8

Remembering Your Dreams

s I mentioned earlier, the biggest takeaway, perhaps even the only takeaway, that is important in lucid dreaming is remembering your dreams. It’s entirely possible that all of us have lucid dreams every night, but if a lucid dream falls in the waters of your unconscious and you aren’t there to remember it . . .

According to Hobson (the Harvard dream researcher), the hippocampus, the area of the brain that controls long-term memory, shuts down while we dream. As a result, we may remember parts of our dreams while we are still sleeping, but we forget soon after we wake up. In the course of one night, we have a number of dreams, many of which we don’t even realize we’ve had, precisely because of this shutting down.

A number of techniques have been created to circumvent this problem and to increase the chances of remembering dreams. Here, I’ve compiled, clarified, and expanded on most of these ideas, grading the techniques by complexity and type. The basics are outlined here, beginning with the easiest and ending with expert-level tools for those who don’t mind sacrificing a little sleep for the sake of lucidity. We’ll look even more closely at some of these techniques in the next chapters.

EASY

Explore Your Set and Setting

The term set and setting comes from the lexicon of psychoactive drugs, and oneirologists (those who study dreams) have adopted the term because the dream experience resembles a psychedelic trip. In Dreaming Wide Awake: Lucid Dreaming, Shamanic Healing, and Psychedelics, David Jay Brown delves into the relationship between lucid dreaming and psychedelics. In psychedelic research and literature, set and setting involves attending to your physical surroundings and creating a space that allows you to have a positive experience, and this concept could just as easily apply to lucid dreaming.

To examine your set and setting, look around your bedroom and notice the setting. Is it a sanctuary for sleep and dreaming? Or is it a mishmash of distracting objects? Remove clutter, electronic devices, or any other items that might distract your attention or irritate your senses. Keeping lights off will also help the photosensitive pineal gland to produce melatonin.

Set and setting includes how you arrange yourself in bed as well. Body position is associated with lucid dream quality: lying on your side may produce more typical dreams, while lying on your back may produce more out-of-body lucid dreams.

Keep a Dream Journal

Keeping a physical dream journal is perhaps the most important item in your lucid dreaming tool kit. Dream journals help keep our long-term memory active. Journaling also increases our motivation to remember dreams and increases our dream retention and recall after waking. The physical act of writing down words and images in a dream journal may also affect consciousness, since it requires an integrated act of mind, senses, and movement.

Wear a Sleep Mask

Unless you sleep in total darkness, a sleep mask is an essential tool for any dreaming practice. Sleep masks not only provide the darkness required for quality dreaming but also are a powerful reality check: if you know you went to sleep with a mask on and can suddenly see, then you know you are dreaming.

Meditation and Awareness

Being aware of your daily life is critical in becoming lucid. Paying attention to things that you are doing at any single moment creates a focus on the reality of the situation and allows you, when reality changes, to realize you are dreaming. Practice clearing the mind by focusing on breathing through a meditation practice. Focusing on an object or focusing on breathing while awake is one of the best ways to increase your dream recall and the likelihood of becoming lucid.

Be Aware of the Processes of Sleep

Understanding what your body does before it goes to sleep is an important way to recognize and maintain awareness as you fall asleep. Body twitches, temperature changes, and visual and auditory hallucinations are all common physiological responses as the body falls asleep. Practice noticing your unique process. As a complement to set and setting, you can also voluntarily twitch your body or induce a slightly lowered body temperature to trigger your body and mind’s sleep and dreaming process. Lying on the back while practicing breathing techniques can enhance your awareness as well.

Use MILD

Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreaming (MILD) is considered one of the most powerful ways to remember and improve your lucid dreaming ability. There have been many studies showing that the MILD technique is one of the best ways to improve your chances of having a lucid dream. Read more about MILD in chapter 9.

INTERMEDIATE

Wake Often

Waking up often may sound counterintuitive, but it is an effective way to teach the brain to toggle back and forth between being awake (the state most associated with awareness) and being asleep (the state most associated with dreaming). Waking up often can break apart the sleep cycle and cause your mind to be more aware while you should be sleeping. This will increase not only your dream recall but your overall control within your dreams.

Avoid Alcohol, Maybe

What you eat and drink can have important longand short-term effects on your dreams. It’s not uncommon for people to have a few drinks in the evening; the nightcap, often used to help relax and aid sleep, has become a bedtime trope. And there is some truth to the idea that drinking—even large amounts of alcohol—can result in an increase in the number of dreams you have and remember. It’s a bit counterintuitive, because alcohol increases the amount of serotonin and GABA in your system—you may recall that serotonin blocks REM sleep and GABA reduces memory formation. However, once serotonin levels off, a REM rebound, a longer than normal REM period, follows. Similarly, once GABA drops off, long-term memory formation seems to be amplified.

While REM rebound sounds like an ideal state for remembering lucid dreams, the negative long-term health impact—including the depletion of serotonin over time that reduces overall sleep quality—probably outweighs the apparent immediate benefits of using alcohol to induce lucid dreams.

Increase Serotonin Naturally

Drinking milk or eating fish before bed will naturally increase serotonin levels and may trigger REM rebound. You can also take a supplements such as 5-HTP—a natural precursor to serotonin—before bed for similar effects.

