Want To Lucid Dream Tonight? 9 Tips & Techniques To Get You Started

While lucid dreaming can be powerful and fun, to say the least, it does come with some risks—especially if you have any sort of mental health disorder (psychosis, dissociation, and depression, in particular).

“Those who are dissociative or have conditions that lead them to lose touch with reality might find the blurred boundaries between dream time and waking life disorienting,” Ellis explains, adding “it can lead to a further blurring of the line between what is real and what is imagined.”

As Waggoner adds, he always tells people, “If you can not handle waking reality, then it seems best to avoid lucid dreaming. But if you can handle waking reality, then it seems generally safe to dream lucidly.”

However, according to Ellis, even healthy dreamers can have trouble waking up out of a lucid dream sometimes, “and experience a series of ‘false awakenings’ or will enter a black void before they are able to orient fully to the here and now.”

And because lucid dreaming isn’t a typical sleep state, she adds, some dream experts believe too much lucidity can interrupt one’s normal sleep cycle in an unhealthy way.

According to Waggoner, the name of the game is to simply “wait until you feel relatively at peace with your waking state experience before beginning a lucid dream practice.”