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Comment by blueridge | Hacker News Reader

Please share! This is something I've always wanted to explore.

Set periodic alarms on your watch or phone, 3-5 per day, same times every day. Every time it goes off, take a few minutes to look around you and try prove to yourself you're not dreaming. Note the stability and regularity of the world around you, and that where you are and what you're doing makes sense (hopefully).

The point is to establish a habit such that you end up repeating this habit even when you're dreaming. Often you won't realize you're dreaming when you do this while sleeping, but sometimes you will. This lucidity sometimes doesn't last long, but duration will get longer and frequency increases with practice.

This is a DILD (Dream Induced Lucid Dreaming) technique, reality checking. These techniques are generally not as reliable as WILD, you can’t control the timing of your LDs and they tend to create pseudo-lucid dreams[1]. If you have a consistent sleep cycle (REM and non-REM), I recommend WILD techniques. If you are young it’s even easier, as sleep phases tend to get messed up as you get older.

1: These are just regular dreams in which you dream about that you are lucid dreaming. Your awake consciousness is not actually present, your memory is as suspended as it is in regular dreams, you don’t notice flaws in the dream reality and it feels distinctly like regular dreams (like a “bystander”) as opposed to the self awareness feeling in lucid dreams. See https://youtu.be/fqWikLRVby8?si=J0E2BpxO4ff4mam4

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