False Awakening Through Expectation (FATE)

A technique from the Daniel Love's book 'Are You Dreaming?' which seemed interesting.


1. Retire to bed. Before retiring to bed as normal, set your standard alarm clock to wake you after a minimum of five hours sleep. Also, set your alarm app to give random alarms for a 90-minute period, starting shortly after the time you have set your standard alarm clock to wake you. Place both of your alarms some distance from your bed, enough so that you have to leave your bed to switch them off, but not so far that they will be ineffective at waking you. Also, be sure that any clocks or devices clearly showing the time in your bedroom are covered, so you are unable to judge the time simply by looking around your room.

2. Wake at the preset time. Once awakened by your standard alarm, get out of bed walk, over to where you havepl aced your alarms and switch off your standard alarm, making sure its face is now covered so you cannot red the time. Pay careful attention to everything you do as you walk over to the alarm, how it feels, the lighting your, bodily feelings.

3. Perform the nose pinch reality test. Once your primary alarm clock is switched off, and its face covered, making it impossible to red the time, slowly and carefully perform the nose pinch reality test. Once you havce firmly established that you are awake and not dreaming, return to bed.

4. Visualise the reality test whilst returning to sleep. Whilst you return to sleep, run over in your mind the process you have just performed, Imagine how it felt to walk over the alarm clock, and imagine yourself performing the nose pinch reality test but discovering you can breathe, that you are indeed dreaming. Remind yourself also that soon you will be awoken by a random alarm and will be requiered to perform the same test.

5. Awaken to the random alarm. During some point during the next 90 minutes, you'll be awoken by the first of an unknown number of random alarms. When this occurs, get out of bed, walk over the alarm (paying attention to your environment and how you feel), dismiss the alarm if requiered by your app, then once again thoroughly and carefully perform the nose pinch reality test. If you establish that you're awake, return to bed.

6. Repeat tasks 4 and 5. Continue to perform tasks 4 and 5 until you achieve lucidity or wake for the day.

Thanks for this, even tho I've already read the book and really liked it, it's useful to have it on here too. I've given this a try has worked well so far and when it didn't it gave me some pretty interesting dreams anyway. It's been about 80% effective so far mostly WILDs. I would say it's one of those techniques for when you don't need to work that day tho, as it doesn't give you the most restful mornings sleep. Still it's a small price to pay tho for a pretty sturdy way to get lucid.

Also this may be of some use to someone out there: I was just buying a second copy as a birthday present for my bud and noticed Amazon.com have it at a pretty nice reduction at the moment, at about $13, so I may buy a couple more as early xmas presents just in case the price goes back up before then.

Using expectation tends to be the best way to gain lucidity in a lot of cases, it's why dream incubation and visualizing yourself getting lucid is a good form of MILD.

Sorry for digging this thread up, what app is good to use for this? I can't seem to find one on either android or iphone that allows me to get a random number of alarms within a certain interval. All of the apps require me to set the number of alarms and it will randomize the frequency, but this technique also seems to require that you don't know the number of alarms that will occur before-hand.

This is a very interesting technique. I figured out something similar and dubbed it "FAILD" (False Awakening Induced Lucid Dream).

Instead of using and visualizing the alarms, I just wake up 90 minutes or so earlier (without moving!) than I normally wake up (using an alarm or something that goes off only once), then I imagine I have to get up for the day, and imagine myself going to brush my teeth, wash my face, get ready, etc. It happens really quickly: I'm in a false awakening right away in which I'm doing just those things. Except I had expected beforehand that it was going to be a FA, so I catch it right away and proceed to have my LD. :)

If anyone tries this, let me know how it goes!

It reminded me of the technique the OP posted, but with less bells and whistles.