There are many ways to have lucid dreams. Some people can do it naturally, other people have to try very hard to accomplish the lucid state.

However,
Everybody can do it!

If you really want to have lucid dreams it is advisable that you don’t lead a stressful life. You must have the time for yourself and for your dreams. I’ve had periods that writing down my dreams alone took 2 hours. Nowadays I have a busier life and I see that my lucid dreams have decreased. I would advise to start the exercises in a quiet period. Maybe in your vacation.

Once you have had your first lucid dreams you will see that the next ones are easier and sometimes you will become lucid completely by surprise.

Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams (MILD) Technique

Set your mind to awaken from dreams and recall them. When you awaken from a dream, recall it as completely as you can.

While returning to sleep, concentrate single-mindedly on your intention to remember to recognize that you’re dreaming. Tell yourself: “Next time I’m dreaming, I want to remember I’m dreaming.”. Try to feel that you really mean it. Focus your thoughts on this idea alone. If you find yourself thinking about anything else, let it go and bring your mind back to your intention to remember.

At the same time, imagine that you are back in the dream you just woke from (or another one you have had recently if you didn’t remember a dream on awakening), but this time you recognize that it is a dream. Look for a dream sign. When you see it say to yourself: “I’m dreaming!” and continue your fantasy. Imagine yourself carrying out your plans for your next lucid dream. For example, if you want to fly in your lucid dream, imagine yourself flying when you come to the point in your fantasy that you realize you are dreaming.

Repeat steps 2 and 3 until your intention is set, then let yourself fall asleep. If, while falling asleep, you find yourself thinking of anything else, repeat the procedure so that the last thing in your mind before falling asleep is your intention to remember to recognize the next time you are dreaming.

Taking naps, or, as you can also call it, adjusting your sleep patterns.

For example, set your alarm clock a few hours before you actually have to get up. When you are awoken, read something about lucid dreaming, do a reality check, or whatever, to keep your mind on lucid dreaming. Then go to sleep again with the intention to have a lucid dream.

This also works if you have woken up naturally and are still dozing a little. You don’t have to get up so you doze off to sleep. If at that time you keep in the back of your mind that you are dreaming you have a high change of a lucid dream.

If you can time your REM-cycles (the time in which the actual dreaming takes place), you will be able to set your alarm clock exactly on a time when you have finished dreaming.

Other ways to become lucid

Look at your hands
A many used technique and one that seems to work pretty good is to look at your hands. Just remember to look at your hands and the moment you do it you know that it is a dream.

The best way to do this is to consciously look at your hands during the day and ask yourself whether you are dreaming or not.If you do this often enough you will look at your hands in a dream too.

Then you can realize that you are dreaming.

Dirty tricks
Before you go to sleep, drink a lot. In that way, you will have to go to the bathroom somewhere in the middle of the night.

Lie down, close your eyes and concentrate. Say to yourself that whenever you are in a bathroom or looking for one, you will be dreaming. In most cases you will have a dream in which you are looking for a bathroom or are in one. It is then that you can realise that you are dreaming.

warning: It can be possible that you’re so convinced everything is real you’ll wet your bed…

How did I get here?
During the day constantly ask yourself:”how did I get here?”, and playback the actions that got you were you are now.

If you do this long enough you will eventually ask yourself this question in a dream. And then you really cannot remember how you got there. Bingo, you must be dreaming!

Once I dreamt I was climbing on a building. Then I asked myself:”how did I get here anyway?” and really couldn’t think of how I got up there. Convinced I was dreaming, I jumped off the building and flew away.

Lucid Nutrition
There is some Dream Food around, try some out

Orange juice
Orange juice, or any pure fruit juice helps your nervous system to stay active, while your muscles “sleep”. This way you have more vivid dreams, and increased change of a lucid one as well.

Milk and Cheese
Milk and cheese have amino acids in which have been found to stimulate the production of melatonin, a neurotransmitter associated with sleep and dreaming. So warm milk before bedtime might really help you sleep after all!

Lettuce
A Mirror Traveler wrote:
I have found that lettuce is a great stimulator of dreams, in general. (I’m not too familiar with the lucid variety of dreams.) I don’t know how or why it works, but i know of two friends who have confirmed that lettuce did indeed either induce memorable dreams, or aided in remembering them. I have tried this on three occasions and it worked all three times.

Mustard and pickles
Another account from a Mirror Traveler:
I was listening to a local radio station, one morning on the way to school. They reported that a dream researcher found that if you eat a tablespoon of mustard and a medium size dill pickle, immediately before bed, it will induce lucid dreams. Of course I tried it, well it worked! (The third time) Now I do it about 1-2 a week, the results are good, good enough to make my-self gag down a tablespoon of musterd. I wish that I could remember the researchers name or where he was from. I told my friends to try it and they get about the same results, sometimes it works. For me sometimes is better then no times.

Ice Cream
It is reported that people tended to have lucid dreams after eating ice cream. Could be the amino acids again, or the temperature of the ice cream causing your digestive system to go haywire and thus raise your overall arousal level…

Popcorn
Another alleged lucid dream inducer.

Fish
This is because of the protein contained.

Staying lucid

Once you realize you are dreaming, it is sometimes difficult to remain lucid, or even to remain dreaming. Here are some techniques to keep you dreaming:

• remain calm

Don’t get too exited. If you do, chances are you will wake up after the immediate realisation that you are dreaming.

• spinning

Twirl around your own axis (you won’t get dizzy) and say to yourself:”The next scene will be a dream.” When you stop spinning, if it is not obvious that you are dreaming, do a reality test. Even if you think you are awake, you may be surprised to find that you are still dreaming!

