Can you wake up from a lucid dream

But if you can handle waking reality, then it seems generally safe to dream lucidly. However, according to Ellis, even healthy dreamers can have trouble waking up out of a lucid dream sometimes, "and experience a series of 'false awakenings' or will enter a black void before they are able to orient fully to the here and now. And because lucid dreaming isn't a typical sleep state, she adds, some dream experts believe too much lucidity can interrupt one's normal sleep cycle in an unhealthy way.

According to Waggoner, the name of the game is to simply "wait until you feel relatively at peace with your waking state experience before beginning a lucid dream practice. Lucid dreaming is an undoubtedly fascinating, and for many, eye-opening, experience.

While there are some who would do best to avoid it, if you're at peace with your life, you should be fine to give the practice a go by setting the right intentions. Happy dreaming! Want your passion for wellness to change the world? Become A Functional Nutrition Coach!

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Last updated on August 24, In This Article. What are lucid dreams, and why would I want one? So, by increasing your awareness during your waking state, you can enhance your awareness during your dreaming state. Reality testing is a popular way to do this. The method involves doing reality checks throughout the day. Choose one reality check and do it several times a day. You may have to experiment with different reality checks to determine which works best for you.

To increase your chances of lucid dreaming, use these techniques with reality testing and dream journaling. While occasional nightmares are normal, recurring nightmares can be taxing.

They can interfere with consistent quality sleep. It also lets you control the dream, which allows you to turn a nightmare into a more neutral or pleasant scenario. By decreasing nightmares, lucid dreaming may ease nightmare-related anxiety. Visualizing physical movements can increase the actual ability to do them. This may be done during a lucid dream, where the dreamer can mentally practice motor skills.

This is the part of the brain that controls movement. In this regard, lucid dreaming could help physical rehabilitation for people with physical disabilities. It may also benefit people without physical disabilities by improving sports performance and other motor skills. Typically, people who are more creative are more likely to lucid dream.

This might be due to their heightened ability to recall dreams and visualize events. But according to anecdotal reports, it also works the other way around.

People claim lucid dreaming increases their creativity and imagination. Dream interpretation can help you understand the relevance of your dreams. Do certain themes or people show up again and again? These may provide insights into the types of issues your inner psyche is focused on. Keep repeating it until you fall asleep. When you wake up from a dream, stay in bed as you write down anything you remember in your dream journal.

Then, close your eyes and try to go back to sleep, focusing on the dream. Play the dream out in your mind, but this time, imagine that you were aware that you were dreaming. Keep focusing on this as you fall back asleep. Instead of 6, you might try this alternate method, known as Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming. When your alarm goes off, do your best to keep your eyes closed.

As you lie in bed with your eyes closed, keep your mind focused and aware, in order to increase your chances of experiencing a lucid dream. However, know that by keeping your mind awake while letting your body drift to sleep, you may experience a sensation known as sleep paralysis.

This can be very unsettling for some people as your body will feel unable to move as your body enters back into sleep. As it happens, just remind yourself that you are safe and that you are doing this so you can lucid dream. Many eminent thinkers and artists induced sleep paralysis to help them dream up their greatest work, including Benjamin Franklin, Salvador Dali, and Mary Shelley.

The Wake Back to Bed technique involves scheduling alarms to maximize your chances of waking up during REM sleep, so that when you fall back asleep you are more likely to reenter your dream. Set an alarm to go off 4. Only choose one of those times.

The 6 or 7 hour mark is more likely to catch you during a REM stage of sleep, since REM sleep lasts longer in the second portion of the night. When your alarm goes off, stay awake for 30 to 60 minutes. After writing your dream down in your journal, get out of bed and do something. You want your brain to wake up while your body stays sleepy. The participants in Experiment 3 did exactly the same procedure but with a shorter duration 30 min in total; about 10 min for each step.

After the wake period finished, the participants returned to bed. The participants in Experiments 1—3 were instructed to keep practicing MILD while falling asleep, whereas the participants in Experiment 4 were simply instructed to recognize that they dreaming the next time they dream.

Upon returning to bed, the participants were further awakened following these conditions: 1 15 min of uninterrupted REM sleep after 3 h; 2 end of a shorter than 15 min REM period after 4 h; 3 after observing a LRLR eye-signaling on the sleep recording 3 epochs after the last signal. The awakening was made in the same way as before see above.

All recorded dream reports were transcribed, randomly permutated and scored by a blinded judge for lucidity on a 3-point scale 0 — no evidence of a lucid dream, 1 — possible indications of a lucid dream, 2 — clear indication of a lucid dream , which was shown to have a good interrater agreement Stumbrys et al. A successful induction of a lucid dream could be shown by three types of proofs see also Schmid and Erlacher, : 1 self-rating of lucidity; 2 an external rater judged the dream report as either with clear or possible indications of lucidity; 3 the participant reported LRLR eye signaling and the eye signals can be unambiguously identified on the sleep recording during REM.

