Meditation And Lucid Dreaming
Meditation can help you become lucid and give you more awareness and recall. My favorite way to practice lucid dreaming is by meditation and you don’t have to do this in the traditional way.
How does lucid dreaming benefit from meditation?
Lucid dreaming benefits from meditation a lot. In eastern practice, they have meditation practices that are based on getting lucid. Personally, I don’t follow those practices and learned from other ways of doing them and made them my own. The things that lucid dreaming benefit from meditation are:
- More awareness in dreams.
- Better dream recall.
- Dreams have more fantasy.
- Easier to practice visualization, which benefits lucid dreaming techniques.
With meditation, I have gained a lot of lucid dreams and recall. Without meditation, I can recall 1 to 4 dreams a night. Whenever I use meditation, I recall between 3 and 12 dreams a night. Writing that down is not quite easy and that is why I mostly summarize them.
If you are struggling with dream journaling or if you are looking for improvements. You can read my article about “How to write effectively in your dream journal“.
How do I meditate for lucid dreaming?
Meditation on the eastern side of the world has a lot of rules and formations, but this is not effective for lucid dreaming and you can benefit from the meditation methods I am using more.
I will go over the things we are not going to do, that you have probably heard from other sites. These are:
- We are not going to use any meditation position
- We are not going to follow the guidelines of meditation
- There are no skill levels required.
For me, meditation is a thing with a lot of freedom, because there are no limitations on how to perform them and how to use them.
Step 1 – Positioning for lucid dreaming meditation
As I have said before, it does not matter what position you take with meditation. We are going to focus on lucid dreaming meditation, this means that we are going to plan meditation before going to sleep. This is why the best ways to do this meditation are:
- On your back.
- In your sleeping position.
- Sitting somewhere.
Lucid dreaming meditation – On your back
This my preferred positioning for meditation. The benefits of this position are:
- You won’t fall asleep “quickly”.
- You can focus better on your meditation method.
- Longer lasting meditation session.
The people who sleep on their backs can still use this meditation method as good as others.
The reason why you can focus better on your meditation method is that when you are laying or your back you probably are not going to focus on the things you are stressing about. The reason behind this is, that you set an intention to meditate.
A meditation session will probably last longer than the other two ways because they have flaws in why they can be more difficult to keep going. The only issue with this positioning is that your back may hurt after a long day (this happens more often to people who are tall).
Lucid dreaming meditation – In your sleeping position
When I feel lazy, and I don’t want to go on to my back, I use this position. The benefits of this position are:
- You can fall asleep directly after meditation.
- It is Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming (WILD) practice and can lead to a lucid dream directly.
- It is perfect when you are tired.
I love the benefits of this position because in my WILD guide I explain that doing WILD in your sleeping position. Practicing this before you go to bed is great practice and will benefit you in the long run. Excluding that you are to meditate at that time.
This meditation position has the most downsides. These are:
- Easy to fall asleep.
- Can feel uncomfortable.
- These meditation sessions are often shorter.
With this position, you easily fall asleep, because it is your sleeping position. With a good focus on your meditation technique, you probably won’t fall asleep and this wouldn’t be a problem.
It can also feel uncomfortable when you sleep on your side, you may have your hand stuck under your head and this can feel numb pretty quickly. You can ignore that, and stay in that position.
The last issue is that the meditation session is often shorter, because of the uncomfortable position or because you fall asleep. With practice, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Lucid dreaming meditation – Sitting
You can meditate sitting, and you can of course use traditional positions. The benefits of these positions are:
- Impossible to fall asleep.
- Easier to focus on your intent.
- Long-lasting sessions with practice.
I personally don’t use this position, because I like to meditate as close to falling asleep. This position has almost no downsides, and I would recommend at least trying this position.
Step 2 – What time should I meditate?
The timing of your meditation session is important when you want to focus on improving lucid dreaming, when you are not focusing on lucid dreaming you can meditate any time you want and gain the same results. There are three times you can meditate to improve your lucid dreaming skill. These are:
- Before bed.
- After bed.
- In a Wake back to bed.
All of these have benefits and downsides.
Lucid dreaming meditation before bed
This is by far my favorite timing to meditate. This timing can help you in multiple ways. The benefits of this timing are:
- Increased awareness
- The increased vividness of dreams.
- Better dream recall.
- Will see results after the first try.
After the meditation session, you will probably see those benefits. It is amazing how effective this is, you will see the effect after the first try.
