My WILD Child: How newborns can help you lucid dream
I started Tech for Dreaming — a community focused on the application of technology to make lucid dreaming more accessible. But today, I’m writing about a low-tech way to have lucid dreams. This ancient method involves loud crying in the middle of the night. Sounds fun? The method is having a baby!
Most babies don’t sleep through the night. My son was a night terror for the first five months. It became clear why sleep deprivation is a form of torture.
In the first few days of my son’s life, I thought my lucid dream life was taking a multi-year pause. I no longer got those REM cycles later in the sleep period that are ripe with lucid dreaming potential. I had to adapt.
Fortunately, the human body has evolved to adapt. After several nights of minimal sleep, my body began craving and prioritizing the REM sleep it lacked the previous nights. When my head hit the pillow, I saw shapes form more easily in my mind’s eye than before. The shapes danced before me, defying any definition I tried to impose. I let go and let the shapes freely dance while maintaining my awareness. The shapes slowly morphed into buildings and people walking by and then snapped into crisp high-definition. I found myself now existing in this new space — transported directly from the waking state into a lucid dream. It was one of those epic, 20-minute lucid dreams that felt more real than waking reality. I even asked the dream itself to recharge my body and mind from the recent sleep deprivation, producing a strong vibrational sensation in the dream. I felt better the next day — either from the placebo effect or something more.
This became a theme in subsequent nights. After each wake-up, when I laid back down I expected to directly transition from the waking state into a lucid dream. Sometimes, I simply fell asleep and woke at the sound of the next baby scream. Other times, I rode the wave of hypnagogia directly into some epic lucid dreams. My son was now my WILD — Wake Induced Lucid Dream — Child.
My now 18-month old son sleeps well, and I do not miss those restless nights. Sometimes, I can even sleep past 8am to catch that final REM cycle that’s more prone to sprout lucid dreams. And even when my son sometimes wakes me at 4am, it’s an opportunity to use the Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) lucid dreaming technique. No alarm clock necessary!
If you would rather not have a baby and sleep deprivation to have more lucid dreams, then you could experiment with some of the latest devices and supplements intended to induce lucid dreams. While no technology solutions have proven reliable yet, Tech for Dreaming is committed to developing and validating technologies capable of making lucid dreaming more accessible. Join us at https://techfordreaming.com/ & https://twitter.com/TechDreaming.
