So one third of our life or about 9,000 days are spent asleep. Is it possible that there's more to sleep than just blackness and then waking up? And as I get busier,
I'm constantly hunting for more hours in my day. More time, even another
minute would be great. What if I could find some
extra hours during sleep? Can I fly to random places? Can I study during dreams? Can I have epic lifesaver battles with Darth Vader during dreams? I tried lucid dreaming for 30 days and my life has changed forever. (soft jazz music) One day I was talking to one of my friends and she was telling me that
last night she went to Egypt. And I was like, "No,
you you're right here". She's like, "No, no, no. During one of my dreams last night, I realized when I was dreaming and I flew in the air and saw the Egypt and saw the pyramids and all
this kind of cool stuff". And I was like, "Wait a second. How do you do that? That sounds really, really cool". And she went on to tell
me about lucid dreaming. She said, "All it is, is you just become aware
while you're dreaming and then you can do whatever you want. You can fly away to different places. You can fly to space. You can be in movies. You can have lightsaber
battles with Darth Vader". Immediately when I went home, I began Googling what is lucid dreaming? And the next 30 days would
be all lucid dreaming. I bought a lucid dreaming book. I read like 100 Reddit posts on the sub-Reddit, Lucid Dreaming. I was really, really hooked. And this was just on the
first night of discovering it. I went to bed that night prepared ready to have a lucid dream,
ready to fly to Egypt. But when it came down
to it, nothing happened. It was just a normal
blackness of the night. I just went to bed and woke
up and nothing happened. Why can't I have a lucid dream? I realized that I wasn't
taking this seriously enough. I had to separate the next
30 days into five day blocks. And each one of those five day blocks I would try a new strategy
for lucid dreaming. And my guide, my Bible
for this 30 day experiment would be Stephen LaBerge's "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming". So, phase one. According to LaBerge and the internet, the first phase is to
have a dream journal, to record your dreams every
night to improve dream recall. And I remember thinking, wait a second. I have to wake up in
the middle of the night, turn on a light and write down
my dreams and a little book. That sounds like a
nightmare just in itself. So, day one. So I have this little journal here. And every time I wake
up I'm just gonna write in this journal kind of, what I dreamed. It's from what I remember dreaming. And I think what this does is it kind of, indicates to me and my
subconscious if it's even real. That lucid dreaming is important. And if I indicate to myself
that lucid dreaming is important maybe my mind will pay
more attention to it. But as I first started down
this lucid dreaming journey I just found waking up to be tough. It was hard to wake up
and write down stuff. I just wanted to go back to sleep. And a lot of times I did. It's 4:30 in the morning. I had a dream. So now, I have to write it down. The only annoying thing about this is, you have to wake up when you had a dream and like turn on a light and
then write it in a journal. So, that's what I'm gonna do now. But when I started reading
Steven LaBerge's book, I got motivated. I was hearing really cool stories of people doing amazing things and not just like one off
random silly things like flying. They were talking to their subconscious or speaking to dead relatives or studying with Albert Einstein. I was like, wait a second. I gotta stick with this. And I started to write down
some dreams but it was tough. I would write down maybe
a sentence, maybe a word but really nothing else would come. However, slowly I was starting
to write more and more. Maybe two sentences, maybe a paragraph, maybe instead of one dreams, two dreams. I think it's day four. I wrote down five dreams this morning. It's crazy. I used to just not write
down any of my dreams or not remember any of my dreams but this morning I've written
down five of my dreams. It's crazy. Crazy. We'll see how many I remember? So like, if there's more
dreams than this though I don't know if I'll be able
to write all this stuff down. I don't think there's more
dreams than this though. Maybe like a couple more. But in Phase One in these first five days, I still didn't get a lucid dream. Nothing magical happened. I just was starting to
remember more of my dreams. (upbeat music) Phase 2 was Reality Checks. And after completing my first five days, I was hungry, ready for the next step. The idea of buying reality checks is that if you start to test your reality during the day, during waking real life, you'll start to check your
reality during dreams. And obviously if you check
your reality during dreams, it's not reality. So you'll indicate to yourself,
okay, this is a dream. Something is going on. So, I made the plan to
do the one reality check where you pinch your nose and
try and breathe through it. Because in real life,
if you pinch your nose and try and breathe through it, right, you can't breathe
through your nose. But in the dream you still can breathe through your nose after you pinch it. That is a reality check, right, because in reality, it doesn't work but in the dream world, it works. And I scheduled myself on my phone to do a reality check
every hour during the day. Of course, this was waking
