Have bad dreams or nightmares? Try lucid dreaming
I want to share something that I was extremely fortunate to stumble upon earlier in life. It’s called lucid dreaming, and, in my experience, is a way to avoid or even eliminate bad dreams.
I believe that anyone can learn how to lucid-dream. In such challenging times as these, when anxiety, depression, and insomnia are going through the roof, we need to gird ourselves with every tool we can find to stay sane and functional, if not aspire to be optimistic, happy, and even joyful.
Most people don’t know this, but after losing just one night of sleep, you can enter what is considered a state of psychosis. Much like someone who is drunk, you lose your sense of time and orientation, your perception becomes distorted, you become disconnected from your sense of self and identity and even from your own thoughts, feelings, and memories (known as dissociation), and you become anxious and irritable.
After two days without sleep, you start having disorganized thinking, hallucinations, delusions, and a range of emotional states from apathy and depression to anger, hostility, and outright aggression. The longer you go without sleeping, the more severe the symptoms become.
Bad dreams and nightmares can disrupt a good night’s sleep, nudging us in the direction of these kinds of psychotic symptoms. If severe and frightening enough, bad dreams can discourage us from wanting to sleep at all, a path to a full-blown psychotic break with reality.
Clearly, if we could have some control over our dreams and prevent them from being bad or nightmarish, that would make the sleep experience one that is not only restful and rejuvenating but also alluring and reassuring.
There is the potential to have that positive sleep experience on an ongoing basis if we master how to be a lucid dreamer and put it into regular practice.
My own experience with lucid dreaming
I haven’t had a nightmare or a truly bad dream in so long that I can’t remember the last time I had one. I still have anxiety or frustration dreams—the kind where you have to get somewhere or accomplish something and the harder you try, the further it gets away from you—but I don’t have fear dreams or nightmares anymore.
The story of how I discovered lucid dreaming is a comical one. I had a bad crush on someone at school just after entering puberty and kept dreaming about ‘getting it on’ with them.
The problem was that I didn’t quite know how to do whatever came after kissing. I was aware that something happened and the general vicinity it happened in, but I didn’t know the specifics. My dreaming mind kept coming up against a roadblock and stopped there, flailing about trying to figure out what to do after the kissing stuff.
Apparently, there was a part of me that was determined and even desperate to take things further. That’s when my conscious mind entered the picture and tried to force things to the desired conclusion. I remember being in that state where you’re half-asleep and half-awake and refusing to wake up until things got ‘resolved.’ My mind kept circling around and around, trying out one scenario after another in extreme frustration.
I never did get the relief I was looking for in that dream, the crush ending before I learned what came next. But I did come out of it with a realization that—sacré bleu!—I could enter my dreams and push them in the direction I wanted them to go. I could lucid-dream.
What is lucid dreaming?
As I just described, lucid dreaming is the use of your conscious mind to influence the content and direction of your dreams.
A study by German sleep researchers found that they could train people in how to lucid-dream using what they called pre-sleep autosuggestion. “Subjects often succeed in becoming lucid when they tell themselves, before going to sleep, to recognize that they are dreaming by noticing the bizarre events of the dream.”
In other words, after you get in bed but before you fall asleep, you would say to yourself something like “When I’m asleep and start seeing bizarre things, I’m going to ‘know’ that I’m actually in the middle of a dream. I’m going to become aware of that and notice it. I’m going to become lucid.”
The researchers also found that lucid dreaming happens in a state between REM sleep (when dreams normally occur) and being awake, per measurements of brain waves of lucid-dreaming participants.
In other words, lucid dreaming happens when people are not fully ‘under’ but haven’t woken up yet, a state that often occurs in the morning prior to waking. If you remember dreams, they often happen in this state.
The researchers’ findings agree with my own experience that lucid dreaming results from 1) autosuggestion and 2) entering an in-between state. However, their method of inducing lucid dreaming differs from my own.
How do I do it?
The German researchers were only interested in producing valid scientific evidence of the mind states during lucid dreaming. They were not concerned with how to use lucid dreaming to change the dreaming experience. For that reason, their approach for inducing lucid dreaming was sufficient to bring about a state of dream awareness during sleep, but not to change the course or content of dreams in any desired way.
I’ve been trained in three therapeutic approaches that are helpful in understanding how to use something like lucid dreaming to bring about the changes we might desire: hypno-psychotherapy, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and ImageWork. These techniques help in understanding how to focus awareness and attention, tap into the unconscious, access deeper states of being and knowing, including memories and traumas, and use the power of imagery and suggestion to bring about desired changes in perceptions, beliefs, habits, and actions.
Our body and mind are communicating incessantly, and we can use that communication to our advantage by planting suggestions or embedding intentions for what happens when we sleep. We can give our mind instructions on what to do when we’re sleeping and how to intervene in our dreams.
There are various ways to do that, but what I do, personally, is to tell my self—yes, I treat my ‘self’ as a separate entity I can communicate with—these two things:
I don’t like dreams that frighten or upset me and don’t want to have them, so please let’s only have dreams that are good and positive and helpful
I want to participate in my dreams, i.e., I want to be ‘lucid’ during my dreams and play a role in what happens.
What that means, essentially, is that I have told my mind that I want to be both an actor in the dream and, at the same time, a director of the dream coaching and issuing instructions from ‘off-screen’—both in the dream doing stuff and outside it watching and directing what happens.
I know it sounds bizarre, but for me it’s worked.
In practice, I allow myself to have anxiety and frustration dreams, because I think dreams are actually a good outlet for those feelings, but I don’t allow myself to have what to me are bad dreams or nightmares, e.g., fear, rage, terror, etc. Instead, I have directed my mind to either change the course of a dream like that or get the heck out, i.e., wake up and let my awake conscious mind deal with it.
I do, indeed, wake up when a dream becomes too much for me to handle, which allows me to soothe my anxiety and use another technique involving my conscious mind to work through what’s bothering or frightening me. I’m a big believer in using distraction during the night and staving off dealing with things until the light of day. Problems tend to seem magnified—much bigger than they actually are—during the dead of night. I find that eating something, especially a banana, a piece of toast, or something else that makes me sleepy, and reading something reassuring is a good way to become calm and drift back to a more peaceful sleep. Then I deal with the problem in the morning or during the day.
In terms of directing the course of a dream, that has now become standard for me in all of the dreams I remember and in all of those I experience before waking. I actually experience my ‘director’ mind deciding that it doesn’t like where things are going and pushing the action in a different direction.
For example, I recently had a frustration dream where I was supposed to get to a venue to give a presentation to a large and daunting audience.
First there were obstacles in getting to the venue—every means I used to get there kept taking me further and further away—and I was sure I was too late to speak. But my conscious ‘director’ mind gave me insistent directions on how to overcome those obstacles because ‘you have to get there and do that presentation.’ Then, once I got to the venue, everything was wrong with the set-up and most of the attendees had disappeared. But, again, my conscious mind insisted that I give the presentation anyway ‘because it’s good experience.’ So the Me inside the dream went ahead and gave the presentation to the few people who were still there, tailoring it to those weird but also entirely possible circumstances. I woke up that morning a bit stunned and happy because, in that dream, I had figured out a way to present a topic that had been a struggle for my conscious mind, and I’d also dealt with my deeper fear that no one was going to care and I was going to fail. My new feeling was one of ‘who cares if they don’t like it, or don’t even show up, because I’ve already delivered it and I know it works—and it’s actually pretty darn good.’
As this example shows, what happens is that my conscious mind enters my dream and directs and motivates my unconscious mind toward finding a solution. Others may explain it differently, but that’s my take on what’s generally happening, or trying to happen, when I engage in lucid dreaming.
It doesn’t always work out that nicely. Sometimes I flail around like my teenage self trying to figure out how to ‘get it on’ and never get where I want to go. My unconscious dreaming mind isn’t always able to come up with solutions. But what I will say is that my conscious mind does protect me. When it doesn’t like a direction the dream is going in, or things starts to feel unsafe, it insists on going in a different direction or to a different place. And I will also say that it’s not a bully telling my unconscious mind what to do. It lets my unconscious have its way and be creative, only stepping in when it feels the need to do so. I see the unconscious and conscious parts of my mind in these dreams as the ‘Creator’ and the ‘Facilitator and Protector.’
How you can become a lucid dreamer
We are the boss of our mind—unless we cede that role to someone or something else, which happens every time we allow a person, an entity, or a substance to direct our focus or attention where they/it want it to go. (Note that minds can be hijacked by such things as subliminal advertising, propaganda, hypnotic suggestion, and mind-altering drugs, but that’s a separate topic beyond the scope of this post.)
Learning to be a lucid dreamer is a way to learn how to be the boss of your mind not only when you’re sleeping but at any time. The general principles and approaches are the same. At its core, it’s about using your conscious mind to direct and influence the unconscious perceptions, thoughts, and beliefs that exert control over your moods, states, actions—and your dreams.
Here are several approaches you might use to become a lucid dreamer:
While awake and conscious, decide what kinds of dreams you do and don’t want to have, and write out specific instructions to your unconscious mind. These instructions need to be kind, gentle, and positive. As you learn in NLP, the mind responds to positives and not negatives, e.g., if you tell your mind “Don’t think about an elephant,” your mind hears “Think about an elephant” and an image of an elephant appears in your mind. Here’s an example of the kind of instructions I mean (but please experiment and see what resonates with your own mind, culture, and personality, as you may find that you need more or less persuasion or directness to reach and convince your unconscious mind):
My dear glorious mind, I love how creative you are with my dreams. You are brilliant in that way, and now I want to work with you on keeping us completely safe and happy. So from now on, you are going to let Me join you when we dream and together we are going to make sure that all of our dreams are positive and uplifting and free of fear, depression, anxiety, or worse. While you are creative, I will be protective, and together we will produce wonderful dreams.
Alternatively, if you want to get fancy, write the instructions as a meditation, a prayer, a visualization, or a reflection—or have someone you think has a way with words do it for you.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash Every night when you go to sleep, ideally after you’ve gotten into bed, read these instructions to yourself (out loud or in your head). The more you communicate with your unconscious mind, the more likely it is to happen—but keep it real and authentic. Continue doing this until you start to experience lucid dreaming on an ongoing basis.
Instead of reading the instructions, you can record them and play them before you go to sleep—or record someone whose voice you find both persuasive and reassuring, i.e., someone your unconscious would actually listen to.
If you have spare funds, you might consider visiting a hypno-psychotherapist, a cognitive-behavioral therapist (CBT), or an NLP practitioner to explore and resolve the trauma that is causing your bad dreams.
Apparently, there is also a lucid dreaming psychotherapy clinic in San Diego, CA, run by Dr. Kristen LaMarca, who has written a book called Learn to Lucid Dream. She trained, researched, and taught with lucid dreaming expert Dr. Stephen LaBerge, who wrote Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life. I read an earlier version of his book and that’s how I discovered that I was a lucid dreamer. Before reading his book, I didn’t know that was what I was doing!
You can also find additional resources at the Lucidity Institute.
A final word on its effectiveness
I need to say a final word, which is that there is no guarantee this approach will work for you. No strategy or approach is appropriate for all individuals or in all situations. And, as in all things, keep in mind that any practice can be limited or lacking in effectiveness for a range of reasons and may also produce unintended effects.
Legally, I need to state that what I have written above does not constitute professional advice, assistance, or encouragement, so I caution you to seek assistance from an appropriate and qualified professional if you are suffering from ongoing trauma or abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, a sleep disorder, or something of a serious nature. If in any doubt, you may also wish to seek a lucid dreaming professional, such as the ones named in the paragraph above.
I wish you good dreams and restful, restorative sleep.