Lucid dreaming meditation after bed
You may ask yourself why after you went to bed? Some experts rather do meditations in the morning for other benefits than increased awareness. The reason that choice after the bed is:
- Remembering dreams that are forgotten.
- Able to start your day relaxed.
Meditation can help you remember the dreams that you have forgotten. People who struggle with recall can use this to start remembering their dreams again that have forgotten.
I personally don’t do this, because I like to be time-efficient as possible. By doing meditation before bed you save time.
Lucid dreaming meditation during Wake Back To Bed (WBTB)
Wake Back To Bed is waking up during the night to increase the chance of becoming lucid by using lucid dreaming techniques. You can also plan a meditation session in this WBTB. By setting a meditation session at this time you can get:
- Able to become lucid by meditation.
- Improve awareness of your next dreams.
- Increase the vividness of your next dreams.
- Increase dream recall.
- Experience sleep paralysis.
- Get hypnagogic hallucinations.
Meditation during a WBTB can be amazing, and you will definitely increase the chance of becoming lucid, but it also does other things I love to talk about.
Hypnagogic hallucinations
Hypnagogic hallucinations are imagery and auditory hallucinations that can happen during a meditation session or by falling asleep. Hypnagogia happens during the stage where you almost fall asleep. Using meditation in a WBTB can increase the chance to 90% that you will experience it. This can get intense and interesting.
Imagery hallucinations can become scary. In my meditation sessions, I always come across something where I fall down somewhere, and get scared and instantly lose focus to meditate. After some practice, I can remove this fear and continue the session.
Auditory hallucinations can also become scary and funny. Imagine your mother yelling at you, and you think this is really happening. There is also a possibility that you hear something scary. If you remember that everything around you is just hypnagogia, you will be fine.
Sleep paralysis by meditation
It is possible to experience sleep paralysis during this meditation session. You can read about sleep paralysis in my article “Lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis“.
Sleep paralysis is not scary only when you make it scary.
Step 3 – Meditation method for lucid dreaming
There are a dozen ways to meditate, and that is no exception for lucid dreaming. I will go over 3 methods that are for me the most effective ones for beginners and experienced meditator (someone who practice meditation). These are:
- Mindfulness meditation.
- 4-7-8 Breathing meditation.
- Visualization meditation.
These have great possibilities and are definitely easy to get long meditation sessions.
Mindfulness meditation
With mindfulness meditation your goal is to be mindful, this is achieved by focusing on something that is easy to focus on. For example, breathing is a great thing to focus on, because it is something everyone can do. You probably will experience thoughts, and your mind will try to interact with them. The goal of mindfulness meditation is to ignore those thoughts without removing them. This can be achieved by not interacting with the thoughts in any way.
In the beginning, you probably struggle with the thoughts flying through your head and maybe you cannot handle longer sessions. To improve this it is important to start with a session of 5 minutes and build it slowly up.
I recommend you do this for 30 minutes before bed, 15 minutes in a WBTB, and 30-60 minutes after bed.
4-7-8 Breathing meditation
4-7-8 breathing meditation is an easy method to get you relaxed fast and is mainly used at the start of a meditation session. To understand 4-7-8 meditation there are great videos that explain it better than I can.
The way it works is that you inhale for 4 seconds, hold it for 7 seconds and release it for 8 seconds.
This is a video that explains 4-7-8 in a more detailed matter.
Visualization meditation
For people that struggle to meditate this can be the most fun one to practice. The goal of this meditation method is that you focus on visualization and nothing else. You can play mind games against yourself or you can work on a mindscape. Working on a mindscape is easier for longer sessions because you cannot get bored.
Mindscape
A mindscape is a world you create in visualization. Mindscape can have multiple goals. Mindscape can work both in visualization and in a lucid dream, this means if you make a mindscape you can use it in a lucid dream to go to this world. Creating the world is easy, you start with an empty world that you start filling in with landscape until you get bored or if you want to work on the other aspects of this world. You can legit do anything to this world to make it yours. The things you can work on in a mindscape are:
- Landscape
- Rules or boundaries
- Lore of the location
- How do people look like?
- What can people do?
- What is happening in this world right now?
- Does someone rule this world?
You can think about anything that crosses your mind. You can do this as a project in visualization meditation.
Conclusion on meditation lucid dreaming
Meditation is a great thing to do to improve your lucid dreaming skills. You should definitely try it. There are no negatives to meditation and only benefits. Meditation is not only for people who are spiritual because the benefits you get from doing it are not based on spiritualism and instead of research. People who meditate have longer REM-periods and have more lucid dreams than normal human beings.