hours and not asleep hours. And I also wanted to do it whenever I drank a glass of water. So, what would happen? I'd drink the water or
the hour would come by and I'd look at my hands
to see if they're blurry, count them and do the reality
check of picturing my nose. The things I'm gonna
do are count my fingers like one, two, three, four, five, and then like inspect them to
see if they're five fingers see if they're fuzzy and stuff like that. And I also read that you're meant to kind of, do another check, if you're like, okay, what's going on? And say if this was a dream, if this really, really was a
dream, what would I be doing? And I had that in my mind
when I was doing this check. And it feels really silly at first, I mean in the hospital, in the streets, I'll just be looking at my
hands or pinching my nose. And people are like, what are you doing? And I felt like a crazy person. I mean, I was a crazy person. Case nine, number six, I've done my reality checks today but my memory's dream
recalls getting much better. I'm starting to recall like
bigger, bigger chunks of it. But then, something crazy happened. About one or two days into Phase 2. I had my first elusive
dream and it was amazing. It happened. I had it. I had a lucid dream the first time. I woke up at like 3:00 am
and I was a little bit sleepy but I stayed up a little
bit and thought like, okay, when I go back to bed, I definitely wanna have a lucid dream. I definitely wanna have a lucid dream. And the next thing I knew,
I was like in my apartment but it looked a little bit weird. I noticed the closet was in a weird place. And I looked at my hands
and there were five hands. But I don't know how I knew. I just knew. I just knew
it was a lucid dream. And I was like, this is a lucid dream. This is a lucid dream. And it was awesome. It was awesome. And then people around me
were looking at me funny 'cause there were people
suddenly around me, but I was like, "This is a lucid dream". And I jumped up in the air and I stayed up in the
air a little bit longer. And then I just woke up. I think I got too excited when I woke up but it was really cool. As soon as I had the realization,
it was a lucid dream, it was a weird like pulse that
went throughout the dream. And it was like, I don't know things got more clear, more vivid. But yeah, it was really, really exciting. I was stunned by how vivid
and real this dream was. It felt like real life
but it wasn't real life. It was a dream. And the only way I realized that was because of my reality checks. And now I was hooked.
I wanted to do it more. I wanted to have more lucid dreams. I wanted to do cool things. But I needed to kick it up a notch. I needed to go into Phase 3. Phase 3 was Mnemonic Induced
Lucid Dreaming or MILD. And I would stick to this phase for the longest of all my phases. This would be a 10 day phase
as opposed to a five day phase. So yeah, it's day 15 now of my lucid dreaming challenge, I guess. So for the next five days, I'm
gonna try this MILD technique because I've seen this kind of works for a good amount of people. And also it's in this book as one of, kind of the best things that
works for inducing dreaming. And all MILD is, is that when you wake up after having a dream, you
wanna write it down right away. But the interesting addition
to MILD is that when you fall back asleep,
you're telling yourself, okay, I will remember I'm
dreaming when I fall asleep. I will remember I'm
dreaming when I fall asleep. And then, you also picture yourself in the previous dream becoming lucid. So for example, in a previous dream, if you're riding a bike up a hill, you should picture yourself riding a bike but becoming lucid. You should picture yourself
realizing, wait a second. This isn't real. This is a lucid dream and
then you become lucid. And the idea is hopefully,
as you fall asleep you'll have that same kind of dream. But this time you'll be ready for it. Your mind will be ready for it. And you'll be like, wait a second. This is a dream and bam lucidity. However, even though this was
one of the best strategies and this strategy I
committed the longest to it seems I was like hitting a wall. No luck unfortunately last night. I did wake up. I did write down my dreams but I must have just been
tired last night or something 'cause I wrote down my dreams. I thought, okay, when
I'm having this dream and it was a weird dream, I was like playing tennis
with my brother or something. I thought okay, next time
I'm gonna be playing tennis with my brother, I'm gonna
remember I'm dreaming. Maybe I was just too sleepy 'cause I just fell right back
asleep within two minutes. Whatever I did, no matter
how hard I committed, I just couldn't have another lucid dream. Night 19 done. No lucid dreams. And I was really annoyed because I thought the curve of having the
dreams was exponential not linear, not downward. I thought, okay, I'd have one every month and then maybe one every week and then maybe a couple a week. But I hadn't had any since
that first lucid dream. And I began to lose
interest in lucid dreams. One day I didn't even do a reality check. Another day, I didn't even write anything down in my dream journal. And I remember thinking
okay, maybe this was over. It was a fun experiment. It was a fun trial, but
nothing's gonna come of this. I was just beginner's
luck when it happened. And I reached out to my original friend and she said, "Wait a second. No, no, no. You're thinking
about this all wrong. You just are building up the commitment. When you start to stop
