How do you know if you have lucid dreams or not?

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There seems to be a lot of talk on here about lucid dreams. I never even heard of lucid dreams until I came here, and the word ''lucid'' sounds like a word with more meaning than what it is. Does it mean more than ''dreams you have what you control''?

I don't think I have lucid dreams. When I'm dreaming, I think it's actually happening to me in real life at the time, then when I wake up I suddenly think, ''oh, it was just a dream.'' I only can control what I daydream about, but when I'm actually asleep I don't control it.

But what does that mean? How do I know if I am controlling them or not? I will try Googling it and reading more about it, but I was just wondering what answers I would get here first.

A lucid dream is a dream in which you know you are dreaming while you're still dreaming.

You may or may not be able to control it; that awareness is the first step to being able to control it, though.

Most people have a lucid dream sometime during their lives, and many people have them repeatedly. It's a quirk of the brain, but it can be a lot of fun, and can even be harnessed to deal with repetitive nightmares.

Oh. Well, I don't have that. Every night dreams fool me into thinking it is what is happening to me in real life.

I'm not exactly sure what counts as a lucid dream. Not too long ago I dreamt that I made certain choices which had consequences for other people. Bad ones. People were dying and things like that. So, all of a sudden, I said "no, things can't be this way. Let's do it all over again." Then the dream started all over again (from the beginning), I made different choices and things got better. I was not aware I was dreaming though.

Another time I dreamt something and then, in the middle of the dream, I stopped and thought "hang on a minute, I've dreamt this before" and then the dream continued. Only now I was aware I was dreaming.

Are those lucid dreams? I've had a few dreams similar to those (especially similar to the second one).

Last edited by rebbieh on 26 Nov 2012, 12:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There is no mistaking lucid dreaming. You suddenly become aware that you are dreaming and that everything you are seeing and hearing is part of a dream that is being created by your own brain. I have lucid dreams sometimes; they are great fun. I can hold conversations with people and know that I'm talking to a simulation of the person created in my own mind. I noticed that the things you see look just as real as the things you see while you are awake, however I noticed the colours were deeper in dreams than in waking reality. The one thing lucid dreams are bad at is continuity. You may see a table then look away and when you look back again the table has been replaced by a chair or other object. You can control lucid dreams to a certain extent too but I've found if I try to do something too different the dream breaks and I wake up. Similarly it is possible to forget that it is a lucid dream and for it to revert to a normal dream where you forget that it is a dream and you think it is real again.

Having a lucid dream just means you realized it was a dream. You might have lost awareness and got it back and then lost it a bit, but yeah, you would have had a lucid dream.
It'll feel really different. It feels really real, sometimes more so than reality. Some things might look odd though, like your hands. Things that look odd can be used as triggers to make you aware. Like for example... I float when I jump. So at first in real life I started to jump every now and then until it became a habit so it was also a habit in my dreams. There are simpler less silly ones like checking your watch (numbers will change when you look back again). There are other techniques too. These days just thinking about having one before going to sleep starts to give me really vivid dreams until I lucid dream a few days later.

Whether you can control them or not is another matter. I can often move my body how I want but the dream prevents me from doing anything.

And the fact that it seemed like real life and you could make choices but did not realize it was a dream means you didn't lucid dream, even if you could control stuff you usually couldn't.

I've had a few lucid dreams. They were often bad dreams and it was like my brain got overloaded with the anxiety of what was happening and then the lucid part kicked in like a defence mechanism. I told my dream self that it was just a dream, it wasn't real and that I had to wake up. It is good when you can control your dream and your choice to remain in it or not. At least it's useful for nightmares.

From what I've read it seems that light switches and mirrors will not work correctly in the dream.

When I have these types of dreams its usually when I realise I've had this dream before or I just get a feeling of deja vu and can now exercise some degree of control. If I try to control too much then I usually wake up pretty quickly which is disappointing because its really fun to dream in this way. These kinds of dreams tend to stick in my mind for days and I will often have a similar but slightly altered dream for many nights in a row. I used to have a lot of these dreams when I was younger and would really look forward to the continuation of the dream as if it was the next movie in my favorite series coming out (but way better because theres the control aspect). I remember having these dreams when I was really really young even (The Land Before Time themed dreams.. haha).

