Thread: Best time during the night to LD?

For me, it's the 5-7 period. You know that feeling when you wake up to get ready for school and you just wanna go back to sleep? And how amazing it feels when you do? Those are the prime times for lucid dreaming (in my experience) - especially WILDs. I think this is because you're just entering/already in REM.

Other than that, it's simply trial and error. I'm yet to do this properly, but wake yourself up over a space of time ranging from 1 hours to 7 (or whatever) and see what generates the best results. Once you get a nearish result (like mine with the 5-7 thing) try narrowing it down by maybe 5 and 1/2 hours or 5 and 1/4, etc.

Well, it depends on when you go to sleep xD I usually do WTBT when I've slept 6 hours, or 7 and a half.

Mine moves around. I try to pay attention to when I wake from my dreams, then count backwards. For example, the last few days, I have been waking from a dream at 5:30am. Tonight, I am going to wake at 4:30am, then immediately return to sleep to catch this REM cycle.

I think I will try those things tonight, as it is a weekend and I can sleep in. I did once find out when I woke up during the night, but since then my sleeping pattern has varied because of issues and such. Thanks a lot.

Are we talking WILD's? Our dreams become more intense as the sleep cycle goes on so later is better the earlier. Personally, I would shoot for 5.5 to 6 hours.

I'm going to publish an iPhone app to help with lucid dreaming in a couple weeks. One of the features that is included is a dream reporting tool. With this, you can precisely log all of your dreams overnight, and figure out when you dream the most. Here are my results from the last night.

It appears that the common advice of waking up after 4-5 hours works, as the app woke me up from 8 dream fragments over 6 sleep cycles in a single night. You can estimate that each REM episode is 30 minutes towards the start of the night, and up to 45 minutes towards the end. If you take a look at the second half of the night, it makes sense: the dreams begin from the half of a sleep cycle, and continue until the end of a sleep cycle.

Can you explain the graph a bit more please? Like what the purple line indicates for instance?

The purple line shows the number of dreams recalled at different awakening times.

A good rule of thumb is that your longest REM period is after 5 1/2 hours of sleep, so it follows that it would be best to time WBTBs/WILDs/whathaveyou then.

the +1 spikes are dreams experienced prior to awakening. the -1 spike is an awakening with no dream recall reported

4 hours before your actual bed time.

For me, the last dream of the night is the best, opposed to the early night ones my LD last longer, is easier to stabilize and to think, and they tend to last from 30mins to an hour, so yeah.

For me, it's usually about 4-6 hours after I first go to bed, but I usually base it on when I get my longest dreams, so maybe around 7-8 hours after bed.

It is cool to see it graphed out, Ev. Have you done this on multiple nights? I would be interested to see how consistent your sleep cycles are.

I've had up to a week of dreams (~30) plotted on one graph when I was developing the lucid dreaming app for android. The dreams tended to cluster together at certain 20-30 minute windows. Back then my sleep schedule was really messed up due to all the programming. Still, I consistently see a dream awakening at ~3:00 hours after going to bed. I would expect that with a consistent sleep schedule, I would see awakenings from dreams in a 10-15 minute window for other sleep cycles as well.

Well last night I went to bed and fell asleep at around I assume to be midnight. I don't remember seeing any time past 11:30 on my alarm clock. I woke up after a dream which I recalled at 4:20. I noted it down and then went back to sleep. So my sleep cycles came and went and ended at 4:20, so my next REM would have been an hour after that?

If that is indeed true, I have set an alarm for 5:20, to wake me up momentarily so I can fall back into my REM.

Does this make sense?

Try later in the morning, I have little wish to stay up half an hour at 4:30 in the morning and today I an interesting experience that is kinda like the 'don't want to get up for school feeling' Graves talked about: I woke up at 7, stayed up half an hour, went back to bed. I then shifted from hypnagogic reverie to dreams on an off for a bit, had a slightly nightmarish dream that was incredibly vivid and tangible (as in I had waking life levels of faculty of thought but didn't know I was dreaming) I then woke into sleep paralysis and after a bit I RCed and I was dreaming, unfortunately I was stuck in bed (very groggy and lethargic), the effort of trying to get up woke me up.

I do find that if I wake up early, and fall back asleep I have my longest and most vivid dreams. But it is also easier for me to fall asleep when I wake up during the night, and my lucids so far were at those times.

I also figured that since you almost always wake up after each REM, then setting an alarm to go off in an hour after the time you wake up, as you wake up, is the best way to accurately pinpoint an alarm to wake you up for a REM?

For instance, if I wake up naturally at 4, then set my alarm for 5, I would fall asleep pretty fast and then sleep for the hour, then be woken up just as I am about to REM, so I would fall asleep right back into the dreams?

Keep in mind that sleep stages cycle on 90 minute basis, if you wake naturally at 4 try setting your alarm say 15-10 minutes before, you'll be likely to recall a dream and that's a good basis for WILD/MILD, even plain old DILD, keep the lights low, personally I just sit up for 2-3 minutes to shake the grogginess and then hit the hay again, I've never gone for the 60-90 minute miracle WBTBs as I hate loss of sleep and I find it much more effective to establish an intent and fall asleep quickly with it in mind rather than stay up ages to raise awareness and then take a long time to fall asleep. But then it varies for everyone, find what works best for you.

In spite of length/quality of REM stages you may find it easier to fall asleep in an earlier REM period, whereas I find it much more likely that I'll either forget why I set my alarm in the first place if it goes at 3 in the morning, or I'll switch it off and slip into immediate unconsciousness, or even sleep through it altogether.

But if you wake naturally at 4 then that's a real gift, use it! You probably just left REM and you're about to enter it again, sounds like prime LDing time to me

But how long after the awakening at 4 should I set my alarm for? I always thought that for an hour after you finish REM, you sleep and don't dream, then once that hour is up, you start dreaming again?

Well it's a bit more complicated than that. But easier in a way.
From the minute you fall asleep you go through a series of sleep cycles through the night. You start in N-REM, going down through stages 1, 2, 3, 4 (each successive stage is characterised by deeper sleep and a lower frequency of brainwaves). When you finish stage 4 you start to climb up again, through 3, 2, 1, and finally, REM. Then the whole cycle repeats.
Exiting REM can also be accompanied by brief awakenings (what you have at 4 o'clock).
As the night goes on you start to skip the deeper stages of sleep, 4 and then 3, altogether. By about 4hrs in you're ping-ponging between stage 2 and REM, going up and down through the 90 minute cycles. Perhaps during those dozy weekend lie-ins we drift in and out of pure REM.

So in answer to your question, by 4hrs of sleep you're spending 30mins+ of each 90min cycle in REM, dreaming. And that doesn't even account for dreams in NREM or other confounding variables like REM rebound from sleep debt and caffiene/alcohol/drug consumption.

I don't drink or take any medicine or drugs, or drink coffee. So I figure that after I wake up in the night, especially later on in the night, setting an alarm to boost my awareness for an hour after I woke up is a good idea. It's a different idea to what I have done before anyway.