Thread: What is your sleep routine?

Honestly I feel like my biggest problem with LDing is not having a good sleep schedule. Not sleeping enough makes me less likely to have vivid dreams, and far less likely to keep a DJ when I wake up tired in the morning. Experienced LDers, how much do you sleep every night? Describe your sleep routine. Do you stop using the computer an hour before bed? Meditate? Go to bed at the same time every night? If you WBTB, how much do you sleep before and after the WBTB?

When I am falling asleep I am observing condition of my snense. I am trying get the moment when a dream has begun.

I sleep about 7 hours on work days, and up to 10 hours on days off (normally 9)

I do not stop using my computer or watching TV, often using them right before sleep.

I meditate every time I am going to sleep until I am sleeping.

Roughly the same time to bed, but it is different for nights off vs work nights.

I wake back to bed at 6 hours on work nights and 7 hours on days off, unless I am intent on forcing an LD. Then I do one at 5 hours and every hour after if needed until I am satisfied with my LDing or I have to get up.

I'm all over the board.

Generally I get to sleep around 2am, and get up to see my wife out the door at 8am. When chores or waking-life projects don't interfere, I go back to bed immediately for a couple of hours looking for dreams. I take weekends off, though I will tend to have an afternoon nap on Sundays where WILD's have been known to occur.

My Wednesdays are set aside for LD'ing: I go to sleep by around 3am, get up at 8:00 for a WBTB, and then usually have LD sessions until at least noon (tho on good days I don't finish until 1 or 2). The WBTB generally involve being up for maybe 15 minutes with up to another 90 minutes going back to sleep. Also, I do not meditate.

I rarely use electronics at bedtime, though that's more a matter of taste than it is for better mindset. I do watch TV occasionally, but make sure it is a movie somehow related to my dreaming goals. I also read for a while at bedtime.

My schedule used to be all over the place (especially when I was in college), but over the last few months I made a conscious effort to go to sleep by 12 am and try to wake up around 8 am on days I don't practice lucid dreaming.

I set aside Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays for WBTB. On those days I go to bed at 12 am, wake up around 5 am, and stay up for 30 minutes before returning to bed. I usually wake up around 9 am instead of 8 to give myself that extra bit of rest I missed out on due to interrupting my sleep.

Over the last couple of months I've also gotten into optimizing my sleep, here's my pre-bed routine:

- I make sure to turn off all electronics about 2 hours before sleep. The light from electronics can be a false signal to your brain that it is still day time. I also got a free app called "flux" that actually adjusts your computer light as the sun goes down so it's less likely to keep you up.

- I often have trouble falling asleep due to stress and excessive thinking, so I take a hot shower about 90 minutes before bed, and that helps me fall asleep much easier.

- Once I'm out of the shower, I put on some soothing ambient music and meditate before sleep. I also use this as an opportunity to prime myself for lucid dreaming (eg. remember to do my dream recall, focus on my lucid dreaming goal, recall common dreamsigns etc.)


Optimizing my sleep has allowed me to be a lot more consistent with my lucid dreaming training. Another benefit was better, more restful sleep which made me a lot more productive throughout the day.

I'm likely to be a total oddball outlier here, but for the sake of completeness, I suppose: I'm currently in a position where I don't need to interact with face-to-face society very much, so I just let my circadian rhythm free-run. (It's so liberating to not have to care when I sleep and when I wake up, I just couldn't go back.) But it's rather chaotic: On “normal” days I'm awake for around 14 hours and in bed for about 10; that's what I usually shoot for, anyway. After several days of this I'll usually have a hiccup (especially if I get really carried away with an activity, which I'm very prone to doing) and could be up for anywhere from 6–24+ hours at a time and then sleep from 7 to almost 24, then the cycle repeats. My wake and sleep times therefore can be literally any time of day.

I do nothing special to prepare for bed. I just do it when I feel like it and record any dreams I decide to whenever I wake up (which is usually right after most REM cycles when I'm in full swing) before going back to sleep; repeat until I feel rested and/or can no longer sleep. I'm currently experimenting with meditation which seems to help with going to sleep and is a great time to set dream intentions/goals.

