Everything you want to know about lucid dreaming

I find myself anything but dreamy, but I always find dreams so interesting. That it can say something about your state of mind or about things you still need to process — often that's the case for me. Not as cryptic as you often read on those dream websites (‘do you dream about a horse? That means freedom is yours from now on’. Eeh, okay…), usually I can also deduce where something comes from and for what reason it ended up in my dream.

But what I often struggle with are nightmares. And I found that quite strange at first, because okay — kids complain about nightmares, but I’m now 31, so you’d expect not to have those anymore, right? But well, I did have them and decided to do something about it. To take matters into my own hands. Literally. I started to delve into lucid dreaming.

Not familiar with it? A lucid dream means that you are aware that you are dreaming. When you are aware of this, you can — by training it — steer your dream. In my nightmares, I often vaguely realized that this couldn’t be real, but I couldn’t really do anything with that at the time.

And so I started to train that. If you’ve never had a lucid dream: you can train that too. Ask yourself several times during the day: is this really real? Can this be or am I dreaming? Of course, you know that you are not dreaming because you are awake, but do this often enough and it will come back in your dream. Then hopefully you can become aware while dreaming that this is a dream and gradually steer your dream in the direction you want.

When you dream and you have the suspicion (in your dream, oh god, is this getting a bit dreamy?) that you are not awake, check something that has time on it. Or try to read something. Something on your phone, a phone number, something like that. In your dreams, that is not possible. Time does not exist and a clock with hands will not work or will be unreadable. The same goes for messages or pieces of text: you cannot read those in your dream. Typing phone numbers is the same. It doesn’t work.

So I taught myself that when I have a nightmare, I try to become aware of it by looking out for clocks, by grabbing/finding something in my dream that I can read. When I then realize that it’s a dream, I can often steer it or I wake up. Both are good. Sweet dreams.