Lucid dreaming feels great and people want to know how it feels like. Lucid dreaming feels like a dream but just like real life, and I go in-depth on what I mean about this.

How does a lucid dream feel like?

Before I started lucid dreaming, I had an idea of how a lucid dream would feel like. I thought that a lucid dream would feel just like real life an exact copy of it. This was not an accurate representation…

Becoming aware of a dream felt like you finally found the holy grail. You enter a state where you are able to directly go through your wildest fantasies and become one with your dream state. I was astonished by this, it was just like a magical place hidden away in your mind. It was like the dream was an organism where the dream was living on its own in your mind.

Since my first lucid dream, I have learned more about the sensation and perception of lucid dreams. For example, every lucid dream is different, and even when they have the same identical setup.

I will now explain how a lucid dream feels like to me and giving you a chance to visualize it.

Senses in a lucid dream

Your waking life experiences are made up of your sensory interpretations like you can smell the air and you can taste your favorite meal. In waking life this is perceived by these 5 senses:

Sight. Everything you see.
Sound. Everything you can hear.
Touch. The feeling of touching something. For example, feeling the warmth of a hug
Taste. The taste of the beverage.
Smell. Every smell you smell when you breathe.

In dreams, the information is processed by the mind. It comes from your memories and imagination. In lucid dreams, when you come aware the sensations become more intense and lifelike.

Sometimes these sensations are pleasurable and intense, that’s why lucid dreamers love to do things like flying or having sex. However, there is plenty of other things to do in lucid dreams.

How does the pain feel in lucid dreams?

Pain in lucid dreaming is an interesting one. I have experienced it in multiple ways, and it is often not in the way we perceive pain.

In dreams, your pain would come from your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind act on your memories. If you perceived pain in a dream that have you experienced before in real life you can feel the same pain or even more intense.

In lucid dreams, this works differently. Your conscious mind takes over your subconscious mind and this means you are in control of how you experience pain. People who have less dream control may experience the same pain, but with some dream control, you can make it feel like it was nothing or you can make it fill in the gaps.

The pain you haven’t experienced before in real life can feel a lot different from what you would expect it to be. For example, I have been shot in a dream and I died. Instead of feeling a lot of pain from the bullet, I felt vibrations and felt like I got removed from the world. This was just a normal dream and woke up directly after it. I also experienced this in a lucid dream, and instead of me dying I got teleported into a void.

How does movement feel in lucid dreams?

Movement in lucid dreaming and in dreams feel different too. The movement in dreams feels different from waking life and I have experienced the feeling in multiple ways.

In waking life you probably know exactly how it feels to walk. It is light in the beginning and if you continue doing it for a longer period of time you may feel exhausted and your body feels heavier and wants you to stop.

In regular dreams, your subconscious mind probably goes on your memories but doesn’t choose the correct one every time. You may feel heavy when you just started walking because of your subconscious choice the memory where you were too tired to walk.

In lucid dreams, your conscious mind takes over and chooses another path. When you are not picky over this your body may feel the same as in regular dreams, but when you start focusing on it, you may feel super light or it feels that you are walking over clouds. An example of how it feels in waking life is when your arm got numb because you maybe lay on it. When you start moving your arm without letting it get its blood back is exactly the feeling of how it feels for me. The vibrations afterward may feel like the vibration state you go through if you try Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming (WILD).

How does lucid sex feel like?

This is probably an interesting one for a lot of people. Most people I know started lucid dreaming just for the lucid dreaming sex. Sex can feel the same as real life and can feel a lot more intense. I have experienced lucid sex before I had regular sex and this felt a lot different than afterward.

In dreams, your subconscious would decide how it would feel and it probably would go off your memories of sex. If you haven’t experienced sex before it will go after your idea on how it would feel. Dreams love to act extra intense so it is something a lot of people do as a dream goal. People who are not masturbating a lot have an increased chance to experience a sex dream. There is a possibility that it is going to be a wet dream.

In lucid dreams, your conscious decide how everything goes. The feeling is probably as intense as one from a dream, but now you are in control of who your partner is going to be. It can be everything of your deepest fantasies.

How do reality checks feel in a lucid dream?

Reality checks are one of the most popular technique out there, and it is used by a lot of people including experts. The feeling that a reality check works is a great and exciting feeling. I will go over the most popular reality checks and try to explain how they felt when they worked for me. These are:

Pinching nose. The feeling of pinching your nose and still able to breathe is insane. It makes you feel like your hand doesn’t exist and it instantly made the world around me more vivid and alive.
Counting fingers. Counting my fingers is also an interesting one. The feeling that you have 6 fingers on one hand and only 4 on your other hand is interesting and makes you question everything around you.
Finger through the hand. The feeling of a finger going through your hand is the same as becoming lucid from the awake state. You feel vibrations while your finger goes through your hand. I have also experienced pain before during the process. It felt like a drill went through my hand, luckily this only happened to me once.
Reading a book. There is not really a feeling, but the question of why the book is moving is interesting and can give you some excitement.
Reading the time. Reading the time is the same as reading a book but now the time of the clock goes wild.
Forgetting what I did before. The feeling that you forgot what you did before sounds familiar to real life, but this normally doesn’t happen to me and when it did I directly knew I was dreaming.

How does becoming lucid feel?

There is also a feeling of becoming lucid from a waking state to a lucid dream. This is called a WILD. The experience of WILD can be intense on multiple levels. The feeling to become lucid is not based on your subconscious instead it is based on how your body reacts to it.

First, you may feel uncomfortable and feel like you want to start moving and get irritated. Some people stop experience there because they feel the need to move. After this happens a state comes where you have hallucinations of imagery, auditory, and maybe even touch. When you pass this stage you will probably get into a vibration state. The vibration state feels like your body became numb and started getting its blood back and starts vibrating. This will happen for a short period of time until you get sucked into a lucid dream.

This may be vague because it is hard to explain and you will probably directly know what I mean when you experienced it yourself.

This video is made to show how lucid dreaming looks like.

Final conclusion

The feeling of your lucid dreams may be different from what others experienced because it based on your own expectations and memories. When you are able to control it, you can change the feelings yourself and it is not based entirely on expectations and memories. You can even make gum taste like beef. Now you know how it feels and it is now up to you to experience a lucid dream yourself. Practicing lucid dreaming takes time so it would be great to learn the fundamentals first.