EXPERT

Change the Sleep Cycle

Just as it’s good to mix up your workouts when you are trying to build muscle, it’s good to mix up the times you go to sleep to build lucid dreams. Your body and mind start to remember what time is normal to go to bed. If you mix up the times you go to bed and wake up, you can essentially trick the mind into thinking it should be awake when you are sleeping, bringing additional awareness to your dreams.

Consider Supplemental Support

In his book Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements, Thomas Yuschak lists the supplements that he experimented with in order to increase his lucid dreaming. Broadly, this practice is known as Supplement Induced Lucid Dreaming (SILD), which uses nutritional supplements designed to reduce the amount of REM experienced during the first part of the night and extend REM to later in the sleep cycle. After some personal experimentation, I have found that the supplements most productive for lucid dreaming are those that support the production of acetylcholine, serotonin, and histamine.

Please use caution. Before using any supplements, consult your doctor or health professional to ensure that they are safe for you to use.

Caffeine

Coffee and other caffeine-based stimulants contribute to the production of adrenaline and other chemicals—this is why many of us drink these beverages to perk up. When taken in small amounts, caffeine can actually help with becoming aware in sleep. Because caffeine acts as an antagonist to adenosine, it may help to convert serotonin into melatonin in the pineal gland. Taken to another level, the way you use caffeine can be used to elicit lucid dreams (see CWILD on the next page).

Caffeine-Withdrawal Induced Lucid Dreaming (CWILD)

In this advanced technique, the dreamer uses caffeine until an addiction is formed (this sounds extreme, but the reality is that much of the world is already addicted to caffeine). Then you take the caffeine away suddenly, causing withdrawal symptoms to occur, and fall asleep. You’re likely to wake up when you are in a REM cycle. The withdrawal symptoms go away and act as an indication to the dreamer that he or she is in a dream.

Serotonin

As discussed earlier, serotonin helps with reducing REM until later times in the sleep cycle and increasing the amount of dreams you remember. Serotonin also has benefits during the waking day: it’s known to reduce depression, elevate mood, and reduce the desire to overeat. Using 5-HTP is a good way to increase serotonin production.

Acetylcholine

The neurotransmitter acetylcholine helps with memory and is tied directly to levels of wakefulness. Choline salts, which support the production of acetylcholine, can be used to increase the amount of acetylcholine in the body while sleeping. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors such as galantamine can be particularly effective because they inhibit the normal breakdown of acetylcholine, allowing it to build up in the brain.

Histamines

Though histamines are seldom discussed in the lucid dreaming community, they may be, quite frankly, essential. Histamines are one of the easiest ways of releasing serotonin into the body. Histamines also can release a protein called PGD2, which is theorized to be the cause of sleep activation. Niacin, or vitamin B3, is a good supplement for this if you’re willing to endure the niacin flush. As niacin releases serotonin and PGD2 into the body, it can produce a red flush or rash on the skin followed by tiredness and a sense of relaxation.

Timing

Having the right supplements seems to be half the battle; using them at the correct time is just as important. The best technique is the Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method (see chapter 10).

Daytime: have some type of caffeinated drinks or supplements. This will produce a later withdrawal.

Daytime: don’t use any caffeinated substances a day before you want to have a lucid dream or during any time period that would produce the withdrawal symptoms during sleep.

Bedtime: take a 5-HTP or a niacin supplement combination. This will increase the ability to have WILD dreams as well as allow you to remember your dreams later in the night after you wake up the second time.

Two Hours After Sleep: wake up and take a galantamine supplement along with a small amount of caffeine. This will increase memory and sleep cycle proficiency along with increasing the REM rebound about four hours into sleep.

Note: do not use this technique every night or on any night when you are not going to get more than six hours of sleep.

DAILY RITUAL

In order to get to the point of having lucid dreams regularly throughout your sleep, it’s essential to set up a daily practice. This short guide will help you maintain consistency.

1. Supplements/Meditation: prior to sleep, take a supplement combination of niacin and 5-HTP. Relax in a meditative state with a breathing technique that allows you to be calm and ready for sleep.
2. After meditating, sleep.
3. After two hours of sleep, wake up. This allows the body to be rested and ready for the lucid dream. Waking up is also an opportunity to take the additional supplement, galantamine. Wait one hour, and then engage in your meditation practice to calm the mind and allow yourself to go back to sleep.
4. The relaxed state you will have achieved from meditation, the increase in REM sleep from the galantamine, and the reduced REM earlier in the night combine to make a WILD–type lucid dream likely at this point.
5. You can attempt more than one WILD dream by repeating steps C and D but without taking additional galantamine. This can be continued until you wake up to begin the next day.
6. After waking, write down your dreams in your journal, describing what you experienced that night as well as how you slept and what you’d like to improve on in the next night. This will help to reaffirm your lucid dreaming goals.

Perform additional meditation during the day not related to lucid dreaming, such as mindfulness, body awareness meditations, and yogic practices. Alternate between the days you perform the additional meditation practices and the lucid dreaming practices described in this book.