I was eight years old, and it was playtime at my primary school. Standing in the playground, I looked up at the wooden gate keeping my friends and me penned in. It was so unbelievably enormous, and I didn’t want to be stuck behind it anymore.
So, I decided to float. Up, up, up, and over the gate I flew, over the chimney tops of my village, all the way home – watched by the shocked and delighted eyes of my classmates and neighbours.
That was a lucid dream – meaning, I had realised that I was dreaming and created my own adventure.
As a child, I had plenty of other lucid dreams, in which I became invisible, rode lions, swam through custard, saved the world armed with a toy car and a garden hose – but I mostly flew up and away, into the sky.
Now I’m an adult, my lucid dreams have become less frequent and less exciting. At their best, they allow me to spend time with family members who have passed away.
I would love to get more out of my sleep, to return to the joy and adventure of my childhood lucid dreams. But is lucidity something you can learn and hone?
Neuroscientists seem to think so. That’s why I asked for their help, to find out if they could teach me – and you – how to take control of our dreams.
What is lucid dreaming?
In my quest to learn to control my dreams, the first person I speak to is Dr Martin Dresler, principal investigator of the Donders Sleep & Memory lab in the Netherlands.
“A lucid dream is a dream in which you realise that you are dreaming without waking up,” he tells me. “There are lots of discussions about how far there should be other aspects, such as dream control, to describe something as a lucid dream.
“But the simplest definition – and I like to keep things simple – is, if in a dream you realise you’re dreaming without waking up, that’s a lucid dream.”
Like me, Dresler had a lot of lucid dreams as a child. But his went away completely when he got older, until he began researching dreams.
“It’s fascinating how the brain is able to simulate, in such a detailed way, a complete reality without any sensory input, in lucid dreams,” he says. “My lucid dreams are very short if I have them, but they’re always long enough to start flying around, even if it’s just 10 or 20 seconds.”
But Dresler explains he’s interested in lucid dreams for more than just fun. He says they can help scientists understand the brain.
That’s because, when we become lucid in a dream, there is a “massive change in cognition and consciousness”, he explains.
It always happens during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep: a stage when our brains become more active and we dream more vividly. REM sleep mostly happens towards the end of the night.
Although we stay in the same sleep stage as regular dreaming, Dresler says that lucidity is a significant and “very clean switch from one level of consciousness to a different one.”
But lucid dreaming doesn’t happen very often. Neuroscientists estimate that only 50 per cent of people ever have a lucid dream in their lifetime, says Dresler, and most lucid dreamers only have them every now and again.
“It’s such a rare phenomenon,” he adds – which, I have to admit, makes me feel quite smug.
Why do we dream in the first place?
So, I’m going to be embarking on a quest to do something that scientists don’t understand. But I am somewhat comforted in the knowledge that lucid dreaming is not the only mystery to be solved when it comes to sleep research.
Far from it. Neuroscientists still know precious little about plain-old dreams.
That’s what neuroscientist Prof Ken Paller tells me – the second expert I speak to in my quest, from Northwestern University, USA.
“Why do we dream at all? Nobody knows,” he says. “People come up with theories. My personal orientation is to be a little cautious and say, I’m not sure why we dream. I’m open to the idea that it has no benefits for us whatsoever.”
Dreaming, he says, might be the result of our brains sorting through our daytime memories, making connections and storing them.
Alternatively, according to Dresler, our dreams might offer us an opportunity to experiment safely in a simulated reality, to play with danger in a secure way.
“Both threats and social situations are absolutely crucial for survival and reproduction,” he explains. “However, you cannot just try them out during wakefulness. You cannot go into the forest and try to find out the best way to fight a wolf or run from a bear.”
And, he adds, social faux pas used to be much more dangerous. Making a fool of yourself could mean being cast out from your group, putting your survival at risk.
But during a dream, our brains can play out plenty of risky scenarios to figure out ones which might work.
“During a dream, you can try out new ways of how to fight a wolf – or how to take your exams from 20 years ago all over again, in front of the class, naked,” says Dresler. “That nicely explains why social and threatening situations are highly overrepresented in dreams, compared to wakefulness.”
And, he adds, it might explain why our brains try to keep us from being lucid. Being unaware that we’re in a dream might encourage us to genuinely try when navigating our brain’s simulated realities.
Read more:
- How to have more lucid dreams
- 8 science-backed secrets to a more restful night's sleep
- Here's what your nationality says about your sleep needs
Lucid dreaming can help you learn
Scientists don’t understand why we dream – let alone lucid dream – so they can’t be sure what the benefits will be if I master how to bend my dreams to my will.
