Why I Don’t Chase Lucid Dreams

But I'm Still Open to Them

Lucid dreaming, along with reality shifting, witchcraft, and erotic fan fiction, are popular trends now I wish were popular when I was a teenager.

I’d have gleefully experimented with all those practices as a younger person if there had been community for it and instruction easily accessible to me. But my local library didn’t carry any books on witchcraft (I checked) and there was no YouTube to suggest videos to me about intentionally switching timelines or manifesting alternate realities.

Life goes the way it goes, and trends rise and fall as they will, and as a 40-something year old (okay, almost 50 year old) who decided to change her career path at mid-life from content marketing to dreamwork and dream research, I’m not too disappointed with the increasing popularity of lucid dreaming now. It means more people are interested in and curious about dreaming!

While I went through a short period about a decade ago of attempting out-of-body adventures and lucid dreaming, this practice came to a halt following a terrifying paranormal encounter I still can’t explain. At the time, I had accidentally discovered a type of breathwork during a Friday afternoon nap that generated a thrilling type of out-of-body experience. (When I tell close friends about this, I use words like ecstatic and erotic.) What I mean is: it felt really, really good. Unlike anything else really good I had experienced before.

I then spent many subsequent Friday afternoons trying to recreate this nap experience.

I succeeded on some occasions, but on one Friday afternoon, my breathwork-instigated OBE was interrupted by a foreboding presence that seemed to be lurking in my dark bedroom. It was terrifying; as terrifying as the previously thrilling was thrilling. I made myself wake up.

Soon after, I had a lucid dream encounter during night sleep with an even more terrifying being. I didn’t like these spontaneous meet ups. Also, I wasn’t mentally prepared at the time to take on investigating or confronting them: I was a mother of three very young children, with a full-time job, in graduate school, living in a foreign country.

I also did not have a spiritual teacher or a community of like-minded practitioners at the time to ask questions to or to seek support from so I might feel safe on a journey that would likely force me to face darkness, literal and psychological. So I quit.

As lucid dreaming has slowly become more popular, I’ve felt pretty closed down and sometimes defensive about the topic. It feels to me sometimes that people may be immersing themselves in waters they’re not truly prepared to swim. I feel this way about a lot of mystical and occult practices that are increasing in popularity.

Perhaps that’s just my bias based on my own negative past experiences and fears, or maybe it’s the maternal instinct in me, worried for young people who are increasingly vulnerable to irresponsibly created content online. Or perhaps, its my inner Kabbalist, who knows that some spiritual practices are meant to be undertaken only after living a few decades, and done so humbly, with caution, reverence, and care.

I suppose I also possess some judgment about it. I take dreamwork and dreaming very seriously. I worry that some lucid dream content creators don’t, or are simply producing how-tos with the sole intent of attracting followers, of gaining more influence. But this is the case online with most subject matter, these days, isn’t it? I can’t, and shouldn’t, mother everyone or monitor their choices.

Lately, I’ve felt less defensive and more curious about engaging in lucid dreaming.

At the 2022 annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, I sat in on a few lucid dreaming talks given by some of the most respected and well-known researchers of lucid dreaming, including Jayne Gackenbach, Robert Waggoner, and Stephen LeBerge, as well as less-known, but also impressive practitioners and researchers. Those panels — especially the ones that illustrated evidence for how lucid dreaming can be used to work through grief and mental health crises — may be part of the reason why I’m softening to lucid dreaming as a beneficial practice for myself and others.

A second reason I’m opening up to lucid dreaming is that it is a practice taught by various mystical traditions I am researching, and whose practitioners and teachers I have great respect for. Intentional dreamwork has been a critical (though less publicized) component of Jewish mystical practice, and also has been a feature of certain lineages of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as well, known as “dream yoga.”

The third reason, and likely driving force of my growing interest in the pursuit of lucidity in my dreams, is the fact that my lucid dreams are happening with greater incidence on their own…and I kind of like them. I like it especially in the moment I realize I am dreaming. I love saying the words: “Oh, this is a dream.” I love the clarity of my senses and the joy that arises for me inside the dream immediately after I say those words. I love how the scene changes, how the colors become more vivid, how the atmosphere thickens. I feel giddy. I feel invigorated by something that feels both ethereal and grounded in some kind of seeming physicality.

It’s not just the sensory high and sense of empowerment of these lucid dreams I’ve grown attracted to, but also the insights and reflections about myself and my reality upon waking from dreams where I had, seemingly, more choice or more clarity.

All dreams are rich in potential for insight and healing, as long as we recall them. However, there is a kind of extraordinariness to finding ourselves aware we are dreaming in the dream.

In the last half year year, I’ve had four or five spontaneous lucid dreams. That’s a lot for me. Half were during naps (which seem to be when they happen more often for me, and for some others.) The other half were inside of night sleep, in the middle of a series of non-lucid dreams.

In one of those dreams, once I became lucid, I chose to wake up and succeeded. (I didn’t like how a guy was looking at me.) In another lucid dream, I had to work really hard at staying lucid. I was so awed by how very “present” I felt in a place of my past that I almost lost my lucidity. I couldn’t believe how vivid the details were, how much I could interact with in this past place. Eventually, I did lose my lucidity. In a third lucid dream, I became egomaniacal, insisting not just on changing the narrative for myself, but for all the other characters in the dream scene as well. I paired them all off, willed them to make out with each other.

Who is this dream me, I wonder? The one who acts with less concern of consequence? Or, at least, different concerns? The one who delights in flying from room to room as if I’ve beat nature? The one who forces strangers to couple?

I’m not sure who she is, but I am very curious about her. I’m wondering about her behaviors in dreams, and how they are different than the choices I would make in waking life. I am wondering if she is Me-me, or just Dream-me. I am intrigued. Will emboldened Lucid Dream Me start seeping into my waking life? Or, will she not? Satisfied instead in simply having the dream stage on which to playact those behaviors out. We shall see.

I would be insincere if I said that my venturing more into the world of lucid dreaming was solely for research and personal growth. There is that. But I’m also there for the the glee.

I’m definitely down for as much glee as this life allows, both in waking life and in dreams.