Of all 62 experimental nights in the present study, one participant Experiment 2 was not able to fall asleep after WBTB. The average WBTB sleep latency for all experimental conditions was In 53 occasions Notably, one participant Experiment 2 reported a lucid dream after a nap without REM sleep. In total, dream reports were collected during the experimental night: 60 from the first part of the night and 55 from the second part of the night. The dream reports had an average length of In total, the participants reported lucid dreams during 20 morning naps following awakening Further, on four occasions 6.

On 14 occasions The judge rated 24 dream reports as without evidence of lucid dreaming exactly the same ones as the dreamers themselves , 22 dream reports as with clear indications of lucid dreaming 19 of which the participants rated as lucid and 3 as ambiguously lucid and two dream reports as with possible indications of lucid dreaming one which was rated by a participant as lucid and one as ambiguously lucid.

Further, on 14 occasions On five occasions 8. In two of those cases there were unequivocal signals during REM sleep observed on the sleep recording, one case was ambiguous and in two other cases no prearranged eye-signaling was observed. On further five occasions 8. Six out of 11 participants All these dreams were verified as lucid by an external judge who scored dream reports. Four participants reported that they produced a LRLR signal three signals were successfully verified on the PSG recording to occur during unambiguous REM sleep; one signal was ambiguous.

Two other participants were unsure if they produced a signal one signal, however, was verified on the PSG; other signal was ambiguous. Eight out of 15 participants In one case, the signal on the PSG recording was ambiguous, in the other case the signal was absent and there were no REM sleep during the nap period.

Five out of 14 participants Two others did not give a signal and one was awakened on making a signal. One participant reported to make a signal but was uncertain if he was dreaming and corresponding PSG recording showed high EEG alpha levels. In the 60 min plus reading condition, only one participant reported a lucid dream, but did not make a LRLR signal. One other participant was uncertain if he was dreaming and made a signal, however, the signal was verified on the PSG recording. In the 60 min plus Wii condition, two participants were unsure if they had a lucid dream.

One of them reported a dream in a dream and told that he made a signal, the other participant was unsure about signaling. No signals were visible on the PSG recording in both cases.

The findings of the present study show that by using a combination of WBTB and MILD techniques, lucid dreams can be effectively induced in people who are not selected for their lucid dream abilities. Under such circumstances, about a half of the participants report a lucid dream and about one out of three participants have a lucid dream which could be objectively verified by volitional eye signaling on the sleep recording.

The achieved success rates are quite high, if compared to other sleep laboratory lucid dream induction studies with unselected student samples. For example, in a study by Paul et al. In the first our experiment, out of four participants who never had a lucid dream before, two became lucid in a single night at the sleep laboratory two out of seven in the second experiment, but four others did not recall any dream content. The duration of WBTB period seems to be an important factor in the effectiveness of technique.

The findings of the present study indicate that WBTB for 1 h might be more efficient than a shorter period of 30 min. The similar finding was reported by LaBerge et al. Two recent sleep laboratory studies applying an acoustic cue during the induction technique of the WBTB-paradigm might shed some light on the timing issue. In the first study lucid dreams were successfully induced in a single nap session by cueing beeping tones with cognitive training Carr et al. The session duration was 20 min and performed in the morning either at am or am.

In the second study a combination of music e. Thus, it seems that not only the duration of the session but also the hours of previous sleep might be important to enhance the chances to experience a lucid dream.

In our fourth study, where two alternative activities for dreamwork were used reading and a balancing task , the success rates were markedly lower. A previous study by Leslie and Ogilvie showed that increased vestibular activation can facilitate dream lucidity, however, in the present study we found no difference between the balancing task and the reading condition. In comparison to reading, the balancing exercise had more disturbing effects on subsequent sleep increased sleep latency and reduced sleep efficiency.

While American Academy of Sleep Medicine AASM, lists a vigorous exercise close to bedtime as one of the factors that can increase arousal and disturb sleep, empirical findings are inconsistent e.

From the present findings, dreamwork writing down the dream, identifying dream signs, practicing MILD can be recommended as the optimal activity during the WBTB period.

The period of wakefulness in early morning hours did not disturb subsequent sleep: In only one case 1. Interestingly, one participant reported a lucid dream after a nap without REM sleep.

While there were no eye-signaling in this case, this might have been an NREM lucid dream, which were also infrequently observed before Stumbrys and Erlacher, The participants in the Experiment 2 had longer sleep latency than the participants in the same condition in the Experiment 1. Yet, the participants in the Experiment 2 achieved very similar lucidity success rates as the ones in the Experiment 1, which suggests that the effectiveness of the present induction method was not influenced by the participation in the seminar e.

Some methodological issues have to be acknowledged. One of the main challenges in all lucid dream induction studies is what to consider a valid criterion for successful induction see Stumbrys et al. While in the most cases the self-ratings and the external ratings corresponded, on a few occasions they diverged.