Sleep deprivation gave me intense dreams, but sleep gives me lucid ones.
My sleep schedule is all over the place. It has been for a while. Even in quarantine, with more “extra” time on my hands, I still find myself struggling. I spend too much time lying in bed before or don’t make it there early enough in the first place. I know my sleep habits won’t be perfect, especially in my day and age, and with college in my near future (yes, I am unfortunately in high school). But I constantly try to remind myself of its value.
Sleep’s Invigorating Effect
Getting the right amount of sleep, 8–10 hours for teens and 7–8 hours for adults, is critical to your memory, immune system, emotional regulation, and overall well-being. Without it, productivity, judgment, learning capabilities, and overall life quality take a huge toll.
Unfortunately, I didn’t pay attention to these truths for a long time. As a teen, my love-hate relationship with sleep permeated (and still does) all aspects of my life. A few years ago, sleeplessness tormented me for many straight weeks, and while I was looking for a solution, the subject piqued my curiosity. Laying in bed, doing nothing but trying to sleep, gets to you - I couldn’t stop a sinking guilt for all the productive things I could’ve been doing with this never-ending consciousness.
Sleep wasn’t a waste of time for all of its incredible benefits, but waiting to fall into it (pre-first stage) feels like torture the longer it drags on.
In my stubbornness, I treated sleep as optional. I understood at surface-level why it was crucial to my health but not the extent of the damage I caused on myself by ignoring it. Once I self-discovered these reasons, this changed. Choosing sleep for the sake of myself was an insanely effective motivation, and after my state of near sleep-deprivation, I welcomed being well-rested. It felt incredible — challenges (I’ll pretend advanced high school courses and basement workouts are considered these) were exponentially easier to overcome.
My first time getting sleep and actually being aware of it? Maybe this was why I noticed such a huge difference. Sleep turned into a side interest, and at one point, I tried biphasic sleep cycles. It messed up my sleep for weeks trying to revert back to my normal schedule since sleeping twice a day (and fewer hours) didn’t cut it for me.
Very Little Sleep to Very Vivid Dreams
Sadly, sleep moved down my priorities again, and my mind was occupied with other things. I preferred staying up to keep the next school day from coming, and if I didn’t sleep, I had unlimited hours left to do what I needed, right? But when I did this, I inevitably crashed. During these nights, I had the most vivid dreams: nightmares about homework assignments and emotionally charged drama. Honestly, I didn’t mind. I had a heightened sense of emotion from them, and I was more perceptive, I thought.
I learned my crazy, very surreal dreams were due to a phenomenon called REM rebound, which is when you get intenser dreams because you’re making up for all the lost ones from not sleeping. Less REM means fewer dreams (REM sleep hours are where dreams occur), and more REM sleep means more elaborate ones.
Like not eating much, and then eating 3x more than normal all at once — sleep and dreams catch up on you.
Dreaming wasn’t something I thought about much before: I just let it happen. If I remembered, it was cool, but if not, I didn’t think much of it. But after these memorable dreams, my mindset shifted — I wanted to keep my them. I also wanted the countless perks of sleep, though, like muscle growth, immunity, critical thinking skills, and way more.
Lucid Dreams
I felt like if I gained something from my dreams that I could use and turn into something tangible, sleeping could be even more productive. I found my answer to this when I came across lucid dreaming. This encounter with the concept was unlike previous shrug offs I’d had before, when I’d heard of it but never looked into the specifics. A few in-depth searches and strikingly edited videos later, I resolved to learn it.
My reasons were quite unoriginal — I wanted to control my dreams. To live out my fantasies and without care for the consequences. Too good to be true?
In a way, yes. But lucid dreaming experts will tell you it’s not. It’s essentially what it claims to be — you’re lucid in your dreams. At some point, you’ll be able to fabricate the events yourself, although you don’t need to control for one to occur.
This process takes time, but I fully believe the initial investment to spur one isn’t bad. Many sources will tell you you’ll be able to do it in a night or a month, and for some people, that works. I personally went through many techniques and near give-ups until a recognizable lucid dream finally registered. Becoming good and manipulating the dream as you want is the genuinely difficult part, at least for me.
