Here’s how to control your dreams, according to science

Imagine being able to fully remember your dreams – and even take charge of what happens, like a cinema director.

Lots of people are interested in the idea of ‘lucid dreaming’, where dreamers ‘control’ what happens, with various pills and potions sold online with the dubious offer of inducing a lucid dream state.

But a study has found that lucid dreams can be induced without the use of herbs and chemicals, and without impacting the quality of sleep.

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The study involved three groups of participants, and investigated the effectiveness of three different lucid dream induction techniques.

1. reality testing – which involves checking your environment several times a day to see whether or not you’re dreaming.

2. wake back to bed – waking up after five hours, staying awake for a short period, then going back to sleep in order to enter a REM sleep period, in which dreams are more likely to occur.

3. MILD (mnemonic induction of lucid dreams) – which involves waking up after five hours of sleep and then developing the intention to remember that you are dreaming before returning to sleep, by repeating the phrase: ‘The next time I’m dreaming, I will remember that I’m dreaming.’ You also imagine yourself in a lucid dream.

Among the group of 47 people who combined all three techniques, participants achieved a 17% success rate in having lucid dreams over the period of just one week.

Among those who were able to go to sleep within the first five minutes of completing the MILD technique, the success rate of lucid dreaming was much higher, at almost 46% of attempts.

‘The MILD technique works on what we call ‘prospective memory’ – that is, your ability to remember to do things in the future. By repeating a phrase that you will remember you’re dreaming, it forms an intention in your mind that you will, in fact, remember that you are dreaming, leading to a lucid dream,’ says Dr Aspy, Visiting Research Fellow in the University’s School of Psychology.
‘Importantly, those who reported success using the MILD technique were significantly less sleep deprived the next day, indicating that lucid dreaming did not have any negative effect on sleep quality,’ he says.