How To Control Your Dreams At Night: 3 Secrets From Research

The basic premise of sleep is completely insane. Imagine you’re designing a species. You want it to survive predators, adapt, innovate, build complex societies, eventually invent memes. At some point, someone in the cosmic design meeting says: “What if we make them spend a third of their life unconscious and defenseless?” And instead of firing that individual into the sun, the team goes, “Brilliant. Ship it.”

But the weirdness doesn’t stop there. Oh no, it gets an exponent. Because we have dreams. One of the weirdest things in all of life.

You’re late for an exam in a class you have never attended. Except you’re in your childhood home. But it’s also an airport. And the floor plan looks like an MC Escher drawing. Of course, the airport is underwater. Obviously, the only person who can help is your third-grade gym teacher, who is also now the Pope.

For some reason, your brain finds creating scenarios like this restorative.

Of course, there’s an entire industry dedicated to telling you these things mean something. Freud rocked up like, “Every dream is about sex,” which says more about Freud’s browser history than your psyche. These days, dream information is primarily distributed through books with titles like Unlock Your Quantum Dream-Code. Such sources purport to explain your dreams in terms that are mystical, empowering, and perfectly calibrated to avoid being falsifiable.

So, instead, I decided to look into the legit research on dreams…

Turns out we can control them. Somewhat. Sometimes.

Seriously. This is real. “Lucid dreaming” is when you realize you’re dreaming and (maybe) take control. Your mind wakes up in the middle of its own nonsense and says, “Hang on, this is nonsense.” And then, with a little practice, you can manipulate the dream world.

Now I’m not saying this is easy. (If there’s one thing we all know about brains, it’s that they’re always deeply obedient and just looooove being told what to do.) So we’re gonna get some help from an expert…

Michelle Carr, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal and the director of the Dream Engineering Laboratory. (That is a real place, not the setting of a Christopher Nolan film.) Her book is “Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide.”

Let’s get to it…

 

Lucid Dreams: Even Weirder Than You Think

Chances are, you’ve had a lucid dream before. Research shows 55% of people have had at least one but only 23% have them once a month or more.

But if you really go down the rabbit hole, merely knowing you’re dreaming or even controlling your dreams is just the tip of the iceberg…

Decades ago, two researchers, Stephen LaBerge and Keith Hearne, had a question: “If someone realizes they’re dreaming while they’re dreaming, can they send us a message from inside the dream?” This is the kind of question you ask if you have too much grant money and not enough supervision.

But it worked. That was the first big “Oh fantastic, we’ve broken reality” moment: proof that what someone chooses to do inside a dream can show up in their actual sleeping body. From there, things escalated the way they always do when humans discover something: we started seeing what else we could get away with.

So the next step was: “What if we could talk to them?” And shockingly, they could. Researchers actually managed two-way conversations with people who were asleep. In one experiment, they tell a sleeping person something like, “What’s one plus two?” The dreamer hears it woven into their dream, like as a car radio announcer. Within the dream, they think, “Oh, it’s three,” and then respond in the real world by moving their eyes left-right-left in three distinct little chunks. Other dreamers answered yes/no questions by frowning or smiling in their sleep. No, it doesn’t work every time but in a significant number of lucid dreams, people can actually hear, process, and respond to questions in real time, while still fully dreaming.

Researchers have, in other words, figured out how to DM people in their dreams. That’s science-fiction-level nonsense… that somehow isn’t nonsense.

Now you and I are just going to focus on realizing when you’re dreaming and controlling the dream. Yes, this is a learnable skill. You can’t guarantee it’ll happen on any particular night but you can dramatically increase the likelihood it will happen.

And, no, lucid dreaming will not break your brain. In fact, research shows people usually wake up feeling more refreshed and happier. Lucid dreams have also been shown to be helpful in overcoming nightmares, so we’ll touch on that as well.

(To learn how to get the best sleep of your life, click here.)

So how do we get started?

