The Lucid Dream Primer

Below are some preliminary steps you must take to help increase your chances of success in having lucid dreams:

Step 1: Understanding The Sleep Cycle

The first thing to do is to learn about the sleep cycle. Once you do, you can more effectively plan out the best time to have a lucid dream.

Research has shown that we sleep in 1.5 hour intervals. And since an average night's sleep lasts for roughly 8 hours, then we have at least five (5) intervals of sleep before we wake up in the morning.

Each of these 1.5 hour intervals consist of two different states:

1. NREM (Non Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep
-This is the phase where your mind falls into the deep state of relaxation, preparing you for REM sleep.

2. REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep
-When you enter the Rapid Eye Movement state, this is where dreams begin to occur.

As you get in bed and fall asleep in the evening, your mind goes into this NREM state, where your body becomes completely relaxed and you begin to wind down into the REM state. It is during this NREM state that you begin to lose consciousness so that by the time you enter REM sleep, you are submersed in the dream and you have no clue that you have fallen asleep. Everything in the dream, you now perceive as real.

When the REM state ends, you return back to the NREM state and you gradually begin to resurface to consciousness. This whole 1.5 hour sleep interval process of going from NREM to REM and then back to NREM again happens every night. And regardless of what some people tell you, each time this happens, you have a dream while in the REM state. You may not remember what that dream was while you were in the REM state, but rest assured, you did in fact have an actual dream.

So the first key to learning lucid dreaming is to have better recall of your dreams each night that you enter these REM sleep states throughout each night. To improve your recall so that you better remember all your dreams, the most effective way to do this is through the use of a "Dream Journal".

Step 2: Start a Dream Journal:

Starting a Dream Journal is vital to the mastery of lucid dreaming. After all, how can you effectively have lucid dreams if you can't even remember if you had one the next morning.

So before you go to bed, get a tablet and a pen or pencil. Place it by your bedside table or as close to you as possible, so that when you wake up, it will be within reach and you can begin jotting down key information about the dream that you just had.

Believe it or not, this works! A lot of people simply say "I don't have or rarely have any dreams". This is completely untrue. The truth is, they have dozens of dreams every night. They just forget them completely, because they never wrote them down after waking up. Once you start keeping a dream journal, you'll notice that you start remembering a lot more of your dreams each morning. If you keep a dream journal long enough, pretty soon you will remember almost all your dreams. It will really shock you that you are indeed dreaming so much.

Try it for just a week if you don't believe me. You'll see that by keeping a dream journal for just a week, you will begin seeing a huge increase in the amount of dreams you are having.

Now that you know about the Sleep Cycle and you are keeping a Dream Journal, it's time to begin learning how to do Reality Checks...