Couple of questions about Lucid dreaming

Hi everyone. New to DV, excited to begin my journey towards mastering lucid dreaming! I've read extensively on the subject of lucid dreaming the past couple of days deciding if this is something I want to invest effort into learning how to do. Because I have not experienced any vivid lucid dreams for myself, it really is beyond comprehension to me that people actually do experience intensely vivid environments during a lucid dream, so I am excited to experience this for myself. I have a couple of questions that I have not found answers to while looking:

I have naturally really good dream recall. Every morning I wake up recollecting anywhere from 1 to 3 dreams. However, all these recalled dreams share a commonality in which they all occurred in the morning right before I wake up. I understand that this is perfectly normal because I read that REM sleep is increased right before you wake up. My question is, can you lucid dream early in the night and still remember the experience several hours later when morning comes? Or do all memorable lucid dreams occur during the last hour or two before you naturally awaken?

Also another question I have is, if you have multiple lucid dream episodes in the same night, when in the second or third episode, can you recall your first lucid dream of the night within the subsequent lucid dream episode? And do you also have a sensation of how much time passes between different episodes of lucid dreams within the same night?


Also, just how real can sensory perception get inside of a lucid dream. I did read that people say that with enough practice lucid dreams can feel every bit as vivid as real waking life. Does that mean that if you are standing outside you can feel a slight breeze against you, feel the earth between the toes of your feet, yell out loud in a chamber and hear the reverberating sound waves of the echos of your voice, etc? It's so hard to wrap my mind around this as being possible since even all of my dreams no matter how fantastical have always had a hazy quality to it that lacked detailed sensory stimuli.

One last question I have is that, in all of the dreams I recall, its almost as if I am looking at myself in 3rd person. Kind of like playing an mmo or rpg with your avatar in 3rd person view. In lucid dreams, is this also the case?

I've only had a few lucid dreams so I'm not sure about most of your questions. I can tell you what becoming lucid for the first time was like for me though and how vivid it was. It was like I'd lived my whole life only in my head and suddenly realized I had external senses. I guess you could say that after I became lucid I really started living in my head.

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Originally Posted by jonaht93

My question is, can you lucid dream early in the night and still remember the experience several hours later when morning comes? Or do all memorable lucid dreams occur during the last hour or two before you naturally awaken?

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Well, I know that a lot of people have their lucid dreams later on in the night, simply because rem-sleep gets longer then. Speaking for me, I've also had lucids early in the night. But I tend to sleep in the afternoon, too, and that can mess up your rem cycles. Of course you can remember lucids you had earlier at night, but as far as I know only if you woke up directly after having them and spend some effort not to forget them until morning. If you're too lazy to do some conscious remembering, you're likely to forget them till morning. Happened to me before, just remembered that I had a lucid dream and forgot what it was all about. Very annoying.

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Originally Posted by jonaht93

Also another question I have is, if you have multiple lucid dream episodes in the same night, when in the second or third episode, can you recall your first lucid dream of the night within the subsequent lucid dream episode?

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It's possible that you remember your last lucid dream while lucid dreaming, yes. For instance, I remember dreaming of myself writing down the lucid dream I'd just had and then realizing that I was dreaming. However, remembering your lucids while LDing doesn't happen all the time.

Another thing is chaining your LDs. Like waking up and then returning into the dream you just had and continuing it. Can be great fun :-)

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Originally Posted by jonaht93

And do you also have a sensation of how much time passes between different episodes of lucid dreams within the same night?

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I don't. But it might be different for others ;-)

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Originally Posted by jonaht93

Also, just how real can sensory perception get inside of a lucid dream. I did read that people say that with enough practice lucid dreams can feel every bit as vivid as real waking life.

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It can be every bit as real as in waking life, all five senses included. However, with me it's a bit touch and go, and it never got better with practice. Sometimes my LDs are extremely vivid, even more real than waking life, and sometimes they are blurred just like normal dream. There are some techniques that help increase vividness (like rubbing your hands together), but for me it doesn't do a lot. There are some people, who try to enhance vividness by taking B6 and tryptophan, some experiment with other supplements. I don't.

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Originally Posted by jonaht93

One last question I have is that, in all of the dreams I recall, its almost as if I am looking at myself in 3rd person. Kind of like playing an mmo or rpg with your avatar in 3rd person view. In lucid dreams, is this also the case?