Needless to say, that's probably hardly ideal, but personally it doesn't seem to pose much of a problem, and I still seem to function pretty well.

I usually go to sleep between 22:00 and 23:00 during workdays, on the weekend I usually go to sleep really late.

I read a chapter of a book and then adjust my sleeping posture so it's like I am laying in a sunchair.

And I listen to a guided visualization exercise for fun. And then I meditate and sleep.

If I wake up during the night I meditate again.

(With meditation in this case I actually mean that I practise conscious sleeping)

So my goal is to eventually learn to consciously sleep the whole night. And by then that will be the only routine.

I usually think about LDing all the time during the day...I practice all day awareness without really trying (i.e., watching the wind blow and trying to see if I can control it). I read DV as frequently as possible and I do a few reverse reality checking (I ask myself, "If I was dreaming...what would be happening?" or "What would I be able to do if this was a dream?").

I usually have the most success during naps. My bedtime is usually sometime after 1:00am or 2:00am because I have severe insomnia. I am also a very light sleeper so if I am taking a nap I am usually still very aware. I then lay down saying a mantra and slightly focusing on my breathing whether its bedtime or I am napping. I may black in and out, but I will always come back to the mantra or breathing and sooner or later I will be lucid (if I don't fall asleep). If I find myself lucid I always do a quick reality check of levitation (this RC never fails me). If I am laying down for the night I usually fall asleep and just hope for a DILD. I am not very good at DILDing because usually I believe everything I see in my dreams...sigh. I can't depend too much on dream signs. My successes usually come from a WILD or DEILD during naps/meditation.

I do practice WBTB frequently and when I go back to bed I still try to stay as aware as possible but like I said, I usually end up falling asleep. I do practice meditation...not as much as I like, but a little practice goes a long way.

Important note: I share a bed with my husband so my successful WBTB have always been moving to another location in the house like the couch. I rarely LD sharing a bed with someone. I only did it once and I remember my husband kicked me in my sleep while I was having a LD and I woke up mad as hell.

Hope this helps someone! One Love.

My sleep schedule is somewhat variable, but there is one constant in that I can't stand being awake in the early morning, that is, from sunrise to about three hours afterward. I think it's just the nature of my circadian rhythm, but inevitably if I'm forced to be awake during that part of the day I'll feel ill and out of sorts, no matter how much sleep I've gotten.

On worknights I'll usually go to bed around 1 or 2 am and sleep until 9 or 10 (luckily I don't have to leave for work until noon). On my days off I'll typically stay up an hour or two later. I'm always on the computer right up until bedtime, either doing work-related stuff or playing video games, depending on whether or not it is a work night. It doesn't interfere with my sleep. There's a trick to falling asleep I'm not sure how to describe in terms other than "letting go." I find that part easy. The hard part for me these days is keeping a measure of attentiveness turned on in order to observe the process.

I don't drink much water during the day, but over the course of every night I'll drink at least a liter, which means I wake up naturally around 3-6 times a night. Usually I go right back to bed, but if the conditions seem right (just had a vivid dream, motivated, sun's not up yet) I'll stay up longer for a proper WBTB (anywhere from 30 minutes to well over an hour) and make a WILD attempt. If I'm feeling lazier I might just make an intention to DEILD or set up my silent alarm to try for an EILD. I get the best results out of my WBTB if I spend it reading about lucid dreaming or writing in my DJ, and I think it also helps to do a few minutes of seated meditation right before I go back to bed. There have been periods when I meditated more regularly during the day, but it didn't noticeably affect the frequency or clarity of my LDs.

Sometimes my job gets super intense, to the point where I'll crash early ("early" for me means any time before midnight) and wake up around 3am to do a few more hours of work during the middle of the night, then catch what remaining sleep I can after the sun rises. Curiously, times like these have produced some completely unintentional and amazing LDs--if rather inconveniently, since the last thing I have time for on such occasions is writing lengthy dream reports! I've found that my actual motivation for LDing on any given night is largely conditioned by how much time I anticipate I'll have for writing up my account afterwards, since that usually takes at least an hour at minimum, usually longer.