Wake-Initiated Lucid Dreams

WILD: Wake-Initiated Lucid Dreams

A WILD is when you slip from the waking state directly into the dream state, without losing consciousness. You wake up briefly after a dream, then fall back asleep while maintaining conscious awareness. WILDs are less frequent than DILDs, because they require effort, but once mastered, they are the most reliable way of inducing a lucid dream.

Three WILD Techniques:

Hypnagogic Imagery

The first is Hypnagogic Imagery. The hypnagogic imagery is what happens as we fall asleep. You’re seeing flashes of lights, images that don’t really mean anything yet, such as pops and sounds, and it's really your waking consciousness starting to tune out and give you all sorts of weird stuff. We can use this to slip into the dream.

The way we do this is first to relax completely. The practice here is from Yoga Nidra. It's called the 61 Points of Light Practice, and it helps us relax totally, extremely deeply. As we’re relaxing, the meditative attention is just resting, very passively, on the hypnagogic imagery as it arises. The moment we grasp onto those images, we can kind of jolt ourselves awake and end up right back at square one. So it's like riding a wave. As we get further and further towards the dream, these images turn into more coherent forms. They become faces, words, and sentences, and they get more complex.

This is the part where we’re riding that relaxation and stability into the dream. You’re allowing yourself to be passively drawn into the emerging dream. There's no active intention at this point. You’re simply being drawn along just by the force of your relaxation and stability, and suddenly, you’re in it. You have to balance between relaxation and stability, so meditative training will come in handy here.

1. Relax completely (eg. with 61-Points of Light practice)

2. Watch hypnagogic imagery as it arises, holding it as delicately as possible

3. Loosely watch as simple images gradually become more complex

4. Allow yourself to be passively drawn into the emerging dream

5. Maintain a balance between relaxed and stable attention. Too tight and you’ll wake up; too lax and you’ll drift into unconscious sleep. 

WBTB: Wake-Back-To-Bed

We use "Wake Back to Bed" in the later dream segments of the morning roughly between four and a half hours and six hours after we first went to bed. At this point, you’re done with deep sleep and dreaming more often, and you’re sleeping more lightly. It's a great time for lucidity. You already have natural wake‑ups after a segment of REM dreaming, so we can use those times to consciously wake ourselves up and then fall back asleep intentionally to foster lucidity.

Here’s how you do it: set an alarm for four and a half or six hours after bedtime. I like four and a half hours, because after six hours I tend to be too awake, but you can experiment. When you wake up, stay awake for 30–60 minutes. If you’re a high‑energy person, lean towards the lower end - about 30 minutes - because you don’t want to be too awake to fall back to sleep. If you tend to be groggy, stay awake closer to 45–60 minutes. Basically, you just want to give your brain enough alertness that when you fall back to sleep, you can carry that thread of consciousness with you and slip into a lucid dream.

Then, after those 30–60 minutes, fall back asleep with a strong intention to re‑enter the dream state lucidly. Intention plays a huge role here. It’s broadly about waking up, staying awake for a short period, and then going back to bed. You can do whatever you want in those 30–60 minutes - use the washroom, have a snack, meditate - as long as you maintain some alertness. When paired with the next method, MILD, it's one of the best ways to have a lucid dream.

1. Set your alarm for 4.5 or 6 hours after bedtime

2. Stay awake for 30-60 minutes

3. Fall back asleep with the strong intention to re-enter the dreamstate lucidly

*Research has shown highest success rates when paired with the MILD technique

MILD: Mnemonic-Initiated Lucid Dream

A mnemonic device is a memory aid. In MILD, we use visualization and deep intention to help us remember to become lucid the next time we find ourselves asleep.

The “mnemonic” is simply a way to remember. The biggest challenge with lucidity is remembering to recognize that you're dreaming while you're in a dream. So the technique here is to use Visualization and Intention. Basically, you pair this with the Wake Back to Bed method.

After waking up for those 30–60 minutes, recall as many details as you can from the dream you just came out of. You can just lie there and review it in your mind, or you can get up and write it down — whatever works best for you. You're essentially re‑narrating the dream to yourself. Then, after that review, when you return to bed, focus single‑pointedly on your intention. It can be as simple as repeating a phrase like, “The next time I’m dreaming, I want to remember that I’m dreaming.”

It’s like focusing your mind the way your eyes focus on a single object in meditation. As you fall back to sleep, you also visualize — imagine yourself back in the dream you just left, except this time, imagine that you became lucid within that dream. Let your imagination fill in the details of what it would have been like to realize you were dreaming and to carry that lucidity forward. In this way, you’re putting yourself back into the dream, but reshaping the story so that you recognize it for what it is.

Repeating those three steps — Intention, Visualization, and allowing yourself to drift to sleep — has been highly researched. Since about 1975, studies have shown that these methods work remarkably well, and even total beginners can have several lucid dreams in one night using this approach. It's especially nice to try this on a weekend when you have time to sleep in. 

1. Before bed, set your intention to wake up and recall your dreams

2. When you wake during the night, recall as many details as possible of the dream you were just having - see and feel it (if you’re too sleepy, get up briefly)

3. Return to sleep focusing single mindedly on the intention, “Next time I’m dreaming I want to remember that I’m dreaming” and feel that you mean it.

4. Imagine that you’re back in your last dream, but this time you realize you are dreaming. Continue to elaborate on the visualization - what do you do next?

5. Repeat 3 & 4 until your intention is deeply set and nothing else enters your mind. This should be the last thing on your mind as you fall asleep.