It's obvious to me that I am controlling the dream because I am somewhat conscious of the fact that my body is resting and that the me in my dream is an image of me so I can control and influence in whatever way I want and I recognize my ability to change the environment to some degree.

In that case then, I do not have lucid dreams at all. Each time I dream, I think it is really happening to me. Often I'm having a meltdown in my dream, often crying, ''ohh why is this happening to me?!''

I remember earlier this year I dreamed about the world was ending. It was very graphic, so real, and I really thought it was really happening. It wasn't even muddly, only little bits were, like one time in the dream (while we were waiting for the world to end), we suddenly felt an intense shake like it was an earthquake, and suddenly this foamy stuff poured over us in the room, almost suffocating us. I thought, ''OK, this is it, I am going to die, help!'' And I was almost drowning in this foam. Then the foam suddenly all evaporated really quick, and I was OK again. But I was sitting there cuddling my relatives and crying because we were all just sitting there waiting to die and I was experiencing exactly the same emotions you would if the world was really ending.

Then when I woke up I still thought it was real. It was still dark, so I laid on my back for a couple of minutes, thinking ''was that a dream?'' then I suddenly realised it was a dream, and I felt so happy. In fact I was so relieved that it was just an awful dream, and I turned over and went back to sleep (and thankfully dreamt of something else, less disturbing).

These are called "reality checks". Everybody's mind works differently, so your particular "reality checks" will be unique to you. If you're very familiar with light switches and mirrors, they may well work just fine. I've used both within dreams, but YMMV and I'm sure many people do use these as reliable reality checks.

The trick with a reality check is to make it something that cannot happen in real life, but can easily happen in a dream--something that's easy for you to imagine, but not to do. I tend to use telekinesis: In real life, I cannot move things by thinking about them; in a dream, it's easy. Some people use things like pinching your nose and trying to breathe through it (if you can, it's a dream), trying to put a finger through the palm of your hand (possible in a dream, not in real life), or flying. That kind of thing. Whatever works for you, you should do it while you're awake a couple of times, so that you might remember to do it while dreaming; if you're lucky, you'll be able to understand that you're dreaming because what just happened isn't possible in real life. Your mind while you're dreaming has very little ability to tell fantasy from reality; you'll accept things that you would know were impossible in real life, and generally be pretty naive. That's because your frontal lobe is pretty much asleep when you're asleep. If you're lucid, you're probably waking it up a little. Brain scans on people who are having lucid dreams have shown a bit of activity that looks like a waking mind, in the frontal lobe; so it makes sense that your executive control center would be what would help you realize "this is impossible; I must be dreaming".

It's not like virtual reality, though; not really like a personal holodeck. More like the ability to see, hear, feel what you're capable of imagining. If you can't hold it in your mind all at once, you won't be able to create it. It's a little like daydreaming, except that you can also create the sensory compenent, and you're missing a lot of the critical thinking that you're able to do when you're awake. I find it rather interesting.

I often wonder whether there are any similarities between dreams and psychotic hallucinations--the same lack of ability to reality check is common to both. I don't know whether anybody has been doing that research, though. I wish they would. Maybe it would help people who have psychotic episodes, if we knew whether there were a connection with sleep, because it might give us another angle to attack the problem from.

I've only had it happen once. When it did happen, I had probably a gram of caffeine and tried to force myself to sleep while being super strung out on caffeine. So I managed to get like, 4 hours sleep or something during that sleep. Then dreaming that night, I realized I must be dreaming as I was driving a car I no longer owned anymore. However, I didn't make anything cool happen in my dream or anything. It was like a normal dream, but I just realized for a minute (in dream time) I was dreaming. I got distracted during the dream and forgot I was dreaming, though. And this only happened once under the influence of a LOT of caffeine.