Lucid Dreaming: Exploring the Space Between Dreams and Reality
Introduction — When Dreams Feel More Real Than Waking Life
Dreams are strange things. Sometimes they dissolve the moment I wake; other times, they cling like mist, refusing to fade. Some leave me with a deep unease, as though I’ve glimpsed something important but can’t quite hold onto it.
Among the most fascinating dream experiences I’ve had is lucid dreaming — becoming aware I’m dreaming while still inside the dream. Sometimes it lasts only a few seconds, just a flash of realisation before I wake. Other times, it feels as though I’m walking between two worlds, fully immersed yet somehow conscious.
Lucid dreaming fascinates me because it blurs boundaries: between imagination and experience, memory and possibility, dreams and waking life. That blurred edge became the foundation of my novella, Dreams Don’t Always End — a book born from recurring dreams where time folds, memory fractures, and reality ripples beneath the surface.
I’m not here to give instructions or pretend expertise. I want to explore what I’ve experienced, what I’ve read, and how dreams have shaped my creative work — and maybe share why lucid dreaming continues to pull me in.
What Is Lucid Dreaming?
Lucid dreaming is simply realising you’re dreaming while the dream continues around you. Sometimes that awareness slips away instantly; other times, it deepens until the dream becomes vivid, textured, and strangely solid.
The idea isn’t new. In fact, humans have been fascinated by lucid dreaming for thousands of years:
In Tibetan Buddhism, dream yoga trains practitioners to awaken within their dreams, using lucidity as a tool for spiritual insight (read more).
Aboriginal Australians describe the “Dreamtime,” a sacred realm where ancestral stories and teachings are revealed through visions.
In ancient Greece, followers of Asclepius, the god of medicine, entered temples to sleep and seek guidance through healing dreams.
Even Aristotle wrote about becoming aware of dreaming in On Dreams, remarking that “often when asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what presents itself is but a dream.”
This is a deeply human phenomenon, crossing cultures and centuries.
In modern times, researchers at the Lucidity Institute proved lucid dreaming’s reality by training dreamers to signal from inside REM sleep using pre-agreed eye movements. Brain scans show that while most of the brain is immersed in dream imagery, part of the prefrontal cortex — responsible for reasoning and self-awareness — briefly “wakes up.”
Lucid dreaming exists in this liminal space: neither fully awake nor fully asleep.
The Science and the Subconscious
Most lucid dreams occur during REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement), when dreams are at their most vivid. During REM, the brain behaves as though it’s awake — active, emotional, creative — while the body is paralysed to keep us safe. Normally, we surrender to the story the subconscious creates. But in lucid dreams, something unusual happens: self-awareness slips into the dream.
Some researchers compare it to standing on the threshold of two realities. You’re aware, yet immersed; present, yet detached. This paradoxical state is what makes lucid dreaming so compelling.
It also explains why creativity flourishes here. Without the rigid filters of waking logic, the mind makes unusual connections, stitching fragments together into ideas that might never surface otherwise.
Throughout history, dreams — and lucid dreams especially — have seeded breakthroughs:
Mary Shelley envisioned Frankenstein after a vivid waking dream.
Paul McCartney dreamed the melody for Yesterday and rushed to play it before it slipped away.
Dmitri Mendeleev described a dream where the elements “fell into place,” helping him finalise the periodic table.
Salvador Dalí slipped into hypnagogic states — that drowsy edge between waking and sleep — and harvested surreal imagery for his paintings.
Friedrich Kekulé famously dreamt of a snake biting its tail, inspiring his discovery of the benzene ring structure.
Otto Loewi, a neuroscientist, dreamed of an experiment on chemical neurotransmission, woke, scribbled notes, and later performed the work that earned him a Nobel Prize.
Dreams are more than random noise. They’re a creative workshop, combining memory, emotion, and intuition into unexpected forms.
The Recurring Dream That Wouldn’t Let Go
For me, dreams have never been passive. They’ve unsettled me, haunted me, and sometimes felt more vivid than waking life.
Dreams Don’t Always End was born from a recurring dream — a motorway crash involving a Luton van on the M4. It replayed over and over, each time slightly different, yet always carrying the same intense weight. The sound of tyres screeching, the flicker of brake lights, the awful inevitability — I’d wake up shaken, heart racing, knowing it would return.