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That can be the case, but it doesn't have to. In my dreams the 3rd person view only occurs when I've spent too much time playing computer games the day before ;-)

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My question is, can you lucid dream early in the night and still remember the experience several hours later when morning comes? Or do all memorable lucid dreams occur during the last hour or two before you naturally awaken?

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You can, but in my experience LDs are harder to remember the more time you spent sleeping after them. If you wake up and write some keywords though, you can sleep as much as you want and the memory'll be fresh :)

Hi Jonaht,

Having naturally good Dream recall is a great place to start! It's one of the best things to have to start with in my opinion.

You can have LDs at any point during the night but DILDs do tend to happen more in the morning for most.
Often after a good LD you wake up straight after it anyway, so it wouldn't really matter if it's early in the night when it comes to remembering it.
If you don't wake up though and go on to have more Dreams it can be a little hard to remember a LD sometimes when you wake up.

I've found with multiple LDs in a row, or even just one long LD, the first one (or beginning of a long one) can start to become a little hazy.
If I hear something I really want to remember and a Lucid's going on a long time I'll often wake myself up before I risk forgetting it.

I've found LD's to be, for the most part as real as you could hope for!
The vast majority of mine feel like how you'd hope a perfected VR machine would be in the future.
You can feel the sun on your back, the wind in your face, you can taste anything you eat (though it might not taste as you expect sometimes), you can feel the weight and texture of items you pick up, if you get real close to Dream Characters I've even felt the warmth emanating from their skin!

It's honestly amazing and is one of them things that sounds to good to be true, but so far in life I've found it to be the only thing that sounds to good to be true, but it is actually true lol.


Like I said before having great Dream recall is the best place to start so you could be Lucid in no time.

Hey Jonhat93! Welcome to the land of dreams! It is certainly an exciting journey which I am sure you will find out for yourself. I will answer your questions based on my experience which of course can be different from other people but these seem to be general questions anyway.

I can assure you that Lucid dreams are indeed real in the sense of how realistic they feel which can be just like waking life and sometimes even more intense and colourful.

You are right in that our REM period is longer as we progress in our sleep so we do end up dreaming more in the morning but it may just be that you don't wake up in the middle of the night or if you do then maybe you're just not remembering any dreams. You can dream at any point of sleep but it is more frequent during the REM stage. You can also be aware of other stages of sleep whilst there is no dream happening. So yes you can have lucids early at night and you may remember them when you wake in the morning after having other dreams. This isn't always the case though, as dream memory can be tricky depending on the dream quality and your awareness.

Hmm not too sure about this one but I will try. You can certainly remember that you just had a lucid dream during your second or third lucid dream but dream memory inside the dream is also tricky. Our access to memory can be restricted at times and we can also have false memories whilst in the dream where you will be sure that it is true only to find that it isn't upon waking. As for the sensation of time passing inside the dream, you can estimate that it feels like you have been in there for 10 mins or half an hour, etc. However this won't necessarily reflect how much time passed in the waking world. You can have a dream longer than 5 minutes that lasts only 5 minutes in waking life. I usually tell what time is as I wake depending on the lighting of the room.

It can be as real as you imagine it to be like I said above. It often depends on what you are focusing on. You can feel various things at the same time but if you focus on a particular sense it can be more intense. Don't worry about it. When I first started My dreams weren't vivid at all and my first lucids also weren't as vivid. Just so you onow that because you are lucid doesn't mean that the dream will automatically be vivid. Just like normal dreams some stand out more than others.

When I first started I also had 3rd person dreams which went away with time and visualisation practice where I would try to visualise things from a 1st person point of view. I had some 3rd person lucids before but it depends on the dream to be honest.

Hope I helped and am glad you are thinking about experiencing this. It was an absolutely life changing experience for me and at the time it came, lucid dreaming gave more meaning to my life :mrgreen:

My lucid dreams are just like real memories, so I recall them just the same. But, I awaken after the end and reflect on it for awhile. In one lucid dream I was talking to my father who passed away a few years ago, and told him I had had a lucid dream about him the prior night, which I had. For beginners like you it is a shame it is called lucid dreaming, as it is more accurately an alternate reality or out of body experience rather than dreaming.

Jonaht93:

First, welcome to DV's; I think you've chosen a good site to help you with your LD'ing experience and exploration!

