10 Benefits Of Lucid Dreaming To Improve Your Waking Life
Lucid dreaming is a mental state where you realize that you are dreaming within the dream.
Unless you’ve experienced a lucid dream before, you’re probably wondering if it’s even possible. Because after all, to the uninitiated it does sound too good to be true.
The ability to experience anything you can imagine as if it were ‘real’ life through all of your senses. Exactly as you are experiencing the waking world right now — In this very moment!
Whenever I ask people about their experience with lucidity, they either have no clue what I’m talking about or shrug it off as a fun, one-off occurrence they had when they were younger — Not realizing the power and potential they came in contact with.
Humans have known about this state of mind, and have been practicing it for a long time.
The pursuit of pleasure is the initial motivation to get into lucid dreaming for most people — But as the pool of pleasures is exhausted over time, lucid dreaming becomes a tool to enhance both the waking and dreaming life dramatically.
Learning the practice of lucid dreaming takes you on a journey of pleasure, discovery, skill acquisition, and healing.
But as with any skill worth learning, you need the right motivation to overcome the plateau when things start to get good.
The 10 Benefits Of Lucid Dreaming
1) Live Out Your Fantasies
The most common motivation to learn the skill of lucid dreaming is to realize personal fantasies.
You can experience everything and anything you always wanted to, whether it’s possible in waking life or not — In absolute clarity of perception.
2) Design — Manifest — Visualize
Lucidity provides you with the power to visualize and manifest things immediately. As long as you can imagine it, you can make it happen and experience the real thing instantly:
- Design and drive a concept car
- Experience impossible architecture and complete worlds
- Magically draw shapes in the air
Your ability to manipulate dream matter improves with your proficiency in lucid dreaming.
3) Base Decisions On Personal Experience
Since you have the power to do anything in lucid dreams, you can set up scenarios to ‘try things on for size’ before you commit in waking life.
This can be anything that helps you make more educated decisions:
- Experience a profession you consider
- Learning a certain skill
- Preview decors and lighting for your living room
- Choosing a hobby
Most people make flawed decisions by pre-feeling the good parts of how the realization of that decision feels.
But in dreams, you don’t need to pre-feel, you can live just through the options and base your decisions on real experiences more confidently.
4) Learn And Train For Waking Life
It turns out that your brain does not make much of a difference between dreams and ‘real’ experiences.
To our brains, dreaming and doing something is equivalent to actually doing it — Stephen LaBerge
While lucid, you can learn new skills or complement existing ones through targeted practice in ways you could not easily, safely, or possibly in waking life.
5) Solve Problems
While you can’t directly access the subconscious in dreams, communication between the conscious and unconscious mind is much facilitated.
Solving non-trivial problems typically involves the following modes of thinking in iterations:
- Focused and intentional crunching of the problem toward a solution
- Big-picture thinking and rumination using the subconscious as discrete processing power — while you go about your day-to-day life
You experience your subconscious through what you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste within a dream.
Depending on the problem you want to solve, you can take advantage of all the visualization tools you have at your imaginative disposal.
This is why people often come up with good ideas or solutions to pressing problems after sleep or even a good nap.
6) Overcome Fears And Nightmares
Lucid dreams are the perfect training ground to overcome fears and nightmares, gradually and safely. Successfully facing nightmares and fears in lucid dreams neutralizes their power over you and empowers you to face your fears in waking life.
The more fears you face, the more grounded you become in your dreams and reality.
The more grounded you become, the more you will long for additional fears, nightmares, and challenges to overcome.
7) Overcome Limiting Beliefs And Be Empowered
Since you can manipulate the dream world, and to some extent the behavior of ‘dream people’, you can rule over that world any way you see fit. Without backlash from anyone or anything.
If you currently feel out of control in life, it’s a great way to overcome your self-limiting beliefs by exercising power over your environment.
Be a man. Be a king. Be a god.
8) Cope With Grief
Whether you want to talk to a deceased loved one or revisit a situation that causes you suffering, you can set up dream scenarios to live through moments and resolve them for a better outcome.
You will always know that nothing outside the dream world is affected, yet living through a painful situation vividly and changing the outcome to something more positive might give you relief.
One powerful application of this is to resolve a fight with someone who died before you could reconcile. You can express your feelings to that person one last time before letting them go.
9) Double Your Lifetime
Time is your most valuable resource, bar none.
Without time nothing matters, not even health.
So why wouldn’t you spend additional time to the fullest of your desires?
Hustle culture these days is so concerned with squeezing every second into the waking life by sacrificing good sleep time, for low-quality waking time.
Not only are you wasting part of your finite store of time to be alive, but you are missing adventures and lessons that could enrich the rest of your life
— Stephen LaBerge
Dreaming is living too, but you need to make that choice deliberately.
For every second you spend in a lucid dream, you get more out of waking life with zero additional effort.
10) Improve Yourself
Looking at your waking and dreaming life as a whole, you’re always on a journey.
You start with self-indulgence, then transition to improve yourself and your situation by acquiring skills and wondering how to go about your existence.
Over time, you will seek answers to existential questions and travel to distant worlds to reflect in absolute freedom — This happens naturally as you progress in your waking and dreaming life.
It’s Possible For You Too
Learning to dream lucidly is possible for anyone with the right intentions.
Tough times are ahead of us, so we better make use of every tool we have available to get us unstuck and keep moving in the right direction.
Ludic dreaming is one of these tools.
If you want to start your lucid dreaming journey tonight, all you need to do is record your dreams.
Before you go to sleep tonight, clear your mind, and set your intention to remember your dreams during the night when you wake up — Then write them down in a dedicated dream journal.
Dreams feel real while we’re in them.
It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange
— Leonardo DiCaprio (Inception)
The more dreams you remember in detail, the easier it will be to induce lucid dreams later on. Remembering your dreams as vividly as possible is the first step to becoming a dream explorer.
If you’re serious about learning the practice, purchase the following book from Dr. Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold:
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming
Or anything more recent from the same authors. You won’t regret it!
What’s Your Story?
In the hopes that this article ignites your curiosity for lucid dreaming, make sure to follow me on Medium and Twitter | X for upcoming articles.
I’d love to hear your story and experiences with lucid dreaming.
Build your own worlds, and become acquainted with what the
universe really has in store for you
— Anonymous
See you around!