thinking about lucid dreaming your mind thinks, okay, lucid
dreaming isn't that important? And so, your chances of having
one goes way, way down". She said, she's been doing
lucid dreams for like 20 years. And if she doesn't keep dream journal, if she doesn't do reality checks, she also stops having the lucid dreams. But when she wants to,
she can have one pretty much every single night of the
week, which is crazy to me. And I tried to think
back to my motivation, why did I get into looser
dreaming in the first place? What did I wanna do? And I remember I just had
no time during the day. I wanted to find a
little bit of extra time. A little bit of extra time to
not necessarily study or learn even though you can do that,
but get some extra time for myself to just do fun, crazy things. And I realized, it clicked just then that getting this extra
time was important to me, getting this extra time was something I was willing to work for. And so, I worked for it. I went back into writing
down all my dreams. I went back into doing like
30 reality checks a day and I was doing MILD every single night. But still by the end of phase three I hadn't had another lucid dream. But I felt things building. I was writing pages in my dream journal. And I was starting to feel
like, okay, I'm close. I just feel like I'm close. No lucid dreams again. I'm still trying to hunt down that nice lucid dream I had the other day. But I'm starting to
remember a lot of dreams. Last night was the most
I remember dreams ever. I remembered five dreams, I
think, which is like crazy. I know I used to think
like I would go to sleep and have no dreams, but I
remembered five dreams last night. It took me like 10 minutes to write them all down on my phone. It was crazy. But yeah, I feel another one coming and then I'm gonna start
introducing something new. (upbeat music) For my final form, Charizard, I mean, no. I'm not a Pokemon. I mean my final form was Wake Back To Bed and the WILD technique which is, the Wake Induced Lucid
Dreaming technique, you know. And these were said on the internet to be advanced techniques. But you know, I've been doing
this for a couple days now, a couple 10, 15 days even. I think I can do it. No luck again last night. Recording lots of dreams,
heavy dreams but no luck. My theme in my dreams is definitely, it's like playing video games or watching a movie a lot of times. I'll control myself. Or in one dream I was going
on a race up a mountain, but I was controlling
the shoes on the race with like a video game controller. So, yeah. So what are WBTB and WILD? Well, WBTB, is Wake Back To Bed. So, you just wake up four and a half to five hours after you fall asleep, stay awake for a little bit to
waken your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that has logical thinking, right. Because when you're in a dream, the problem is weird things might happen, but your logical thinking is asleep. So, you don't realize
these things are weird and you don't have a lucid dream. But if you wake up for five, 10, 15, 20, sometimes people even need
to wake up for 15 minutes, maybe your prefrontal cortex will be awake that you'll realize,
wait, things are weird. This is a dream. Now, you also use this
in combination with WILD which is the Wake Induced Lucid Dream, and many people Redditors
and Steven LaBerge said that this isn't
for the faint of heart. They said falling asleep
consciously was really difficult and really difficult for a couple reasons. The first reason is,
it's really hard to kind of be awake enough that you're conscious when you're falling asleep, but also to actually fall asleep. The other reason it's hard is because when you fall asleep consciously, scary things start to happen. You start to see flashes
of light, hear loud bangs. Your body starts to do weird jerks. And especially if you've never had this experience before,
it's gonna scare you. And you'll probably just wake yourself up. But you know, I was like, I can do this. I'm on the Phase 4 of this
magical lucid dreaming journey. Why not? And I started with the Wake
Back To Bed and the WILD method. The first night I stayed up way too long. I stayed up for 30
minutes. Went on my phone. Don't go on your phone, by the way. And I was reading and
like, playing video game. It was awful. And then I just couldn't go back to sleep. And I just stayed up the whole night and showed up to the
hospital an absolute mess. The second night I
stayed up for only like, two or three minutes and
I just fell back asleep. But I wasn't awake enough,
so things were bad. But then the third time I did this I stayed awake for like 12.5, 15 minutes. And I was reading Steven LaBarge's book. And then, I went back to
sleep and it happened. I had another lucid dream. After my 10, like 15 day
drought, it happened again. I had a lucid dream. I had another one. It worked. I woke up, I stayed
awake for like 15 minutes and then I went back to bed. But when I was trying to go back to bed, I set the intention in my head, listen, I'm gonna have a looser dream. And when I have the looser
dream, I'm gonna fly. I'm gonna have a loose dream. when I have the lucid dream I'm gonna fly. And then I fell asleep. And I was on this beach. And I noticed the beach was kind of dirty and there were people around. And I wondered kind of why was I there? And then I realized, wait a second. This is probably a dream. I looked down at my hands,
my hands looked normal. And then I did the reality
