I’ve never managed to get myself to go reliably lucid with a regular sleep cycle. Dream journaling for weeks at a time doesn’t work, and then I develop an aversion to writing down my dreams and stop it. Reality check habits don’t work, and I develop an aversion to doing them while awake in a couple of days for whatever reason. Recurring dream signs don’t seem to show up regularly enough that I could develop a habit of noticing them, though I guess this could be made to work if I had months’ worth of dream diaries.
Wake back to bed does work for me, but it mostly gets me wake-induced lucid dreams that last a few minutes and don’t get very fun before I zone out into regular sleep. Then it tends to stop working and start messing up my sleep cycle when I can’t get back to sleep after waking up early, so I haven’t practiced it regularly. The basic trick seems to be that with regular sleep, you go into hours of deep sleep and full unconsciousness, and then when you start dreaming you’re so zoned out from that that you don’t get your rational faculties online. When you do a properly timed wake back to bed, you deliberately get your mind going after the deep sleep phase, and then go quickly from being fully alert and prepared to lucid dream into an actual dream state, and retain a lot more of the mental alertness.
I also recently noticed that if I go to bed earlier than usual and spend the first 30 minutes lying on my back and meditating (I lie on my side to fall asleep), I seem to consistently have a lot more vivid dreams in the early morning. I’ll see if keeping up with this will help with developing some sleep cycle preserving lucid dreaming skills as well.
I’ve never managed to get myself to go reliably lucid with a regular sleep cycle. Dream journaling for weeks at a time doesn’t work, and then I develop an aversion to writing down my dreams and stop it. Reality check habits don’t work, and I develop an aversion to doing them while awake in a couple of days for whatever reason. Recurring dream signs don’t seem to show up regularly enough that I could develop a habit of noticing them, though I guess this could be made to work if I had months’ worth of dream diaries.
Wake back to bed does work for me, but it mostly gets me wake-induced lucid dreams that last a few minutes and don’t get very fun before I zone out into regular sleep. Then it tends to stop working and start messing up my sleep cycle when I can’t get back to sleep after waking up early, so I haven’t practiced it regularly. The basic trick seems to be that with regular sleep, you go into hours of deep sleep and full unconsciousness, and then when you start dreaming you’re so zoned out from that that you don’t get your rational faculties online. When you do a properly timed wake back to bed, you deliberately get your mind going after the deep sleep phase, and then go quickly from being fully alert and prepared to lucid dream into an actual dream state, and retain a lot more of the mental alertness.
I also recently noticed that if I go to bed earlier than usual and spend the first 30 minutes lying on my back and meditating (I lie on my side to fall asleep), I seem to consistently have a lot more vivid dreams in the early morning. I’ll see if keeping up with this will help with developing some sleep cycle preserving lucid dreaming skills as well.