On the morning of April 12, 1975, Alan Worsley was asleep in the sleep laboratory at the University of Hull, in England, with electrodes taped around his eyes. Before going to bed he had agreed on a signal with researcher Keith Hearne: if at any point during the night he realized he was dreaming, he would move his eyes from left to right eight times in a row.
A week earlier they had come close and lost it in the worst possible way. Worsley had his lucid dream, gave the signal…and nobody saw it. Hearne had switched off the recording equipment a few minutes before.
That morning, though, the equipment was still running. Shortly after eight, the line tracking Worsley’s eye movements, irregular until then, traced eight broad even sweeps from one side to the other. Worsley was still asleep. And at the same time, he knew perfectly well that he was dreaming.
It was the first time anyone had sent a message from inside a dream.
Until then, many scientists considered it impossible to be aware while dreaming. Today we know that it is not only possible: it has probably happened to you at some point, even if you never called it by that name.
What Is A Lucid Dream?
A lucid dream is one in which you know you are dreaming. The term was introduced in 1913 by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, who had recorded hundreds of his own dreams of this kind. He chose the word “lucid” for the mental clarity he experienced in them: he remembered his waking life, knew his body was lying in bed, and could choose what to do.
It’s worth not confusing lucidity with control. Knowing that you’re dreaming doesn’t necessarily mean you can fly or change the scenery at will. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, and often only a little. What always changes is your position inside the dream: you stop being someone things happen to and become someone who watches what happens knowing where he or she is.
Lucidity also comes in degrees: it can be a suspicion that lasts three seconds or a clear awareness that holds for several minutes. And, it is far more common than people tend to assume. Plenty of people have experienced it without giving it much thought.
How To Have Lucid Dreams
Lucidity can be trained through specific techniques for it. Most of them come from the work of Stephen LaBerge, the researcher who repeated the eye-signal experiment a few years after that morning in Hull. They all aim at the same thing: turning the question “Am I dreaming?” into such a deep-rooted habit that it shows up even while you’re asleep.
1. START BY REMEMBERING YOUR DREAMS. The first step is to train your memory, because if you don’t remember your dreams, you won’t remember having been aware inside them either.
Your basic tool is a dream journal. Write down what you dreamed as soon as you open your eyes, before getting out of bed and before looking at your phone. At first, you may only recover a single loose image, and that’s normal: recall improves over the weeks. Sometimes it’s enough to lie still for a minute, with your eyes closed, for a whole scene you thought you’d lost to come back.
Over time you’ll notice that your dreams repeat things: being back at school, a phone that won’t dial, a house that isn’t your house but in the dream it is. LaBerge called those repetitions dream signs. They’re your personal clues, the scenery that only shows up when you’re asleep.
2. ASK YOURSELF DURING THE DAY WHETHER YOU’RE AWAKE. Reality checks are quick tests that tell you whether you’re awake or dreaming. The most effective ones rely on things dreams don’t reproduce well. Read a line of text, look away, and read it again: in dreams the words tend to change. Or pinch your nose and try to breathe: awake it’s impossible, in a dream the air will probably come in anyway.
The usual mistake is doing them on autopilot. If you look at your hand without genuinely asking yourself whether you’re dreaming, you’ll do exactly the same inside a dream: look, and move on. The test works when there’s real doubt behind it, and the best moment is when something strikes you as odd or when you recognize one of those scenes that keep repeating in your dreams.
3. USE THE LAST HOURS OF THE NIGHT. Set an alarm about five hours after falling asleep, and when it goes off, stay awake for a few minutes. Toward the end of the night the periods of sleep with imagery grow longer and more vivid, so that’s the best time to try.
What matters is what you do with those minutes. Go back over the dream you just woke from and repeat a clear intention to yourself: “The next time I’m dreaming, I’ll realize it.” Then imagine returning to that same scene, noticing something impossible, and realizing that you’re asleep.
It works through the same kind of memory that reminds you to pick up bread when you walk past the bakery: an intention that returns on its own at the right moment. It’s better not to stay awake too long turning it over; the sooner you fall back asleep, the better.
4. WHEN IT HAPPENS, DON’T CELEBRATE. The excitement of that first moment tends to wake you up on the spot. To keep the dream from falling apart, bring your attention to the sensations in it: rub your hands together, touch a wall, feel the ground under your feet.
What You Can Do With a Lucid Dream
Almost everyone starts by flying or walking through walls. That’s the fun part, and it keeps you practicing, but there are uses that are worth considerably more.
One is rehearsing. Inside a dream you can repeat a presentation, a conversation you’ve been putting off, or a movement you keep getting wrong, with your whole body in the scene and no consequences at all. Some athletes train this way, and what’s left when you wake up feels close to having actually done it.
Another is seeing someone again. Many people use lucidity to look for someone who died. They know they’re dreaming and they know their own mind is producing that figure, and they stay anyway. What they describe afterward rarely has anything to do with the supernatural: they talk about having been able to say something they never got to say.
And then there’s the reverse: staying where you always run. In a recurring nightmare, lucidity gives you an option you didn’t have before: not running, turning around, and asking whatever is chasing you what it wants from you. It usually loses its force the moment it stops being a pursuer, and what appears in its place almost always has something to do with what you were avoiding while awake.
Twenty Years Before the Laboratory
Worsley was no ordinary volunteer. He had been dreaming lucidly since childhood and, by around the age of twelve, was already inventing experiments to try inside his dreams; he would set himself a task while awake and try to remember to carry it out while asleep. Nobody was guiding him and there was no equipment involved; he just wanted to see how far he could go.
That’s why you don’t need electrodes or a laboratory to begin lucid dreaming. Everything that led Worsley to that morning fits into two very simple habits: writing down what you dream as soon as you wake up, and planting an intention before you go to sleep.
Gabriel Soca is an Argentine writer, Akashic records reader, and Reiki practitioner. He has written extensively about personal growth, consciousness, and ancient wisdom traditions, helping people explore their inner lives and gain new perspectives. Visit https://gabrielsoca.com/en/.
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