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Ask HN: Do you practice lucid dreaming?

by raunometsa on 2/22/25, 12:45 PM with 26 comments

• by wruza on 2/22/25, 3:33 PM

  It's a full virtual reality experience not only with visuals and sounds but with taste, touch, and emotions, too.

  The commonly experienced downside is lack of real control. Once you get really involved, you just wake up. Nice if you can avoid that, but doesn’t work for me. I have to stay in the mid-zone that is similar to when you wake up but decide to sleep further.

  After some success around ten years ago, I found that it’s not much better than just dreaming and gave up on it. Together with 5-HTP, normal dreaming is like a blockbuster compared to dull prose you can write yourself in LD. I don’t think that I could solve a “5 bullets vs 6 monsters on the block while on a jump stick” problem in LD. (The answer is to find an armed monster and kill it first to get more bullets). Or taking the knife out of perps hand and carving crosses on his knees. How can you come up with that in LD without waking up from laughing?

• by Quinzel on 2/25/25, 7:56 AM

  I do practice lucid dreaming but haven’t really done so lately.

  I figured out how to easily induce lucid dreaming for myself basically by letting myself become sleep deprived and then drinking copious amounts of caffeine before letting myself nap. Somehow, that almost always results in a lucid dream state.

  Then in my lucid dreams, I often choose to dream about things that I wish were a reality in my real life, but that are not. Often relating to desired connections and relationships with people i’d like to have relationships with in real life, but can’t for whatever reason. Maybe it’s partly due to my anxious-avoidant attachment style, but I struggle to have healthy romantic relationships or even to maintain friendships for very long. The other reason I use lucid dreams (less often) is for exam preparation. I lucid dream that I am studying my course material etc usually the night before. Somehow it helps with recalling facts etc during exams the next day.

• by guzik on 2/22/25, 2:28 PM

  LD is becoming popular again? I feel like I’m seeing more and more threads about it lately. Even my friends are getting back into practicing LD after abandoning it because of how hard it was to achieve. I think I’ve had a lucid dream twice in my life-each lasting about 4–5 seconds - and honestly, those were some of the most exciting seconds I’ve ever experienced. It’s like being a god, even if just for a moment. The problem? To get there, I had to grind for almost a year—writing down my dreams, doing reality checks etc. Too much effort.

• by raaron773 on 2/25/25, 11:47 AM

  I actually have tried it but i dont practice it. Performing realty check is really important but at the same time you have to make sure that your check fails in dream. Once, made a mistake that my reality check passed in a dream and i went on about it without thinking much.

  I never realized how exhausting it can be once you wake up.

• by elmerfud on 2/22/25, 2:34 PM

  This is something that has always come naturally to me even when I was a child. I remember when I first learned about a lucid dreaming in my teenage years and I was surprised that this wasn't normal for everyone. Except for very rare situations I have always been aware that I am dreaming and once I am aware of the dream I can exert complete control over it.

• by ANighRaisin on 2/22/25, 10:42 PM

  I've been attempting WILD every few days whenever it's convenient. No luck so far, but it's not something I'm taking particularly seriously. For that reason, I'm still not sure whether it'd be worth doing a dream journal or risk disrupting more of my sleep.

• by pizza on 2/23/25, 7:17 AM

  For years I tried and never got it. Though these days, I only remember, or have, a dream once every few months.