I just wanted to address one foundational part of your questions that seems to have been overlooked:

Lucidity in dreams does not equal vividness in dreams.

In fact, aside from the potential (with experience and dream control) to appreciate or eventually increase the vividness or clarity of your dreams with lucidity, lucidity has nothing at all to do with vividness.

Lucidity equals the presence of your waking-life self-awareness in dreams, and nothing more. In other words lucidity is simply about knowing that you are dreaming, that you are present in your dream world, and nothing more. You can be incredibly self-aware (aka, lucid) in the dullest of dreams, and you can have the most vivid or realistic of dreams without even a hint of lucidity. As I mentioned above, you can use your lucidity, with practice, to increase vividness or to better enjoy the vividness already present in the dream (as folks above have already nicely described), but your lucidity in dreams has nothing to do with vividness.

I think it is because of its being called "lucid dreaming" that the state seems to have developed a mythology of being a condition of vividness in dreams, and I can see how, as you read the things you did, you may have been led to believe that lucidity = vividness... it doesn't. If you haven't already, I suggest that you shift your attention from a pursuit of vividness to a pursuit of becoming aware that you are dreaming so that you can follow a more direct route to successful lucid dreaming.

tl;dr: Just to be clear, lucid dreaming does not equal vivid or realistic dreams. Lucid dreaming equals the knowledge that you are dreaming due to the presence of waking-life self-awareness during a dream, and nothing more.

While Sageous is right, to be Lucid just means you are aware you're Dreaming I think for a lot of people Lucidity is accompanied by extremely vivid Dreams.
I've always had vivid non Lucid's but nowhere near to the extent of my LD's.

I'd say in about 95% of the times I'm Lucid, the Dream is just like Rothga says, more like an alternate reality than Dream.
They're not Dream like at all, I feel like I've woken up totally aware in a completely realistic environment where I'm free to do whatever I want.

You can have vivid non lucid, and hazy lucid dreams.

I remember watching a bond chase sequence where the camera kept pulling back thru layer after layer of glass corridors and the hero ran thru them, I thought If only my dreams could be as vivid as this. Then I woke up.

the other night I woke and felt my elbow on the window, a soda bottle jammed into the frame, the window was open and across the street the neighbors were playing nursery rhymes on the radio, I was very tired and bleary eyed, then I thought, Hey I didn't go to sleep in the car. Quickly I attempted to stabilize but 5 seconds latter I was awake in bed (this was a lucid dream, maybe a blurry mostly hand rubbing dream but a lucid one)

Of course I have had false awakenings that became lucid that were crystal clear, and had vision, light levels, clarity all come and go in Lucid dreams.

Lucid dreams are not different in look and feel than normal ones for me, your just more likely to remember more detail because you are aware.

Initially most of your lucids will be short until you learn to control yourself, and to stabilize, maybe only seconds, but I have had several last 10+ minutes and more, of course in most of these I entered the void survived and reentered the same or a similar dreamscape.

I have pushed lucid dreams for more and more detail and gone blind, then survived the void and ended up in mundane looking dreamscapes.

As for what you can remember in Lucid dreams themselves, I have dozens of goals, yet often I just run around doing whatever occurs to me. With your brain turned half off don't expect to be at your best :)

Hey welcome to dreamviews and congrats on your first steps toward becoming a LD'er!

I remember one time I had about 11 lucid dreams in one night, in fact I only had 11 dreams total and remembered each lucid upon waking. Another time I had just 1 lucid that lasted the entire night, the scenary changed a few times but I managed to hold onto my lucidity the entire night.

Keeping track of time can be difficult though, as there have been times when I dreamt what felt like a 2 hour dream in the space of 2 minutes! but generally it feels pretty consistent. For beginners they usually have short LD's lasting seconds to minutes, but as you become more experienced they can last for hours.

Lucid dreams can be hazy at times but also very vivid. There have been times when I had to double check I was dreaming because it felt so real. My sense of taste, touch and even smell all seemed super-realistic - more so than waking life - that I even questioned if this was the real reality and that waking life was some sort of sub reality.

I've had dreams where I am in third person although I've never achieved this intentionally in my lucid dreams. Mostly because it isn't a goal of mine, I prefer things to be first person but I'm sure you could achieve this or even 360 degree vision if you wanted.

Best of luck on your LD journey! slow and steady wins the race.