Everyone wants to learn how to have longer lucid dreams, and it is easy to accomplish. These methods will guarantee to work on you, if you already have experience with long lucids and your method is not on this list please mention it in the comments.

How to have long-lasting lucid dreams

You can have longer lucids easily with dream control and with stabilization. There are multiple methods for increasing the length of your lucid dreams. To make your lucid dreams longer you have to learn how to stabilize your lucid dreams. This can be done by focusing on objects or by focusing on a part of your body.

1. Stay calm

Beginners can struggle with keeping aware that they are dreaming, and this is completely normal. The best way to prevent losing awareness is by staying calm in your dreams.

Often beginners are getting super excited that they are lucid and this is great, but this can make you wake up early from a lucid dream and end your lucid experience.

Back in the days, I was a beginner as well, and my biggest issue what getting long-lasting lucid dreams. I learned after some time that whenever I stay calm, my lucids became longer and more stable. This could be hard because I had crazy dreaming goals that are hard to do without being a bit excited.

2. Focusing on objects

This is my preferred method of stabilizing my dreams because it makes lucid dreaming more exciting, and makes your lucids more vivid. This method can be performed in two different ways.

If you just got lucid, the best way to stabilize is to look at an object in detail and try to focus on it for a couple of seconds. Every time you feel like you are fading away, look at an object near you, and focus on it in detail again.

3. Do a reality check

Reality checks are a great way to make your lucids last longer. Every time you do a reality check, you are basically checking if you are aware or not. Being aware is the most important thing of lucid dreaming because otherwise, you are not lucid dreaming.

4. Rub your hands

I learned most about lucid dreaming from Brandon (mostly known as Sensei), He told me that he had issues with extending is lucid dreams and make them longer. He found out that by rubbing your hands you can stay aware. This is a great thing to do because it would not interrupt your lucid dreaming experience.

After I learned this from him, I directly started implementing it in my lucid dreams. With this method alone, my lucids increased by at least 5 minutes from the 30 seconds I had before.

The best thing about doing this is that it also increases the vividness and sharpens your body and mind.

5. Read

Reading in your lucid dream can make you more aware of the dream. This does not work if you are not reading out loud. Sometimes in dreams, you can’t read well, because the book is a mess, then try another method instead.

Reading is also a fantastic reality check for bookworms.

6. Looking at your hands

This method is more an alternative to rubbing your hands. Instead of rubbing them you look at your hands and try to look at your hands in detail and take a close look.

Looking at your hands is also a great way to do a reality check. Every time you look at your hands you ask yourself if you are dreaming. This may become a habit and comes into your dreams, and you become lucid.

7. Ask your dream

Yes, this is possible! You can ask your dream if your dream can last longer. This works because you are asking about your dream, and this is a way to stay aware of the dream. By asking about the dream you are thinking about the dream itself.

You must believe in yourself, if you don’t believe in your sentence it will not work.

If it works it will work like magic and makes your dream more vivid and makes you more aware of your dream state.

8. Spin around

You can also spin around in your dream to make your dream last longer. With spinning in your dream you are trying to ground yourself in the dream. This is a method Stephen Laberge (wiki) uses. Sadly

whenever I use it I lose my awareness of the dream and wake up. Some people told me that whenever they did it that they have to visualize a new dream scene first to make it work, and also some told me that it worked like a charm.

9. Focus on your gravity

If all of these above don’t work, you can also decide to try to focus on the gravity in the dream. By doing this you are grounding yourself with the dream, and it can make your dream awareness stable if you do this during the whole lucid dream.

A famous lucid dreaming called Hukif uses this technique all day and night. He is doing this by focusing on his body and if there is a change in gravity, he knows he is lucid. This is very difficult to accomplish, and you need to work a long time on it to make this work.

You can start small, and that is by focusing on your hands and every time your hands feel heavier you question reality. If it is hard to do this all day, you can try to remember everything you are having an emotion. For example, if you are laughing you remember to focus on your gravity. To remember that, you can use Intention or Mantra’s. I explained this in the Mnemonic Induction Lucid Dream (MILD) guide.

10. Do a calculation

I have never tried this method, but apparently, this one works really well. You can try to do math in your lucid dream, and this can make you more aware of your lucids dreams. I am not quite sure how this method would work, because you basically become less aware.

At least this method is a great lucid dream goal to do. Can you solve a math problem in your dream?

11. Use drugs

I would definitely not recommend this, but with the use of cannabis you can extend your lucid dream by a lot in advance, this is called REM-Rebound (wiki).

REM-Rebound is where you are stopping your rem sleep for a long time, this can be done by smoking cannabis. The moment you quit smoking cannabis for a short period of time, you can experience REM-Rebound and experience a long REM (wiki) stage. If you managed to become lucid in this REM stage you will experience a super vivid and long-lasting lucid dream, and you probably don’t have to use any awareness techniques to make your lucid dream longer.

12. Using Dream-Exit Induced Lucid Dreaming (DEILD)

You can use DEILD to make your lucid dreaming experience last longer if you wake up from your dream. This technique is simple, and I highly recommend you to learn this technique and use it whenever you can apply it.

You can apply it, when you wake up from a dream, lucid dream, random awakening during the night, or during a Wake Back To Bed (WBTB).

13. Using Lucid dreaming supplements

You can also experience long-lasting lucid dreams if you use lucid dreaming supplements. I don’t recommend using lucid dreaming supplements as a beginner, because it can impact your lucid dreaming progress and makes you rely on these supplements.

However, with lucid dreaming supplements, you can experience long-lasting lucid dreams, and they are also super vivid.

You can learn more about lucid dreaming supplements here: Lucid dreaming pills, positive and negative side.

How long can a lucid dream last?

Lucid dreams can be perceived as long. You can have a week-long lucid dream (in your mind), but you are basically only lucid for an hour or so.

If we are looking at in a real lifetime, it would be that you are lucid at max for 90 minutes in your last REM stage.

I personally don’t believe this, and I think that you can lucid dream the entire night. You can dream in NREM dreams, and maybe they are harder to recall, but if you are aware in the first dream you can be extending in during the entire night with awareness techniques such as mention above or with Dream-Exit Induced Lucid Dreaming (DEILD).

Final thoughts

Extending a lucid dream is amazing, and you should definitely learn one of these techniques to your advantage.

As I mentioned above, if you have another method that worked for you, please let me know, so I can add it to the list.