However, if dreams might offer us a chance to develop skills, could I hack my dreams to get better at whatever skills I’d like? The science on lucid dreaming is sparse, but so far, the answer seems to be ‘yes’.
In fact, a 2023 review concluded that decades of small, experimental studies indicate lucid dreaming could help improve motor performance.
By lying in bed and imagining movement, we could get better at it – and some elite athletes already say they train in their lucid dreams.
It’s an area which fascinates Charlie Morley, the third lucid dreaming expert I spoke to. Morley isn’t a scientist, but he was recommended to me by neuroscientist Prof Paller.
Morley teaches people how to become lucid in their dreams and has been involved in several scientific studies – including some of Paller’s.
“There are literally dozens of studies on athletes practising their athletic discipline in lucid dreams,” he tells me. “They’re getting markedly better in the waking state.
“I’ve worked with a tennis player and a basketball player, and they’re interested in whether you can get a couple per cent extra optimisation in their athletic disciplines. That can mean a lot for high-level athletes.”
Doing sums in your sleep
But athletic skills aren’t the only things I might be able to learn in my dreams. Paller’s research has investigated whether lucid dreamers could communicate from their dreams, calculate sums, solve problems, and more.
To do this, his team developed a method of helping people get lucid in their dreams. It starts when they’re awake and study participants listen to a noise, like a single note played on a violin.
Every time they hear that sound, participants are told to ask themselves, ‘Am I in a dream?’ After checking how they feel, they conclude, ‘No, I’m awake. This is reality.’
After a while, these individuals begin to associate that sound with this process of ‘reality checking’.
Then, when each participant is in REM sleep and dreaming, the researchers play that same sound to them, quiet enough that it doesn’t wake them up.
The hope is that the dreamer hears that sound and asks themselves, “Am I in a dream?” And this time, the answer should be ‘yes’.
“We instruct them: if you’re in a dream, and you know it’s a dream, make a left, right, left, right signal with your eyes,” says Paller, who can record these eye movements.
Lucid dreamers can listen to his voice and respond, he tells me – and then the scientists can communicate with them.
“Now we have a way for us to ask them questions, and for them to answer with coded signals – with their eyes or with sniffing,” he explains.
“We use sniffing a lot now, so three sniffs in a row means something, and we’ll have them go to sleep knowing that, but not knowing what we’re going to say to them.”
In Paller's studies, participants were able to answer maths problems in their sleep – correctly.
And further studies have suggested that dreamers could do more complicated tasks in their sleep, such as solving puzzles or memorising faces.
Personally, I have sometimes surprised myself by practising my French language skills during lucid dreams – occasionally coming up with actually serviceable French.
Lucid dreaming can improve your mental health
Solving maths problems and learning new skills might be useful, but lucid dreaming has far more potential than that. It can truly transform people’s lives.
Most of the research here is on people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), one of the symptoms of which is recurrent nightmares.
Morley – the lucid dreaming teacher – often teaches people how to conquer their nightmares, especially for those who have PTSD.
That was how Morley got into lucid dreaming himself. He had lucid dreams growing up and – very much a teenage boy at the time – used them to “have sex and be really good at skateboarding.”
But, at the age of 17, Morley began to have nightmares, frequently dreaming of a terrifying figure in a wasteland – which he believes was a symptom of undiagnosed PTSD.
After doing some research on lucid dreaming, Morley became lucid in one of these nightmares and shouted at the figure: “Fuck off! This is a dream. This is a dream. This isn’t real.”
Then the nightmare changed to what he describes as his teenage self’s idea of paradise at the time: “a big skateboard ramp, and on the top were all these girls in bikinis smoking joints.” And he never had nightmares again.
Now, Morley leads lucid dreaming courses and retreats where he teaches people to become lucid, sometimes with the goal of subverting their nightmares or processing trauma.
During the day, his students will plan what they want to do in their dreams – what Morley calls “planting seeds” – and then attempt to recreate those scenarios when lucid.
If you’ve ever seen or read Harry Potter, you might remember boggarts: shape-shifting creatures that take the form of their opponent’s greatest fear.
Just like a wizarding schoolchild, a lucid dreamer can force their tormentor to wear their grandmother’s clothes, turn an enormous snake into a jack-in-the-box clown, or simply acknowledge that their demon isn’t real, in order to defeat their nightmares.
And Morley says that some people with childhood trauma choose to meet their childhood selves, and show that child love by giving them a hug and comforting them: another form of lucid dreaming therapy.
Morley says: “Once you’re lucid, you’re basically conscious in the unconscious, a bit like a state of hypnotherapy, so anything you can treat through hypnotherapy, you can treat through lucid dreaming.”
