Do you want to know how to enter REM sleep purposefully? How can scheduling your REM sleep help you lucid dream?
In their book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold explain how you can learn to optimize your sleep cycles for lucid dreaming. This involves waking up in a specific way every morning.
Here’s how to optimize your REM cycle.
Learning to Lucid Dream
LaBerge and Rheingold explain that when we dream, we usually watch or participate in the experience without realizing we’re dreaming. Because we don’t know we’re in a dream, it unfolds much like we experience waking life—things happen around us and we respond to them.
In a lucid dream, however, you realize you’re dreaming, and you can consciously influence the dream and change any aspect of it. This can open up a universe of experiences: Instead of being limited by the real world, in a lucid dream you’re limited only by your imagination.
Some people have lucid dreams without intending to, but the authors explain that lucid dreaming is also something you can train yourself to do. One way to do this is to learn how to enter REM sleep.
Optimize Your Sleep
Lucid dreams, like all dreams, happen during REM cycles. The first thing you can do to set yourself up for successful lucid dream exploration is to optimize your sleep schedule so you go through more REM cycles each night. The authors explain that you have more REM cycles in the second half of the night than in the first—lucid dreams often occur right before people wake up in the morning. Therefore, the later you sleep in, the greater the chance you’ll have a lucid dream.
(Shortform note: Not everyone has more REM cycles in the second half of their sleep period. Many common sleep disorders involve irregular sleep cycle patterns. For example, people with narcolepsy enter REM sleep much faster than the typical 90 minutes, often within 15 minutes of falling asleep. They also tend to spend a greater proportion of their sleep time in REM, and some research has shown, perhaps unsurprisingly, that narcoleptics also have more lucid dreams than the average population.)
If you can, sleep later to give yourself more time in REM sleep. However, if your schedule doesn’t allow for sleeping in, you can wake yourself up early, stay awake for an hour or more, and then go back to sleep to catch up on your missed sleep. You’ll have more REM sleep during the second period and a higher likelihood of lucid dreaming.
(Shortform note: A similar technique to the one above uses the snooze button on your alarm to induce lucid dreaming. It works for the same reasons the authors’ method works—but with this technique, you don’t have to get up for an hour or more before returning to sleep. In one study, participants who hit “snooze” had lucid dreams more often than those who didn’t use it. The researchers say the short, typically 9-minute duration of the snooze period may be ideal because it prevents you from falling into a deep sleep where you might forget your dreams or enter a dreamless state.)
