Lucid dreaming: the basics

A lucid dream is a dream in which you realise that you are dreaming while the dream carries on. Sometimes that awareness comes with a little control over what happens next, sometimes not. It is common: a meta-analysis of fifty years of surveys found that about 55 percent of people have had at least one, and about 23 percent have one a month or more¹.

This guide covers how scientists showed that lucid dreams are real, what is known about the brain during them, which induction techniques have evidence behind them, and where the evidence is thin. It also covers a few reasons to go carefully.

How we know they happen during sleep

For a long time lucid dreams were easy to dismiss as brief awakenings remembered as dreams. The answer came from a simple design. Because the eyes move freely in REM sleep while most of the body is still, a dreamer can agree before sleep to make a set pattern of eye movements once they become lucid. In 1981 Stephen LaBerge and colleagues recorded exactly that: five participants signalled with pre-arranged dream actions that they knew they were dreaming, while the recordings showed unambiguous REM sleep².

Forty years later a study run across four laboratories went a step further. Researchers spoke simple questions and maths problems to sleeping participants and asked them to answer with eye movements or facial signals. Of 36 people, six gave correct answers, 29 times in all, from within REM sleep³. The success rate was low, but the finding matters: a lucid dreamer can, at times, take in information from outside and respond to it.

What the brain is doing during lucidity is less settled. A review of the neuroscience describes early imaging work pointing to frontal and parietal regions associated with self-reflection and working memory, but notes that the EEG studies are mostly small and their results mixed⁴. Treat any confident claim about a "lucid dreaming brain state" with some patience; the wider science of the dreaming brain is in the guide on why we dream.

Techniques with some evidence behind them

A systematic review of 35 induction studies came to a sober conclusion: none of the techniques had been shown to induce lucid dreams reliably and consistently, although some looked promising, and the quality of the research was generally low⁵. With that in mind, three approaches have the most support.

Reality testing means checking several times a day, with real attention, whether you are dreaming: reading a line of text twice, looking at your hands, trying to push a finger through your palm. The idea is that the habit carries into dreams, where the check fails and tips you into awareness.

Mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD), developed by LaBerge, works with intention. After waking from a dream, you go over it, then repeat a phrase such as "next time I am dreaming, I will remember that I am dreaming" and imagine yourself back in that dream, noticing that it is one. Wake back to bed adds timing: you wake after about five hours of sleep, stay up briefly, then return to sleep while practising MILD, because lucid dreams are more likely in the REM-rich later part of the night.

The largest recent study, with 355 participants across several countries, compared these combinations with a newer technique called SSILD, which cycles attention through sight, sound and body sensation as you fall back asleep. MILD and SSILD worked about equally well, with weekly success rates in the region of one in six attempts. Participants who recalled their dreams better and who fell back asleep within ten minutes had more success, and the techniques had no adverse effect on reported sleep quality⁶.

Recall comes first

That last finding is the practical point most guides skip. A lucid dream you cannot remember in the morning is, for your purposes, a dream that did not happen, and good recall predicted success in the study above⁶. Before trying any induction technique, spend a couple of weeks simply remembering your dreams and writing them down. A dream journal also shows you your own dream signs, the places, people and oddities that recur, which make natural cues for reality checks.

Keep a record of the attempts as well as the dreams: which technique, what time you woke, how long it took to fall back asleep. With success rates around one in six, most nights nothing happens, and without notes it is easy to give up after a week or to credit the wrong change when a lucid dream finally comes.

People who manage it often describe the same first experience. The realisation arrives, excitement follows, and they wake up within seconds. Practitioners suggest staying calm and turning attention to a sensation inside the dream, such as the feel of your hands, to hold it a little longer. These are tips from practice rather than findings from trials, so take them as things to try, not rules.

Reasons to go carefully

Lucid dreaming is often sold as a straightforward good. The research does not yet support that. Nirit Soffer-Dudek has argued that evidence for mental health benefits is mixed, and that frequent deliberate induction might affect sleep quality and blur the line between sleeping and waking experience for some people; she calls for these questions to be studied rather than assumed away⁷. Wake back to bed, by design, interrupts your sleep. If you are short of sleep, have insomnia, or have experiences where waking life feels unreal, it is wiser to skip induction or talk it over with a professional first.

There is also a clinical side. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine lists lucid dreaming therapy among the treatments that may be used for nightmare disorder, with weaker support than imagery rehearsal therapy⁸. If nightmares are the reason you are interested, the guide on nightmares and imagery rehearsal therapy is the better place to start.

Read next

• How to remember your dreams
• What a dream journal is and how to keep one
• Nightmares and imagery rehearsal therapy
• Why do we dream? The science of dreaming, explained

Sources

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2. LaBerge SP, Nagel LE, Dement WC, Zarcone VP (1981). Lucid dreaming verified by volitional communication during REM sleep. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 52(3), 727-732. doi.org/10.2466/pms.1981.52.3.727
3. Konkoly KR, Appel K, Chabani E, Mangiaruga A, Gott J, Mallett R, et al., Paller KA (2021). Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep. Current Biology, 31(7), 1417-1427. doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.026
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6. Aspy DJ (now Adventure-Heart DJ) (2020). Findings from the International Lucid Dream Induction Study. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1746. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01746
7. Soffer-Dudek N (2019). Are lucid dreams good for us? Are we asking the right question? A call for caution in lucid dream research. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 13, 1423. doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2019.01423
8. Morgenthaler TI, Auerbach S, Casey KR, Kristo D, Maganti R, Ramar K, Zak R, Kartje R (2018). Position paper for the treatment of nightmare disorder in adults: an American Academy of Sleep Medicine position paper. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 14(6), 1041-1055. doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.7178