It should be acknowledged that the scientific literature on this is still quite scant, but Dresler confirms: “Lucid dreaming is a very capable nightmare therapy.”
He adds that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has recommended lucid dreaming therapy as a first-line treatment for people with nightmare disorders since 2018.
“Even though there are not many studies on it, I think the working mechanism is so intuitive and clear that if you, during a nightmare, realise it’s not real, it takes much of the power out of that nightmare,” says Dresler.
How to learn to lucid dream
I may not have PTSD or recurrent nightmares, but it’s exciting to appreciate the full potential of what I could use my lucid dreams to do – so, my next question is, how do I do it?
Well, the most crucial part is to make myself realise that I’m dreaming whilst I’m asleep – and there are plenty of techniques I could try.
Paller has his sound method, but that has to be done during REM sleep and at exactly the right volume, which I can’t easily recreate at home.
But Dresler recommends simply paying more attention to my dreams, thinking about them more – and potentially starting a dream diary.
“By just thinking more about your dreams, you might start thinking about your dreams when you’re dreaming too,” he says.
While that might work for some people, I’ve tried that before, and it took up a lot of time.
Instead, I begin ‘entertaining’ (or more accurately, boring to tears) my partner most mornings with long tales of what I dreamt that night.
After just a few days, I have a lucid dream. Simply by thinking about my dreams more, I have three lucid dreams in a single week – more than I’ve had in years.
But these lucid dreams aren’t very exciting. I don’t do much aside from realising that I’m dreaming. And, within a couple of weeks, they stop altogether.
So, it’s time to bring out the big guns. Another method that Dresler suggests is reality checking.
Reality checking can get quite strange. There are endless questions I can use to test my own reality, such as: What did I do five minutes ago? If I pinch my nose, can I still breathe? Can I switch on a light and notice instant brightness?
If I do these reality checks often enough, the hope is that I might start checking reality in my dreams. So, at random points in the day, I start to ask myself: am I dreaming?
And, though it feels a bit ridiculous, I have to admit that this one works. It’s not long before I’m swimming in an underwater basement and I ask myself; can I breathe? The answer is yes. I can breathe in water – so it’s a dream.
That sets off one of my most fun lucid dreams in a very long time, involving trashing a large corporate office, doing a lot of risky parkour, stealing a car, and fleeing from police. I’m a very meek and law-abiding citizen in my waking life, so all this crime is exhilarating.
I want more of these dreams, so I ask Morley for some advice. He suggests I try a ‘wakeup practice’ – a technique that he says is effective, but not right for everyone, because it involves setting an alarm for four or five o’clock in the morning.
The idea is to wake up during REM sleep and then, Morley says, “you drop back asleep when it’s easier to catch the bounce of these REM periods,” giving you an extra go at lucid dreaming.
For the sake of myself and my partner, I instead decided to extend my sleep to nine and half hours per night, giving me longer to dream in the REM stage.
However, I do give one of Morley’s suggestions a go. He says that practicing mindfulness and setting intentions can be powerful – so I go to a yoga class and, during the meditation portion of the session, say to myself over and over again: ‘Tonight, I will remember to recognise I’m dreaming.’
A few hours later, when I’m lying in bed, I plan what I want to do in my lucid dream and reaffirm my intention to lucid dream that night. I feel a bit silly.
But, when I fall asleep, I become fully lucid and do what I haven’t done in a dream since I was a teenager.
Finding myself in my childhood home, I climb up to the loft and out of a roof window. With one push from my feet, I fly up, up into the sky, over the big tree that used to stand in my neighbour’s front garden, and far, far away.
Epilogue: what I’ll be taking from this
In the following weeks, I really have a play, making my dreams bend to my will. I visit Paris and spend days swanning around cafes trying all the baked goods – and I normally avoid gluten, so this one is a big treat.
Another night, in a strange house full of plants and animals, I find that an attic floor is missing, so I decide to fill it in with knitted woollen squares. Then, the floor feels like a soft hammock.
These may feel like little – and very weird – details, but it takes a lot of mental effort to control what’s going on around me. And, although it’s fun, I often wake up tired.
Paller confirms that I’m not the only one to feel this. He says: “Some lucid dreamers suggest that they don’t feel as rested after a lot of lucid dreaming.”
Lucid dreaming might bring extraordinary benefits – for motor skills, learning, problem solving, mental health and more. But, I decide, I’m done forcing them.
Learning to control my dreams was incredibly rewarding, but for now, I’m happy just enjoying lucidity when it comes my way.
Read more:
