I Tried Lucid Dreaming for 2 Years and It Changed My Life15 min read

For 27 years, all I did was put my head on the pillow, experience blackness, and then wake up. We spend a third of our lives asleep. So, nine years (27/3) of my life disappeared to sleep.

What if there was a possibility of something else other than blackness during sleep? Like chatting with Einstein or, more importantly, discovering something about myself? Interacting with my subconscious? Discovering my life’s purpose? Or eliminating nightmares forever? One day, one of my friends introduced me to lucid dreaming. She told me she controls her dreams, and I was amazed!

I learned that dreaming is essentially being aware (lucid) while dreaming. But that’s only the beginning…

Enthralled two years ago, I tried a 30-day challenge. But the things I experienced were so profound, so life-changing, that since then, I haven’t stopped! I’ve been lucid dreaming for over 2 years now! But things got way more intense and complicated than I thought. Some good. Some bad.

In this post, I’ll reveal my two-year journey with lucid dreaming and why I’ll never trust Inception to guide my lucid dream adventures again.

In this post, I’ll reveal my two-year journey with lucid dreaming and how it completely changed my life.

Casting Magical Spells – The Beginning

When I first started exploring the world of Lucid Dreaming, I was mostly excited by the fun stuff. I wanted to fly through space, enter the world of Harry Potter, and ask Isaac Newton to explain gravity to me. So here’s what I did, I:

1. Kept a dream journal (recording what happens in your dreams).
2. Read one book, which to this day I think is the best book (​Stephan LaBerge’s​)
3. Started reality checks (like counting my fingers because in dreams, you might have 6 or 7 or 8 fingers)

However, after a couple of days, nothingchanged. However, I was amazed at the amount of dreams I was remembering. I was writing down two, three, or even four dreams in my journal every night.

However, still no lucid dreaming. Still mostly blackness, then waking up.

I thought everyone on the internet and in the book was faking it. Maybe they were hallucinating or taking ayahuasca or something crazy.

However, around day 7, it happened. Here is a passage from my dream journal:

I was in my apartment, but it looked weird. The closet was in a weird place. I looked at my hands and instead of one hand being there, there were 5 hands! And, I realized this was a dream! I was having a lucid dream! I said, “This is a lucid dream! This is a lucid dream!” 

Suddenly, the dream became much less hazy. The colors were clearer, I was thinking more clearly, and people around me were looking at me confused, like, “Who is this guy?” But I was so excited that I jumped up into the air, and I floated, almost like gravity was 10% of what it normally should be. Then I woke up.

My first lucid dream lasted about 10 seconds, but I was amazed. It was so cool! For the rest of the month, my skills dramatically improved. I was flying, swimming at the bottom of the ocean, and encountering my subconscious.

The most crucial beginner techniques I used were:

• Dream Journal and Reality Checks (a base)
• Continued interest (reading a book about lucid dreaming)
• MILD (Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreaming)
  • When you wake up late at night, you remember and record your dream. Then, as you fall back asleep, you repeat to yourself, “Next time I’m dreaming, I will remember I’m dreaming; next time I’m dreaming, I will remember I’m dreaming.” All the while, imagine what you would do when you remember you are dreaming. So, if I wanted to fly, I would picture myself in the dream I just woke up from, realizing I was dreaming and going off and flying into space.
• WBTB (Wake Back To Bed)
  • The WBTB method entails waking up 5 or 6 hours after falling asleep and then falling asleep consciously. The idea is that later in the night, your REM cycle is at its longest duration, and your REM cycle is when you dream. However, many Redditors and even LaBerge indicate this method isn’t for the weak of heart.

However, after this month, I experienced another lull in lucid dreaming, which hampered my reinforcement of reality checks and my dream journal. Then, sadly but predictably, my Lucid Dreaming abilities disappeared.

The Lull – Back to Blackness and Nightmares

I went from having 3-4 lucid dreams a week to having zero dreams a week, but it made sense:

• I wasn’t keeping a journal
• I wasn’t doing reality checks
• I wasn’t doing WBTB or MILD
• I wasn’t learning or excited about lucid dreaming

I was busy with life and lost my love for lucid dreaming. I forgot about the amazing experiences and mind-bending adventures.

Then, one day, I rewatched the movie Inception and realized my body had missed lucid dreaming so much. I couldn’t stop writing notes to myself during the movie about how I was going to enter the world again and create magical buildings and adventures. 

I remembered the amazing feelings associated with lucid dreaming of elation, happiness, and personal insight. But that night, I had one of the scariest nightmares that began as a lucid dream.

Now, after reading 10+ books on Lucid Dreaming, I think there are three possible reasons why this might have happened.

#1 – I was rejecting lucid dreaming and thought dreaming should be left alone or sacred.

Many Lucid dreamers and dream experts believe that lucid dreaming is sacrilege and that dreams are sacred and natural.

In The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep: Practices for Awakening, the Author Tenzin Rinpoche says, “Dreams are a bridge that connects our subconscious and conscious minds. To interfere with their natural flow is to lose a profound opportunity to understand ourselves.”

#2 – I wasn’t ready to lucid dream again.

Another argument I learned about in Robert Waggoner’s book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self is maybe that because I hadn’t consciously put in the work (introspection, reality checks, etc.), my subconscious was rejecting my conscious attempts to dive back into lucid dreaming again.

Robert talks about an amazing lucid dream where he was rejected by a “review committee,” after having an amazing lucid dream flying through the planets and experiencing some crazy symbols, he relays how he came back to earth and as being “reviewed,” 

I descend back to the ground, only to find an attractive woman waiting for me. She comes up to me and insists that I follow. Curious about such a talkative dream figure, I follow her, and she leads me to an older, dark-haired woman seated on a chair. This woman begins asking me a series of questions, the gist of which is that she wants to know if I’m worthy of advancing deeper into dreaming-she wants proof that I’m ready! I respond, but wonder why a dream figure would want to question me.

When I first did my 30-day challenge, I read about the theory of lucid dreaming and created a purpose for it: to learn more about myself and try cool things. But this second time I was entering into it more lackadaisically, without any true focus, and, maybe, my subconscious was sending me straight to jail without passing Go.

#3 – There was something in my life going on that I was repressing.

One theory on dreaming is that it is simply an exposure to every aspect of who you are. So, if you are having a nightmare, it is really just an aspect of yourself that you are maybe suppressing and fighting that you need to face—not face with anger or violence, but with love because it is just a part of you.

I, without realizing it, eliminated pretty much all nightmares from my life when I was around 13 years old because I stumbled upon lucid dreaming. I used to have the recurring nightmare that a purple monster would attack me in my bed, but only if I moved or made a sound. One night, I built up my confidence and went up to the monster with the true intention of understanding and loving it. I hugged the monster and asked, “Why are you doing this?” He said, “To show you it’s ok!” and it turned into a friendly old man with whom I proceeded to have a fun adventure in the jungle! My interpretation of that, now, was that I was very afraid of standing out in any way. I wanted to become as small as possible at home, at school, and with my friends, which resulted in me not talking to many people, trying sports, or experimenting with new things. 

Maybe this was a part of me telling me that it was “okay” to move, to make noise, and to do things.

After that particularly awful nightmare after watching Inception, I dove back into lucid dreaming research. I wondered if any famous figures had similar experiences to me?

I found out that:

• Einstein famously lucid dreamed (or went into a dreamlike state) when he discovered the theory of relativity.
• James Cameron attributes the blockbuster movie Avatar to a particularly vivid Lucid Dream
• Richard Feynman, my favorite teacher of all time, would regularly lucid dream to observe how his brain processed sights, smells, and sounds.
• Tiger Woods would practice his golf swing during lucid dreams.

I reflected on these amazing people and my experiences. I realized I needed to get back into it. Nightmares be damned.

Breakthroughs – Predicting the Future and Letting Go

I began reading books again and really tried to think about what would be important for me from lucid dreaming. And I began setting bigger goals for myself and achieving them:

1. Learn physics from Richard Feynman
2. Talk to my deceased grandpa
3. Ask my subconscious the meaning of life (it annoyingly answered, “Whatever you think it is,” before jolting me awake).
4. I watched the pyramids being built, explored alternate universes, and watched the Big Bang
5. Solved countless challenging problems with the fantastic technique of falling asleep with a problem + MILD

Then, however, something truly mind-bending happened:

I was on vacation in Buenos Aires and had a unique, otherworldly experience one night out with friends. I think it was some combination of sleep deprivation, being in a new environment, and speaking a different language (Spanish). 

I was watching the sunrise over the city, somewhat falling asleep, when I began to float over the city. I watched a mother wake up with their children and prepare breakfast, a city worker sweeping the streets, and, the best part, I floated to this beautiful Japanese garden and saw the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen reading a book on a bench.

I woke up with my heart pounding.

What was that? It wasn’t real, right? A dream?

Maybe this was confirmation bias, but as I woke up and walked out of my Air BNB to get my morning coffee, I saw the mother walking with her kid – the face was the same as the dream experience. I just stared at her for 1 minute and didn’t know what to do. I pinched my nose and looked at my hands. Yes, it was real life.

The realist in me realizes that it was likely just a lady I had seen frequently on my morning walks and sequestered away in my subconscious, but what about that girl from the garden? Where is a Japanese garden in Buenos Aires, Argentina?

So, what did I do? Well, I Googled Japanese gardens. And, low and behold, there was a world-famous Japanese Garden in Buenos Aires. I went there immediately, and it was beautiful, but the girl wasn’t there.