• look at your hands or the ground

Focus at a stable reference point in the dream, like your hands or the ground. This helps you stabilize yourself in the dream.

• rub your hands together

The rubbing will give you a vivid sense of movement and friction. While rubbing your hands repeat to yourself: The next scene will be a dream.

According to some researches, the spinning technique is the most efficient, followed by the rubbing-hands technique.

Norman Doidge, head of long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for the University of Toronto’s psychotherapy program, points out that Freud is the most cited intellectual of the 20th century — a distinction bound to lead to any number of erroneous claims made on his behalf. One misconception frequently attributed to Freud is that people — and our dreams — are motivated solely by sexual desire. Freud did claim sex is deeply significant, and he had a broad understanding of sexuality as something that begins long before puberty. But to say that, for Freud, it all boils down to sex, “is a gross oversimplification of a very complicated model,” says Doidge. “It wouldn’t make the first cut of the Idiot’s Guide to Freud.”

Mills agrees. He notes that Freud followed his classic 1900 treatise, The Interpretation of Dreams, with 40 more years of research and writing. “Early in his work,” says Mills, “Freud very much believed that dreams are the disguised, distorted fulfillment of unconscious wishes, some being primordial urges or impulses, such as sexuality.” But by the end of his career, he amended those views, postulating a role for aggression, unconscious guilt and anxiety.

And Freud’s credentials as a scientist? He was a “hard-core neuroscience researcher,” says Doidge. “He knew an incredible amount” about the way the brain works. Doidge offers a compelling example. When we are awake, our forebrains process visual information in three stages: the primary visual cortex registers things like lines, colour and movement, which are then visually dramatized in a secondary association area; a third area relates those images to an idea, or abstract thought. Freud hypothesized, says Doidge, that “the dreaming mind regresses.” In other words, when we dream, that process is reversed: an abstract idea generates an image. “If the idea is something like, ‘I’m special, I don’t have to go by the rules the way everyone else does,’ ” explains Doidge, “you might have a dream of being able to walk on water or fly through the air.”

It’s now pretty clear that Freud had that part right. What’s more, research carried out by Mark Solms has proved as much — leading that neuroscientist to radically challenge Hobson’s and McCarley’s brain-stem theory of dreaming. In the mid-1980s, Solms began interviewing patients with damage to certain areas of their forebrain. In waking life, a damaged primary visual cortex causes blindness; a damaged secondary association area causes complex perceptual disorders; while lesions in the third area have no direct effect on perception.

But in dreaming, Solms discovered, that pattern is reversed. Patients with damage to the third area experience a total loss of dreaming, while those with lesions in the secondary association area report complex dream image disorders (such as an absence of colour or people without recognizable faces). Lesions in the primary visual cortex have no effect on dreaming. In other words, says Solms, when we dream, our brains do process information in the opposite direction, just as Freud hypothesized.

Interviews with some of Solms’s other subjects, however, revealed something truly unexpected. Nine of the 365 people in his study had suffered damage to what’s called the ventromesial frontal quadrant of their brains, which includes the white fibres located just behind the eyes. All nine reported a total and permanent loss of dreaming. But their REM sleep continued, leaving Solms to postulate that REM sleep and dreaming are distinct phenomena — sometimes associated, sometimes not. As well, the fact that dreaming ceased in sleepers with frontal lobe damage despite normal functioning of the brain stem led Solms to conclude, contrary to Hobson and McCarley, that dreams must originate in the frontal lobe, the highest, quintessentially human, part of the forebrain.

Nine cases, however, could hardly be considered authoritative, and Solms began searching for a way to corroborate his theory. Then he recalled that fibres in the ventromesial frontal quadrant had been deliberately severed in thousands of people who underwent prefrontal leucotomies (the successor operation to the infamous frontal lobotomy) in the 1950s and 1960s to treat severe psychotic illnesses. A tour through reports from that period confirmed his suspicion: those patients had stopped dreaming, too. And while Solms’s theory grew out of his work with brain-lesioned patients in the 1980s, today’s PET scans, he says, confirm it: “The structures that scans show as activated during dreaming sleep are the same structures that, when damaged, as my research showed, lead to abnormal dreams or a total loss of dreaming.”

THE POSSIBILITY that dreams originate in the ventromesial quadrant is good news for Freud backers. Because that is part of the forebrain, Solms concludes, it follows that dreams do have something to do with our mental capacities, our feelings and thoughts. What’s more, that area of the forebrain connects the limbic system with the higher frontal areas, making it an essential part of our motivational system. It is, he says, “what makes us turn to the world to look for the thing that we need.” Think of a dog foraging for a bone, he adds, “wagging its tail, twitching its whiskers.” Such a basic need-driven function corresponds nicely with the Freudian claim that dreams represent our unconscious wishes or urges. Solms is careful to say his work doesn’t prove Freud was right. But, he adds, “it’s strikingly consistent with the sort of thing Freud was claiming on the basis of an entirely different type of approach.”

Peering into the brain, then, has reignited a century-old debate. And, once again, neurologists are redefining its terms, albeit by relying on more hard-core scientific methods than Freud’s. Solms credits Hobson and McCarley with discovering the mechanism for REM sleep, but believes their dream theory relies too heavily on those mechanisms. While REM sleep, he notes, is “the most likely and most sustained trigger for dreams during sleep,” it’s not the only trigger. “If you want to understand what a dream is,” Solms says, “you want to look at the mechanisms in the forebrain, not at what it is that sets them working, especially since the thing that sets them working is neither necessary nor sufficient.” Hobson’s claim that specific forebrain structures are activated in response to chemicals firing up from the pons, Solms adds, cannot account for other neuroscientific research that shows people with damage to the pons still report dreams.