How to Increase Your Odds of Having a Lucid Dream

June 10th, 2007

This article is Part 11 in the series Mastering the Art of Lucid Dreaming.

Because dreams take place in the REM sleep state and we experience the REM state more frequently in the later hours of sleep, the chance of achieving a lucid dream is much higher during the last few hours before you wake up. By making a slight adjustment to your sleep pattern, you can take advantage of this increased occurrence of REM sleep to trigger lucid dreams.

Using a "wake-up interval", you can quickly increase your chances of having a lucid dream. The simplest method of employing the wake-up interval technique is to sleep until two hours prior to your usual wake-up time, get out of bed and remain active for one hour, then return to bed for the final hour of sleep. Your chances of achieving a lucid dream in that final hour of sleep will be dramatically increased.

For example, if you typically sleep for eight hours per night, on a normal night you may decide to retire to bed at 11 PM and wake up at 7AM. To use the wake-up interval, you would instead go to bed your usual bedtime of 11 PM but set your alarm for 5 AM — six hours later — then awaken at 5 AM and spend an hour involved in any activity during which you're not likely to fall back to sleep. At 6 AM, you would return to bed and sleep for another hour. (As you can see, this results in a total sleep time of only seven hours, but we'll resolve that problem in a moment.)

During your one-hour wake-up interval, do not stay in bed. Even if you think you'll be able to remain awake for the full hour, chances are very high that you'll fall back to sleep. Instead, get out of bed and participate in other activities during that time. It's the perfect time to read about lucid dreaming, to review your past dream journal entries, and to use other conscious dreaming techniques.

I don't recommend watching television or using a computer during your wake-up interval. The flickering light of the TV or the glaring light of the computer screen can trick the mind into thinking it's daytime, which can in turn interfere with your sleep and your dream cycle when you go back to bed.

When you return to bed after your wake-up interval, as you drift off to sleep perform the same lucid dreaming techniques you use in the evening before bedtime.

As you may have noticed, when using the wake-up interval technique described above, an hour of sleep is lost. There are two different ways to handle this. You may elect to forfeit the lost hour of sleep, or, for better rest and better results, make up for the one-hour wake-up interval by retiring to bed an hour earlier in the evening or sleeping an hour later in the morning.

Stay tuned for the next article in this series, which will describe how to induce a lucid dream from the waking state.