Thread: Question about dreaming/lucid dreaming

Most dreams take place during REM sleep. There's more REM sleep during the second half of the night than the first.

It is possible to have an LD instantly without prior sleep, but your window of opportunity to do this is relatively narrow.

Thank you for posting that chart, dolphin!

If I may I will expand on your answer.

To have a LD without prior sleep is possible during a nap few hours after waking up, or if you were sleep deprived. In both instances it's because our body puts us straight into REM after a very short falling asleep phase, which is always present.

In a nap we go almost straight into REM because our body knows we just finished a full nights sleep which had enough of both NREM and REM cycles. So we can afford to have mostly REM in a nap.

When we are sleep deprived, we go into REM because I guess our body regards this sleep cycle as a tad bit more important than NREM. It is not recommended to force lack of sleep in order to LD. Reason is it's not really clear how many hours of sleep deprivation we need for this to work as there are many other factors at play. Also, NREM is an important part of sleep during which body repairs itself and recuperates.

Some people may have the ability to go straight into REM without any prior sleep, but those are most likely sleep disorders. I would definitelly not recommend trying to WILD without prior sleep.

We dream mostly in REM (dream cycle). In order to reach REM at the beginning of sleep, we need to go through falling asleep stage and deep sleep stage. And at this time these last about 80 minutes, before we hit 10 min long REM stage.

But as it's clear from the chart that dolphin posted, the longer we sleep, longer our REM becomes and NREM stages are shorter.

When WILDing, we go straight from being awake to being asleep and aware. But if the REM is 80 min away, we would need to keep that state of body asleep/mind aware for 80 min. That is possible. At least Tibetan buddhist monks say so. But for us, mortals, it's practically impossible. Once you hit that state of mind where you are on a verge of falling asleep it's not easy to keep your awareness for longer than minutes. For me prsonally it's just seconds. After that I either wake up or fall asleep into non-lucid sleep.

I forgot to say, that a DILD can happen at any sleep cycle, even the earlier ones. My first LD - DILD happened in the first REM. I went to bed super excited, after spending most of my day reading this forum having just discovered lucid dreaming.

But even a DILD has a better chance to happen at later REMs, especially those close to our normal waking time. That's because our mind expects us to wake up soon, so it starts to wake up itself and it's easier to become "aware" in a dream when we are in this state.