 

How To Induce Lucid Dreams

1-Keep A Dream Journal And Look For Dream Signs

Learning to better recollect your dreams helps. So how you wake up matters. Stay still. Keep your eyes closed. Gently replay the dream in your mind. Then write it down. If you do this consistently, you’ll start remembering a lot more of your dreams.

As your dream journal collects this growing pile of nocturnal lunacy, you may start to notice patterns. For instance:

• Maybe you’re frequently naked and desperately trying to parallel park a submarine.
• Dead relatives are routinely strolling around.
• You’re always at a carnival that is simultaneously your middle school library and a Costco.

Lucid dreaming researchers call these recurring motifs “dream signs”: surreal little tells that could, in theory, tip you off that you’re asleep. They’re the equivalent of the boom mic dropping into the frame in a movie. Clues you use to go, “Wait. This is impossible. I must be dreaming,” rather than just nodding along as your dead aunt turns into a vending machine.

2-Do “Reality Checks” Like Someone Who’s Clearly Not Okay

Several times a day, stop what you’re doing and ask, “Am I dreaming?” which, in waking life, makes you sound like a philosophy undergrad.

Then you do one of the following delightful little sanity drills:

• Plug your nose and try to breathe. In real life, this should fail. If it doesn’t, either you’re dreaming or you’re some kind of eldritch horror and lucid dreams are the least of your problems.
• Look at a clock, look away, then look again. In reality, the time might change by a minute, but it won’t become 87:63, or “chicken o’clock”.
• Try to push a finger through your palm. If you’re awake: you can’t, you look ridiculous, and the person next to you on the bus changes seats.

Practicing these habitually while awake makes it more likely you’ll do them in a dream and become lucid. (Or you can buy a spinning top, if you wanna be all clever about it.)

3-The “Wake-Back-to-Bed” Method

Wake up 1–2 hours earlier than usual in the morning. Stay awake for about 5–20 minutes. Enough to become slightly conscious, not enough to fully reboot as a functioning adult. Use this time to write down any dreams you remember.

Then, as you’re falling back asleep, say: “The next time I’m dreaming, I’ll remember that I’m dreaming.” Then go back to sleep.

By interrupting your sleep like this, you’re more likely to drop straight into REM sleep, which is where most lucid dreams happen.

If you combine dream journaling, reality checks, wake-back-to-bed, and intention-setting, studies show you’ve got roughly a 50% chance of having a lucid dream within a week, and your lucid dream frequency can jump by over 85%.

“I’VE HACKED MY BRAIN! EVERY NIGHT FROM NOW ON I CONTROL REALITY!”

Hold on there, Neo. It’s more like: You can influence the dream, but you can’t fully script it. You might decide, “I want to go to Paris,” and there’s a chance your brain creates a city with one Eiffel Tower and sixteen inverted Olive Gardens.

(To learn how to have amazing naps, click here.)

Getting anywhere near “Infinity Gauntlet, all stones included” level is going to take some practice. So what has Michelle’s research shown works best for improving lucid dream control?

 

How To Control Lucid Dreams

1-First, Stay In The Dream

The first time I tried to “control” my dreams, I did it the way I do everything else in my life: half-assed and overconfident. I immediately treated it like the most immersive game of “Grand Theft Auto” imaginable, got excited, and woke up.

This is not uncommon. (The getting excited and waking up part, at least.)

Lucid dreams are annoyingly fragile. If you get too emotional, you’ll wake up. So the first step is grounding yourself in the dream so you can stay in it.

Now with nightmares your initial reaction to becoming lucid will probably be: “Nope. Absolutely not. Get me out. Unsubscribe. Close tab.” An understandable reaction, but useless therapeutically. Instead, tell yourself: “This is a dream. I’m safe. I can change this.”

Yes, it feels ridiculous to reassure yourself while being chased by a twelve-foot shadow wearing your unresolved childhood issues. But do it anyway. And stick around.

2-Start With Self Control

Breathe slowly and deeply within the dream. (Yes, those lungs are imaginary. No, this does not matter. Your brain is easy to fool. That’s how advertising works.)

