Secrets to Create a Lucid Dream or Out of Body Experience

Photo by averie woodard

I wrote this blog a while back to promote my Sleep album from Guided Meditation Treks. It sat on my hard drive for a while, and I've moved on to other albums since then, but I've still remained an avid lucid dreamer. These are the secrets I've uncovered in researching and experiencing this topic for many years. If you're not familiar with the concepts, a lucid dream is a dream where you know you are dreaming. Once you become lucid in a dream, you can become a conscious creator of it. Imagine yourself in a world where anything is possible – a world where the physics of earth do not apply. It’s not only a world where the repercussions of an action have no (known) physical consequences, but it’s also a world where you can have just about any experience delivered to you at will. As a lucid dreamer, it becomes possible for you to visit unimaginable places in your dream and even co-create the dream itself! An out of body experience is similar in that the steps to induce it are similar, but the difference is that your consciousness remains in some version of the physical reality instead of the dream world. Here are the secrets to go to these places!

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​Dreams are another plane of existence

The verdict from physical science as to what dreams are and how they serve us is still out; however, spiritualists and metaphysicians have been using the dream world to help us in the waking world for many centuries. The practice of dreaming is as old as humans, and so is the practice of using our dreams to learn about our subconscious. Nonetheless, just as many of us sleep through our waking life, so too do we sleep through our dreams.

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Becoming Lucid

​Becoming lucid in a dream takes us to the next level of understanding because, by being aware that we are in a dream, we can then use this knowledge to access realms in the dream world that cannot be reached from the waking world. Want to talk to your spirit guide? Just ask in a lucid dream, and there’s a good chance one will appear. Want to meet the girl of your dreams? Dial her up in your dream. Want to talk to a loved one who has passed? You can often find them in your dreams.
 
The key to having a lucid dream lies in one thing – awareness that you are dreaming. The most common way to do this is to practice awareness exercises during the day to check if you are in a dream. Once you practice this often, it will become a habit to also do so during dreams, and sure enough, you will be able to recognize it. For me personally, if I feel like I might be in a dream, I’ll try jumping in the air. If my dream body floats slowly back to the ground instead of falling quicklyback down to Earth, I know I’m dreaming! Then, I can take control. So, essentially, becoming lucid during a dream state is an awareness exercise – but there’s another way...

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​Wake Induced Lucid Dream

​It is possible for you to go directly into a dream in such a way that you are conscious all the way from a waking state directly into the dream. In this case, you don’t “become lucid” during a dream, you are already lucid before the dream begins. This is the preferred method of many because it can often be a more reliable way to enter a lucid dream than to try to “catch yourself” in the middle of a regular dream. However, inducing a lucid dream from a waking state is not something that we can easily do any time of the day because dreaming is dependent on our brainwave frequencies. For example, when you first go to bed at night, your body tends to try and get its deepest sleep first. These brainwave frequencies for deep sleep are too slow for dreaming, so it’s harder for us to lucid dream at the beginning of the night, especially after a long day when all our body wants to do is get into deep sleep instead of have secret agent adventures in dreams. So, what should we do if we want to go straight into a lucid dream?

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​The Best Time to Lucid Dream

​Studies have shown that, while the first half of a night’s sleep is dedicated to non-dreaming deep sleep, the second half of a night’s sleep is dedicated more to dreaming. As we approach morning, more and more of our sleep time is spent in higher brainwave frequencies (called the Theta state), where our brain begins to dream. As such, the second half of the night is the best time to lucid dream.

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​Inducing a Lucid Dream from a waking state

​With that understanding, the best time for us to go directly into a lucid dream is in the middle of the night, after a couple of full sleep cycles, somewhere after 3am. Experience has shown that, if we can wake up and become fully conscious for a short time (up to an hour), then go back to bed with the intention to have a lucid dream, it is possible for us to slip DIRECTLY into such a dream at that time in the night! However, there are some methods that go along with it.

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​Steps to have a wake-induced lucid dream

Step 1: Wake up in the middle of the night
First off, as I said above, it is best to wake up and gain full consciousness first. So, around 4 in the morning or so, get out of bed. Go to the bathroom or maybe pick up a book about dreaming. Perhaps even meditate a bit. Get conscious and give yourself up to an hour to gain a conscious state.

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Step 2: Lie back down in bed and get uncomfortable.
Lie in bed and get into a position that is one position away from your dreaming position. For example, I like to dream on my back, so I’d lie down first on my stomach for a bit. If you dream on your side, you might lie on your back first. Eventually, your body is going to tell your mind that it wants to shift. This is how your body knows if your mind is awake or not – it tells your mind to shift your body, and if you agree to do it, it knows your brain is awake. If you don’t shift, it assumes your brain is asleep. The key is to fool it by keeping your brain awake, but letting your body think it went to sleep.

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Photo Credit: Anthony Tran

Step 3: Stop Drop and Roll
A good way to do this might be to start off on your back. Stop moving and keep your legs uncrossed. Put your hands resting on the pillow beside your head so your arms are like the goalposts of a football field. After a couple of minutes, your body will tell you to rest your hands beside your body because it’s kind of uncomfortable to sleep with your arms up like that. So, at that point, go ahead and drop your arms. Move your hands to your side, taking care to ensure that your arms are on the bed and not touching you. Then, wait.

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​Eventually, your body will tell you to shift again. This is where you will shift to your final position for dreaming. So in this case, you might roll on to your side. At that point, this will be your final position, so from here on out, do not move!

Step 4: Don’t move a muscle.
Once you are in the dreaming position, this is the most important part. Keep your eyes still behind closed eyelids. Resist the urge to rock your legs or move your arms. Keep your body PERFECTLY STILL. At some point, your body might tell you to scratch an itch or roll over. This is the test! Make your mind ignore the signal and stay totally still while maintaining awareness. At this point, your body will assume that your mind has gone asleep, then the fun begins.

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Step 5: the colors and vibrations, man!
At this point, your body will begin to shut down. It will literally paralyze itself so you don’t act out your dreams. If your mind is still awake during this process, this can be a very scary time! Feeling paralyzed in bed might lead to other fears manifesting, such as dark beings beside you. Don’t worry about this. It is normal. You are beginning to transition out of the physical reality into the dream reality! During this process you might also feel a vibrating as if someone is calling your cell phone. This is said to be your astral body ‘changing frequencies’ to move out of your physical body and into the “astral world” where we dream and have Out of Body Experiences (OBEs), also known as astral projection. During the transition, continue to stay perfectly still as you witness this transition. Stay calm and notice what you see without being too caught up in it.

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Step 6: Explore!
Once the transition has completed, you will then find that your body awareness has shifted from the physical body in your bed into your non-physical body. This might be a dream body, in which case you can then begin a lucid dream from here, or it might be an astral body, in which case you can then explore an out of body experience. These two experiences are related, but from here on out, your experience is your own! At some point, the colors and images will become actual dream scenes, and you will notice that moving an arm does not move your physical arm, but rather, your dream body arm! From there, the magic begins!

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Try the Sleep Album to get A Guided Version of These Techniques

The Sleep Album from Guided Meditation Treks includes a track with this exercise, and the Sleep App for iOS an in-app purchase for a guided meditation to help you go directly into a wake-induced lucid dream. Using a library of drone noises to help clear your mind, real-time spoken word relaxation exercises to walk you through the steps, and the technologies of binaural beats and isochronic pulses to ease your brain into a state of dreaming, this app and album will help you create your own lucid dreams. Just always remember to keep a dream journal so you can write down your experience at the end of the dream and remember it forever! Check out the app at the iTunes store, or the mp3s of the album at CDBaby!