I’m no skilled lucid dreamer, and I don’t have the command over it I’d like. It’s mostly a shot in the dark and, even after many months of trying, lucid dreams can still happen sporadically or barely at all. Certain thoughts will pan out on rare occasions, but achieving consciousness is the majority of my success. Yet even these results, which I expect to grow, are worth it to me.
You’ve probably had lucid dreams before.
I know once I found out lucid dreaming can mean you’re conscious in a dream, I thought back to all the times I had that. As a child, part of me still knew certain nightmares had to be fake, especially when they included characters from recent movies. I must’ve known I was dreaming with so many unbelievable elements, but it felt so real that I couldn’t sleep for weeks.
Now, if I have nightmares, I experience them with the twisted relief of knowing they’re a dream. In that way, it doesn’t really seem or feel like a bad dream anymore, just an unfortunate circumstance. Along with other benefits lucid dreaming promotes less stress, less frequent nightmares, and enhances emotional processes.
How did I do it?
There are countless methods out there, but my ultimate test was patience. This was the reason it took me so long and probably why I could succeed more if I stayed consistent.
Lately, I’ve been focusing on dream recall again to rekindle lucid ones — almost repeating the process I went through to first learn. I wake up and write my dream down from memory — a skill built up overtime. At first, I could only write a couple fragments in my notes, but now I can take up to an hour to finish. It necessitates a thorough rummage of my thoughts, and extracting the details gets harder as the memory dissipates. So if I groggily half wake up sometime during the night or early morning, I immediately reach for something to write it down. Then force myself back to sleep by repeating the scenes in my head and telling myself, “I’m going to lucid dream” or “I’m going to remember my dreams” (this is part of nearly every method you’ll find).
After you get the dream recall down, start waking up an hour or two before you usually do. I used alarms, but sometimes, I’d naturally wake up in the middle of the night. Write it down fast. Or speak it. Just make sure you remember it and think back to it as you drift back to sleep. Try to imagine yourself in it.
My method might not work on you, but if you keep experimenting, it’ll eventually pay off. You’ll realize you’re in a lucid dream, likely with the recognition of abnormal objects or settings, and by then, you’ll have some idea of what to expect.
Everything is blurry, and at first, if you think too hard about your surroundings, they fade. Most likely, the dreams will be short and scattered.
Sleep as Motivation and Dreams as Motivators
Lucid dreaming has so many benefits, if you choose to take advantage of them. People swear by practicing languages, flying, and all sorts of incredible worldly activities. There’s also dangers, like not being able to distinguish from events from reality or losing sleep quality.
But recently?
Lucid dreaming has given me sleep, or at least, the motivation to sleep.
Like actually sleeping 8+ hours and at a decent time. It’s gotten me to bed at reasonable hours and inspired me to attempt healthy sleep habits. All because sleep etiquette is the best way to make lucid dreams successful.
If you’re not sleeping, you’re not getting deep into REM cycles (sleep is split up into non-REM and REM stages). The REM stages in the later stages of sleep are where the dreams pick up and become, well, spicier. And if you’re not sleeping well, those later REM stages are messed up, so you also experience fewer dreams.
That’s why when I was sleep-deprived, I got dreams that were magnified, but I didn’t get them a lot. If you get high-quality sleep, you can develop your lucid dreaming skills. And even if your efforts get frustrating, you’ll feel so much better with more rest. It’s a win-win for me.
Lucid dreaming is a fascinating fact, but sleep is constant. In my short time alive, I’ve had sleep experiences on opposite ends of the spectrum that affect my day-to-day tremendously — I’ve become very conscious of it. When there’s a lack of structure, I fall into poor sleeping habits, and once it becomes noticeable, I finally try to fix it like now.
The pandemic has caused grief on many people’s sleeping habits. In times of great social change, we need reminders that at the end of the day, we’re still in this together.
You could try what I do and sleep for lucid dreams or maybe you can just sleep like a crazy normal person. My method has helped me stay on top of my night routine, which I’m thankful for right now. Even if lucid dreams don’t live up to the high expectations of its definition, a little bit still goes a long way. Mine definitely brighten up my nights, and I firmly believe that this extra flair does a lot for my sanity.