I pulled out my Kindle and immediately hunted for a passage in Stephan LaBerge’s lucid dreaming book that I had read 3 times at that point.

I immediately found the quote I was looking for, “In dreams, as in waking life, our perceptions shape our reality. Lucid dreaming shows us that by changing our perceptions, we can change our reality.”

Maybe it wasn’t that I was actually predicting the future or having an out-of-body experience, but simply accessing a part of my mind that wasn’t accessed before. Maybe the dream was showing me that there are so many things happening in my real life that I am not aware of, and if I change my perception in real life, I will change my real life.

I realized then that lucid dreaming wasn’t simply a fun place to hang out with hot girls and fly through space, but it was more than that; it was a way to experience and understand real life more.

Robert Waggoner, in his book, says there are five stages of the lucid dreamer:

1. Personal Play, Pleasure, and Pain avoidance
2. Manipulation, Movement, and Me
3. Power, Purpose, and Primacy
4. Re-reflection, Reaching out, and Wonder
5. Experiencing Awareness

I think that the experience in Buenos Aires was a monumental moment of going from stage 3 to stage 4. Instead of constantly driving the lucid dream to what I wanted to learn, I thought it might be beneficial to begin to let the lucid dream guide me to what it wants to show me.

We must learn to sail with the wind of dreams, not against it. The dream is the compass, not the destination.

Henry David Thoreau

For the next year, I dedicated myself to letting the dream guide me. Here’s one of my favorite dreams:

I was in the suburbs of where I grew up and the air felt thick. I was moving slower than usual. I thought it was weird that I couldn’t move very fast, and realized I was dreaming! Instantly the dream became more colorful and clear. I walked through a lovely brown gravel path surrounded by tall pine trees. I arrived at a grand hotel that was also a castle and was about 3x the size of Hogwarts from Harry Potter. The setting was ornate with diamonds and crystals and light reflecting off of everything. There was a big wedding party going on.

Suddenly, I was floating off of my feet. Moving up the stairs, soaring over the heads of the guests. The wind pulled me outside to a concrete sidewalk outside of the hotel. But, the hotel was in space, almost like on an asteroid. I saw how small the Earth was and the amazing number of other solar systems and galaxies throughout space.

A middle-aged man sat next to me, who looked like my Dad but wasn’t, and sat watching the universe with me for what felt like hours. I wanted to ask him questions, but still lucid, I realized I was trying to let the dream show me what it wanted to show me. When I had that thought, suddenly everything disappeared except the man, the concrete sidewalk, and me. We were floating in space on the sidewalk. Everything around was blackness except for what looked like neon blue train tracks crisscrossing hundreds of feet below us. Finally, the man said, “What do you think is here?” I said, “The infinity of space?” He shook his head “no” and smiled and said, “This is just the beginning.” 

I woke up at that point and was amazed by the experience. I wondered if he meant “the beginning” of my journey into this next stage of lucid dreaming. Or something more profound?

I had a few more dreams like this where figures occasionally told me to “slow down,” or “look up,” or repeated, “It’s the beginning.” And it was sometimes referring to things in real life, like when I finally decided to quit medicine forever, I had a dream where I was a very sick patient in a hospital bed but got up and walked out of the hospital to be healed, but sometimes it was much more nebulous, like one dream I was in a movie theatre watching a movie of myself, but, I was blind, so I could only hear the audio. Weird.

Anyway, that brings us to now! I wonder what the next two years will be like. 

Summary

Overall, my stats were for ~700 days:

• 2000+ recorded dreams
• 180 lucid dreams
• No change in sleep quality as recorded by Sleep Eight

Lucid dreaming usually happens in sprints for me.

It really was a muscle. If I didn’t practice for a week, record my dreams, or occasionally do reality checks, my lucid dreaming would inevitably fade. However, when I returned to it, I needed to have a purpose, or I wouldn’t stay consistent. When I found the purpose, I experienced the above life-changing things.

What do I think now? Well, I think it’s ok to oscillate between lucid dreaming and not lucid dreaming. Sometimes, the interest will spike, and I’ll go on a Lucid Dreaming whirlwind for a week or two. Rereading books, writing down dreams, and having mind-bending encounters with an ethereal “subconscious Zach.”

I’ll continue to lucid dream like this. I found it particularly helpful when going through tough challenges in life. And so much information was revealed to me in that second year. Scary dreams were usually something I was repressing, and who doesn’t like occasionally fighting a zombie apocalypse dual-wielding Halo energy swords? My plan now is to simply act in the moment. When I want to fight a zombie apocalypse, I’ll fight one. When I feel like letting the dream speak to me, I’ll let the dream speak to me.

Thank you so much for reading!

And…

Are you sure you aren’t dreaming right now?