check where I hold my nose and tried to breathe through my nose And I could breathe through my nose. And I was like, this is a dream. But I kept on changing the
beach 'cause I was like, I want the beach to be nicer where I'm at. So I was like, make there
be less rocks on the beach. Make this sand be a nice
kind of, golden brown color. And then it just kept on working, lucid dream number two,
lucid dream number three, lucid dream number four,
this method was golden. So, it's lucid dream number, I don't know what number it is. It could be three or four at this point. But it's the most like intense lucid dream I've actually ever had. It was great. Okay, so I was walking
on the streets of London or something like that. And I don't know why but I just
kind of knew I was dreaming. So I looked down at my fingers,
my fingers looked fine. And then, I hold my nose and I realized I could
breathe through my nose. And I was like, this is a lucid dream. So, I remember reading in LaBerge's book like what people were doing sometimes is, they'll just focus on a certain piece item or like focus on something and that'll kind of
keep them in the dream. So I saw this tree. And I started to look at the tree. But I noticed kinda the
leaves were really blurry. So, I was like, that's weird. So, I wanted to just go into a house. But I opened the door and
it was just an empty house that was like there was no one there. So I was like, that was weird. It was dark. It was almost scary. So, I walked away. I walked upstairs and I
still was kind of half lucid. And I was seeing some a different person who was kind of like myself. And then, I was like kind of lucid. And I was like, oh this is like, some kind of subconscious weird thing. So, I asked it and I was
like, "What am I doing?" And the person's like,
'You're doing too much. You need to slow down
and like be healthy". And then he keeps eating the salad. And then I was like,
"What does that mean?" And then I like, I just woke
up 'cause I was so excited. I just remember thinking this is so cool. This lucid dreaming thing is awesome. I was ready to do something big. It was time to dream big, okay. I've only been waiting this
entire video to say that but really it was time to dream big. In my final week, I wanted
to do something crazy. I wanted to do something
a little bit more intense than just flying around and
having crazy lightsaber about. But night 27, nothing happened. Night 28, nothing happened.
Night 29, nothing happened. And I was thinking, what kind
of 30 day experiment is this? Nothing is happening. This is a waste. I'm just gonna end the experiment without having another lucid dream in my final phase too, in my final form. Okay., it's three o'clock in the morning. I'm gonna try and stay up
for like 10 to 30 minutes and then go back to bed. We'll see what happens. I'm so tired. Apologies about the hair. I have no idea what's going on. Night 28, I plan to do cool stuff but I just slept and had normal dreams. Sometimes this happens. Two nights left. Let's hope I get something
cool in the last two nights. So, I don't know. I'm really, really hoping I'm gonna do a ton of
reality checks today. I have a bunch of reminders on my phone 'cause I want my last lucid
dreaming night, night 30, to be actually a big one. I really wanna like do something big for my last lucid dream. I don't know if I'll
even have a lucid dream. But hopefully I'll have one if I set the intention
in my head a lot today, do a lot of reality checks and then before bed, definitely
do MILD, WILD do all of it. So yeah, the experiment's
coming to a close, but I'm gonna keep doing
lucid dreams after this. It's too much fun. It's too much fun. Okay. One day left. But luckily it was almost like there was some part of
me that was listening to my internal want, my dreams
to have this awesome dream. And I had an amazing dream on
my final night on night 30. I remember I was like on a playground but the playground was in an ocean. And then in the ocean, there are also three other playgrounds kind of connected together like that never ending
staircase optical illusion. And I was jumping from
playground to playground. And then I kind of realized I was dreaming but I didn't start to fly. I kind of just like shot up. It was almost like I was, I jumped on a springboard and I shot up to space. And I really wanted to go to
the moon and jump on the moon, but nothing like that happened. So, I just kept on flying through space. But I kept on going really, really fast, really, really fast. And I started to see planets. But I kept flying and the
planets kept blurring. And I started to experience weird shapes and noises and emotions. The dream intensified my emotions to the point where I was nearly in tears. I remember I was definitely
crying in the dream. And when I woke up, I
think I wasn't crying but there were tears in my eyes. It's okay to cry. People cry. It's great, but I'm not crying. I'm not a crier. I don't cry. I, you know, I work out. I have hobbies. I don't,
Come here. What?
Come here. I forgive you, all right. And I realized how amazing
this thing really is. I realized there is so
much more to explore in this world in my own head. Imagine the crazy things I could do if I kept doing this for another week, another month, another year. And honestly my life
will never be the same. My journey into the world of
lucid dreaming has just begun. But if you made it to
the end of this video thank you so much for watching and I will see you on the next one. (soft piano music)
