I trained myself to lucid dream on command with reasonable consistency. This was back in early 2020, right at the start of COVID — suddenly having nowhere to be and an excess of unstructured time turned out to be ideal conditions for dream practice. It took about a month of deliberate practice to go from zero to semi-reliable induction. Here's the framework that worked for me, the neuroscience behind it, and some less common observations from the process.
A lucid dream is any dream where you become aware that you're dreaming — while still inside the dream. The spectrum ranges from a vague "this might be a dream" feeling to full conscious control: flying, teleporting, manipulating the environment at will.
The experience is qualitatively different from normal dreaming. Your prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain responsible for self-awareness, working memory, and executive control — is normally suppressed during REM sleep. In a lucid dream, it partially reactivates. You get metacognition without waking up.
The obvious appeal is the experience itself — it's one of the strangest and best subjective experiences available to a human. But there are deeper reasons to care about it:
Dreaming as anti-overfitting. There's a theory I like that dreaming serves as an evolutionary mechanism to prevent cognitive overfitting. During waking life, your brain builds up a "context window" — a running model of the world based on recent experience. During sleep, a consolidation process distills this into long-term memory (the "weights"). Dreams introduce entropy: strange, novel situations unlike day-to-day reality that force your neural representations to generalize rather than memorize.
Lucid dreaming lets you observe this process from the inside. You can watch your brain generate scenarios, test associations, and stitch together fragments of memory in real time.
Consciousness research. Lucid dreaming is one of the few states where you can study the transition between conscious and unconscious processing from a first-person perspective. It's a natural laboratory for questions about awareness, agency, and the structure of subjective experience.
There are many techniques. These are the ones that actually worked for me, ranked by effectiveness:
You can't skip this. Keep a journal next to your bed and write down everything you remember immediately upon waking — before you move, before you check your phone. Even fragments.
Dream journaling works because it trains your brain to treat dream memories as worth retaining. Most dreams are discarded within minutes of waking because the hippocampus deprioritizes them. By consistently writing them down, you strengthen the encoding pathway. Within 2-3 weeks, your dream recall will go from near-zero to several dreams per night.
Dream recall is the prerequisite for everything else. You can't become lucid in a dream you won't remember.
Throughout the day, pause and genuinely ask yourself: "Am I dreaming right now?" Don't just go through the motions — actually evaluate your surroundings. Check if text changes when you look away and look back. Try pushing your finger through your palm. Count your fingers (in dreams, you'll often have the wrong number).
The goal is to make this a habit so ingrained that it fires automatically in dreams. When it does, and the reality check fails (your finger goes through your palm, the text is garbled), you become lucid.
Set an alarm for 5 hours after falling asleep. When it wakes you, recall the dream you were just in. As you fall back asleep, repeat the intention: "Next time I'm dreaming, I will realize I'm dreaming." Visualize yourself back in the dream, but this time becoming lucid.
MILD exploits the fact that your longest and most vivid REM periods are in the second half of the night. The wake-back-to-bed component primes your prefrontal cortex, and the intention-setting leverages prospective memory — the same system that helps you remember to stop at the grocery store on your way home.
This is the most direct technique and the hardest to master. The idea is to maintain conscious awareness while your body falls asleep. You lie still, relax completely, and observe the hypnagogic imagery (the visual static and fragments that appear as you drift off) without engaging with it. Eventually, a dream scene forms around you and you step into it fully lucid.
WILD is difficult because the transition involves a phase that can feel like sleep paralysis — your body is paralyzed (as it should be during REM) but you're still conscious. This can be unsettling until you learn to recognize it as the gateway, not something to fight.
Becoming lucid is only half the challenge. New lucid dreamers face two failure modes:
I've experimented with a few things that affect dream vividness:
There's a deep overlap between meditation practice and lucid dreaming ability. Both involve training metacognitive awareness — the capacity to observe your own mental states without being captured by them. Meditators who practice mindfulness regularly tend to have an easier time achieving lucidity, likely because the skill of "noticing that you're thinking" transfers directly to "noticing that you're dreaming."
I maintain a daily meditation practice (5-10 minutes, outside, in the morning). I can't prove causation, but my lucid dreaming ability improved noticeably after establishing this habit.
I kept a dream journal for several years. Here are some of the more interesting entries — the ones that stuck with me and illustrate what the dreaming brain is capable of generating. I know that telling someone else about your dream never has the same effect — you had to be there, and "there" was inside your own skull. But I'll try anyway.
The future city. My parents and I were living in a town that looked like nothing I've ever seen. The ground was extremely curved — like hills with exaggerated topology — and structures floated above the landscape. The architecture was this futuristic, warm style that doesn't exist in real life. My brain had generated an entire city from scratch, complete with a consistent aesthetic. I remember walking through it thinking: this place has internal logic. It's not random. The dream architect had a vision.
Two layers deep. I woke up from a dream into what I thought was reality — checked my phone, saw an Instagram follow request from a name I didn't recognize. Then I actually woke up. The follow request, the name, the phone interface — all fabricated. Two nested layers of dreaming, each convincing enough that I didn't question it. This is the one that made me take dream research seriously.
Non-Newtonian volleyball. I was playing volleyball, except the ball didn't follow the laws of gravity. It moved in slow arcs and paused mid-air. The strange part: everyone in the dream played around the new physics perfectly, adjusting their timing and positioning as if this were normal. My brain had altered a fundamental constant and seamlessly updated all the agents in the simulation to compensate.
The remixed video. I fell asleep while watching an America's Got Talent clip on YouTube. In the dream, I watched the same segment — same judges, same stage — but the contestant did something completely different, and the ending diverged. My brain took real sensory input and wrote an alternate storyline on top of it in real time. When I woke up and replayed the actual video, the contrast was surreal.
Football with a kangaroo. We were at some wildlife area and somehow ended up playing football — tackle football — with a kangaroo. It was competitive. The kangaroo was fast. This one doesn't teach you anything profound about consciousness. It's just an absurd scene that could only exist in a dream and I think about it more often than I should.
Once world models and video generation get granular enough in their controllability, I plan on recreating some of these. The future city especially — I can still see it clearly.
Lucid dreaming changed how I think about consciousness. The fact that you can be simultaneously generating a hallucinatory world and reflecting on it with partial waking awareness tells you something about how modular consciousness is. It's not a binary switch between "asleep" and "awake" — it's a collection of subsystems that can be activated in different combinations.
It also gave me a more visceral understanding of how much your brain constructs your experience of reality. In a dream, every person, texture, sound, and emotion is generated from within. Lucid dreaming lets you catch the machinery in the act.
And practically: it's a skill. Like any skill, it responds to practice, weakens with neglect, and has diminishing returns without increasing the challenge. The techniques above will get most people to their first lucid dream within a month. Getting to reliable, on-command induction takes longer — but it's one of the more rewarding projects I've undertaken.