At first, I tried to ignore it. But eventually, I stopped resisting and started listening.
Following that dream became an exploration of symbols I didn’t yet understand:
A flat where time stands still, reflecting the years I spent in quiet inertia.
A corridor that stretches endlessly, representing choices unmade and paths unlived.
An X-ray waiting room, sterile and strange, where alternate versions of myself seemed to exist, side by side.
These weren’t settings I consciously created; they arrived from somewhere beneath the surface. Writing about them felt less like inventing a story and more like walking into a lucid dream — noticing the details, letting meaning emerge gradually, following threads without knowing where they’d lead.
Just like lucid dreaming, the book isn’t about controlling reality. It’s about listening.
On the Edge of Sleep — Hypnagogia and Lucidity
One of the most fascinating states I’ve learned about while exploring lucid dreaming is hypnagogia — the threshold between waking and sleep. It’s that drifting, slippery moment where thoughts start to dissolve into images, where reality loosens but consciousness hasn’t yet let go.
Artists like Dalí and Edison deliberately used hypnagogia to capture insights before falling fully asleep. Lucid dreamers often train themselves to recognise this stage, using it as a gateway into conscious dreaming.
It’s a reminder of how fragile the boundary between states really is — how quickly the solid world around us can dissolve into something imagined, and how real those imagined spaces can feel.
How People Approach Lucid Dreaming
I’m not an expert, but in reading about lucid dreaming, I’ve come across several commonly discussed techniques — many recommended by researchers at the Sleep Foundation (source) and Lucidity Institute (source):
Dream Journaling — Writing down dreams strengthens recall and makes recurring symbols easier to spot.
Reality Checks — Looking at your hands, rereading text, or checking a clock twice trains your mind to question whether you’re awake.
Mnemonic Induction (MILD) — Repeating a simple intention before sleep, like “Next time I’m dreaming, I’ll realise I’m dreaming.”
Wake-Back-to-Bed (WBTB) — Waking after a few hours, staying up briefly, and returning to bed focusing on lucidity.
Dream Incubation — Going to bed thinking about a question, theme, or problem you want the dream to explore.
I’ve tried some of these myself, though never with consistency. Still, just becoming aware of dream signs — like that endless corridor — sometimes brings its own kind of lucidity.
What Dreams Teach Us About Reality
Lucid dreaming doesn’t just challenge our sense of what’s possible in sleep; it raises questions about reality itself.
If your mind can construct entire worlds while you sleep — with landscapes, weather, dialogue, even the feeling of touch — how “solid” is waking life? How much of what we experience each day is filtered, constructed, or invented by the brain?
This is a question that runs deep through Dreams Don’t Always End. The narrator begins to doubt whether time flows straight, whether memory can be trusted, whether the boundaries between alternate selves are as fixed as we think.
Dreams — lucid or otherwise — remind me that reality is not as rigid as it seems.
Lucid Dreaming and Storytelling
Lucid dreaming resonates with storytellers because it mirrors the fluidity of identity, memory, and choice.
Films like Inception turn lucidity into spectacle, bending physics and narrative.
Writers like Haruki Murakami and Jorge Luis Borges weave dream logic into fiction, where meaning is felt rather than explained.
In Dreams Don’t Always End, I explore lucidity as invitation, not control — stepping into symbolic spaces, listening to echoes, encountering timelines that ripple and fracture.
Dreams don’t always end when we wake up. Sometimes, they follow us.
Conclusion — Walking Between Worlds
Lucid dreaming invites us to explore the blurred space where waking life and imagination meet. It’s not about escaping reality but deepening our awareness of it — of the patterns beneath it, the possibilities within it, and the way our minds shape what we see.
For me, dreams became a doorway into writing. Dreams Don’t Always End grew from following a recurring dream into unfamiliar rooms, where echoes shifted and meanings unfolded.
I’m not an expert in lucid dreaming, but I am someone who’s been haunted, inspired, and transformed by dreams. And maybe that’s why I keep returning to them — for the same reason I write: to explore what lies beneath the surface.
📖 Step inside the dream →