Best Times for a Lucid Dream

By: Jerry A. Greene

The more often you are able to have lucid dreams, the more you will be willing to put the time into learning how to have lucid dreams at will. Knowing the time to "target" for lucid dreaming will give you the best chances for achieving the state on a consitent basis.

Sleep Cycles
When you go to sleep, you brain goes through a cycle of periods of deep (body rejuvenating) and light (brain rejuvenating) sleep. Psychologists believe that the main reason we have more deep sleep at the beginning of the night, is because our bodies need the time to rest and rejuvenate.something we generally don't have time for during the day.

At one point, during this cycle, we enter the state of REM sleep, or (Rapid Eye Movement). This is the time when we are most likely to experience dreams.

Studies have shown that we have more REM, or rapid eye movement sleep, during the later part of our sleep cycles. Towards the morning, we have more REM sleep than deep sleep and are therefore more apt to experience vivid dreams during this time. If you think about it, during the night you may have many dreams, but generally only really remember the ones within the last couple of hours just before you wake.

Studies have also shown that when we nap, we tend to go into REM sleep pretty quickly, without any real deep sleep. Because of this, naps happen to be one of the best time to have lucid dreams.

Taking Naps Increases the Chance for Lucid Dreams
There are 3 good reasons to why naps are great for lucid dreaming:

First of all, REM sleep is characteristic of naps.which again is when dreams occur.

Second, we have been awake for some time before the nap, causing our objective mind to have been quite active for part of the day already.

Third, we enter the dream state rather quickly.

Most lucid dreamers would agree that they tend to have more lucid dreams towards the end of the night, or during naps.

Of course, due to your schedule, you may not have much time, or ability to take naps in order to experience lucid dreams in that way.

The Best Time to Have Lucid Dreams
In my experience with lucid dreams, most of mine (100's of them now) have happened during a time in the morning that I specifically plan for.

The exercise I am going to discuss now, must of course, work with your schedule. You may want to try this on weekends, unless you can get to work at a later time :)

One of the best ways to increase your chances of having a lucid dream is to go to sleep at your normal time, but to set your alarm to wake you about an hour and a half before you would normally wake up.

Do something very active for at least a half hour to get your objective mind to be very active. One of the best things to do is to analyze the dream you were having when you woke up and look for dream-signs. Then get up from bed and do something active for a few minutes. Anything that engages your objective mind in one way, or another.

After this period of relative activity, go back to sleep with the thought that you will try to recognize when you are dreaming. Perhaps do a few reality checks and then nod off to sleep. With enough practice, you will most likely experience a lucid dream within a few days. Never give up, if you don't experience one right away. Trust me, it is well worth the effort!

One thing for sure is that if you DO in fact have a lucid dream, you must take note of the things you did to have it. Not only what dream sign made it happen, but what did you do in waking life to make it happen? How were you sleeping? On your right side.left side? On your back? On your stomach? The scientists that study lucid dreaming tend to believe that certain postures of sleep encourage lucid dreaming.

Now, whenever you want to have another lucid dream, make sure you try to duplicate the events prior to going to sleep, as well as how you were laying when you last had the lucid dream. You'll tend to increase your chances, every time you do this. The main point is that once you find something that works, you need to trust yourself to keep at it.

Some people experience lucid dreams many days in a row, but then completely lose them for a while. It seems that the brain does not always want to co-operate, even though you may have a lot of practice and have had a great deal of success. Other people are are able to have lucid dreams at will. Some of these dreamers are able to produce lucid dreams in a laboratory and have them confirmed by the fact that they are able to signal to the outside world with a predetermined eye movement that has been decided upon before going to sleep. You can read more about these types of experiments in Stephen LaBerge's "Lucid Dreaming".