Now stabilize yourself. Rub your dream hands together. Feel the friction. Look around deliberately. Note tile patterns, strange colors, extra moons. Relax into this new world.

If you’re in a nightmare, shift your mood:

• Try curiosity: “What is that thing chasing me? What happens if I stop and look at it?”
• Try courage: “I have survived group chats, surprise bills, and small talk. I can handle a dream.”
• Try playfulness: “What if I give the monster a silly hat?”

Anything that flips the script from “I’m trapped in this” to “I’m running this.”

3-Use Your Voice Like A TV Remote

In the real world, shouting at a bus doesn’t make it stop. In a dream, shouting at the universe can actually accomplish things. So yes, you’re now that person yelling at the sky, but in this context, you’re not crazy.

And if you’re in a nightmare, your voice is a powerful tool for taking control and ridding yourself of fear. Remember that every character in your dream (monster, stranger, weird version of your ex) is just some sliced-off piece of your own mind lurching around in a costume.

Talk to them as if they work for you, because they do: “You. You’re my guide now.”

Congratulations, you just hired your own nightmare monster as a tour operator.

4-Expectation And Simple Commands

Decide what you want, then pair it with an action and a strong expectation. This has been shown to help you do all kinds of wonderful things in the dream world.

Yes, you can manifest things. (I’ve been mocking manifestation on this blog for years but now we’re in a lucid dream, so all bets are off.) Close your dream eyes, imagine what you want, then open them expecting it to be there. There’s a good chance it will be, though your dreaming brain can sometimes throw you a curve ball.

5-Use Your Dream Body

Physics is just a suggestion now. Pick a wall. Any wall. Preferably one that looks offensively solid. Decide: “I can walk through this. It’s a dream. It’s not real.” Congrats, you’re a magician now.

And, of course, there’s flying: because walking is for reality. Start small: jump. Then jump higher. Then higher again, expecting not to come back down so quickly. Flap your arms if you like. Yes, it looks stupid. No, no one’s watching. Experiment. Remember that most people get the best results when they have a strong expectation it will work.

(To learn how to sleep better, click here.)

Okay, we’ve covered the basics of lucid dreams. Let’s round it all up, and learn the deeper life-improving lesson beneath all this…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to control your dreams at night…

• Lucid Dreams: Yes, there is a “Premium Tier” for sleep. Lucid dreaming might sound crazy but it’s real. The more you practice, the better you’ll get.
• How To Induce Lucid Dreams: Keep a dream journal, do reality checks, use “wake-back-to-bed”, and set an intention to lucid dream before you konk out for the night. Do those and soon you’ll be leading a hostile takeover of your own subconscious.
• How To Control Lucid Dreams: Congratulations. You’ve just found the “settings” menu for your brain. Stay calm to stay in the dream, stabilize yourself, use your voice like a TV remote, leverage expectation and simple commands, and have fun flying.

Given all this, you might think I would treat sleep with the reverence it deserves.

You’d be wrong.

My relationship with sleep is like my relationship with vegetables: I know they’re good for me, and yet I behave as if I’m trying to prove a point to the coroner. If sleep hygiene were graded, I would get a negative score. There would be a parent-teacher conference. I go to bed whenever I finally run out of willpower, anywhere between 11 p.m. and “oh crap is that the sun?”

And that’s a mistake. One I’m working to correct. If you’re going to do anything to improve your life, better sleep is arguably the best place to start. Why?

Your brain is the place you live. Not your home, not your city, not your ergonomic office chair: your brain. You are stuck in there 24/7. You do not get to break that lease. Without decent sleep, your brain won’t work as well as it should and that affects everything else in your life.

Lucid dreams are great. But first, focus on getting more sleep so you can be lucid in life and pursue those other dreams. The ones you think about when you’re conscious.

If you’re able to wake up in the middle of your worst nightmare and change the ending, then you’re able to wake up in the middle of your life and change that ending too.

The question is not whether you can.

The question is whether you’d rather keep dreaming.