How to Lucid Dream Tonight

Help your nervous system

To enter the state of lucid dreaming quickly and easily, try to increase the level of acetylcholine and melatonin in your body. You can do it by adding relevant nutrients to your diet, as well as by making sure your bedroom is opaque with no flickering devices by your side, your regime is regular, and you don’t play with your smartphone before going to sleep.

Meditate

This helpful and healthy practice will help you clear your mind and get familiar with the sense of complete self-awareness. Some easy breathing exercises will do, just make sure you empty your mind and let yourself drift, slipping peacefully into a dreamlike state.

Make a bedtime mantra

There is likely to be some very serious reason for you to wonder how to lucid dream tonight. If you have a particular scenario that you would like to develop in your dream, write it down or visualize vividly to go through it over and over again both during the day and while going to bed. It particularly helps to program your mind by telling it you’re going to lucid dream. This type of repetitive projection may become the solid first step to penetrating the word of your controllable dreams.

Do reality checks in your sleep

It’s really easy to learn how to identify the triggers that can help you awaken within your dream. These are everyday objects or facts that you can recognize as strange or twisted, like suddenly appearing thousands of miles away from your home or seeing the deceased, for example. Noticing such triggers can help you realize you’re dreaming and bring you in a state of consciousness, revealing a whole new set of dream control possibilities. Also, the inability to read printed words or numbers (including those on your watches) in your dream is a sure sign you are asleep. Watch out for these signs to achieve self-awareness.

Interrupt your REM stage

The REM (rapid eye movement) stage is known to conclude every sleep cycle and is the one to contain your most vivid and lively dreams. By interrupting this stage with a moment of awakening and then falling asleep again may help you to realize you’re going to dream and thus push you closer to lucid dreaming. To do this, make sure you follow a regular regime of going to bed and waking up around the same time every day, and then set your alarm clock a bit earlier to trick your brain.

Control your fears

It is widely accepted that reliving your fears under hypnosis or in a controlled dream helps to get over post-traumatic stress disorders, phobias and nightmares.

Prepare for real-life challenges

In a lucid dream, you are close to a waking state with the similar brain activity reported in scientific experiments. Knowing this, you can prepare for stage performances, sport competitions, or other tests of your abilities in a made-up environment of your dream.

Get to know yourself

This is by far the most important reason you may want to learn how to lucid dream tonight. Going through different scenarios without the limits of reality and responsibilities that come with it, you are able to study your personality more closely or find the answers to some tricky existential questions that may torment you. Some of the recurring themes in your lucid dreams may also point to real crises and issues that you overlook in your waking life.

Play out your fantasies

This is probably the least serious but most tempting reason. Once you get hold of your dream, you can live through anything you desire – a voyage round the world, a date with your secret crush, or winning a presidential election. However, your waking may be quite disappointing – be careful about falling prey to your own illusions!

Dream diaries

If you are determined to know how to lucid dream tonight but are ready to spend your time on some practice, start keeping your dream logs in a diary. The history keeps many notable examples of dream diaries, some of them even of literary significance, like those by William S. Burroughs and Franz Kafka.

You can start with writing down every detail of your dream immediately upon awakening. In a few days or so you are likely to notice occasional coincidences and recurring topics in your dreams: the places you keep going back again and again, people whom you meet frequently, or the repetitive actions. These details are important for ‘mapping’ your dream world (you may find it helpful to draw your own dream landscape). Once you are familiar with the surroundings, you will start navigate freely in this sub-reality and explore it further and further with every new dream.

Visualization

Similar to repeating your bedtime mantra, this approach helps your brain to familiarize with your desired images while you are awake, so that you keep seeing and interacting with them in your dream. This visualization may take form of a mood board or a multimedia collage. It can be even your sketch book full of quick drafts. Make sure to get back to these sketches repeatedly, and you are highly likely to see these scenes in your dream next time.