they don’t work very well), see yourself in a mirror (in dreams mirrors tend to act funny).

3. Repeat a mantra while trying to get asleep. Something like “I’m going to have a lucid dream tonight.”

4. Wake up ~5 hours after you’ve gone to sleep. Recall your dream and then try to go back to sleep repeating the mantra or imagining you’re having a lucid dream (MILD technique).

The only thing that ever reliably worked for me was laying down to sleep and staying entirely still but "typing" my name with my fingers in incredibly subtle motions over and over again. Something about it let's your body fall asleep but keeps your mind just barely awake. Also doing this after waking up in the middle of the night is highly effective.

The only thing was that instead of realizing i was in a dream while inside it, o was fully aware while undergoing the transition from awake to sleep which was... somewhat disturbing. Usually you forget the exact moment you fall asleep by the time you wake up, but i distinctly remember a dark cloud descending over my mind, flowing past me. Then a skeleton hand reached out from the cloud and i _felt_ it grab my shoulder. It tried to whisper something to me, maybe it did and i can't remember what it said. It was giving "you shouldn't be here" vibes though. Then as quickly as the state came, it left and i was fully awake and aware, standing on a street in my neighborhood. I tested the fidelity of the dream world by scrutinizing the tiniest details of the visuals, sounds, smells, physical sensations of the world and the acuity of simulation appeared perfect to me. I can't be sure that sensation wasn't part of the dream but i literally bent down and took a flower apart, piece by piece, it had water in the stem, smells grassy when i crushed it, and the closer i looked the more detail everything had. It honestly shifted my perception of reality a lot

Interesting. I have had success going into a lucid dreaming state by locking my hands together with the fingers interleaved with each other, with both hands resting on my chest.

Perhaps something about hands is a unique sensory input?

Variations of this technique is what has worked for me also. The trick is to focus your attention on something as you fall asleep, it doesn't have to be imaginary typing. Keeping attention focused as you fall asleep after you go to bed is hard, but doing it after you awake at night is quite easy if you don't wake up too much. The best way I have found to wake up just the right amount is to use a wristwatch with a vibrating alarm and set that to go off maybe two hours before I'd normally wake up. When it goes off, turn it off with as little movement as possible. It seems important to keep almost perfectly still. Using this I have been able to observe the transition to a dream quite gradually by watching hypnagogic patterns (the noise you see in the dark) turn from colored blobs and noise slowly into objects before transition gradually into an immersive scene. I find it quite hard to stay in the dream though, and usually wake up after a couple minutes.

Just usual trick of practicing looking at hands often during the day to make it a habbit works well enough for inducing them.

Why hands specifically?

It's like ChatGPT: hands are difficult to hallucinate and don't stay consistent throughout multiple viewings

Because ones hands are easy to remember and recognize how they suppose to look like. To achieve desired result you must build a habbit to look at your hands every once in a while so you'll do it as often as once in 15-30 minutes for at least a week. And looking at own hands from time to time in real life is one of least weird things you can do. So it's a perfect trigger to build habbit around.

And how it's actually work is already mentioned in other comment - when you look at your hands while dreaming they will look different or weird every single time. This is suppose to make your consciousness go into "wow I am in a dream" mode.

Meditation before bed and going to bed early after taking some melatonin tends to give me more vivid dreams. The wake-back-to-bed technique often works to give me short lucid dreams. I think the trick is that when you wake yourself up in the early morning, you become awake and alert after the early-night deep sleep phase that would otherwise leave you groggy and completely out of it. Then when you go back to sleep you go to lighter REM sleep because your sleep cycle is still running, but are more likely to be alert and recognize it's a dream.

My last lucid dream was ~20 years ago but what worked for me back then was just saying to myself (over and over again) before falling asleep that "My name is $NAME, whenever something weird happens now, think carefully about what was the last thing you remember".

Then while I was dreaming that I'm jumping off buildings etc, I started to realize that wait, this is weird.. what's my name? What's the last thing I rember before.. oh, right, I was falling asleep..therefore, this has to be a dream. Yay!

A higher than usual dose of melatonin does it for me.

How do you increase your melatonin?

By taking an higher dosage of whatever they're taking for sleeping.

You might be mistaking melatonin for melanin (the skin colour one).

Melatonin also comes as a supplement.

What is your usual dose? Asking for a friend...

Not really high. I am a natural night owl but I was working at a job that had a more traditional 9-5 schedule, so I was taking them about 1.5mg about once or twice a week, just to help regulate my chaotic sleeping pattern. I used to buy 3mg pills and cut them in half. If I went for a long time without taking it, or if I took a whole pill instead of half it would be almost guaranteed that I would have lucid dreams.

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