How important are those last REM stages for lucid dreaming?

Quest for Lucidity
1

I rarely sleep for long enough during the nights - usually 5-6 hours, which of course is not a very good idea (I tend to go to bed late even when I have to get up early for work).
Anyway, I decided to sleep for a sensible period of time this weekend so I slept for 8-9 hours both nights, and I clearly noticed that my dream recall suddenly got much better - I can frankly say that I remember a lot of details from relatively vivid dreams that I had both nights, and I didn’t even write them down.
So there clearly seems to be a connection here, or maybe it was just a coincidence, I don’t know.
But I was wondering, just how important are these last REM stages while you try to learn lucid dreaming (or in my case, re-learn)?
It definitely seemed to make quite a dramatic difference these two nights when I slept for about 8 hours.
So… what happens here?
How greatly will my LD chances improve if I catch these last dreams?

2

“How greatly will my LD chances improve if I catch these last dreams?”
Probably as much as your dreams enhanced from sleeping 8-9 hours. :wink:

Everyone is a little different obviously but I think the 8-9 hours of sleep is your sweet spot for REM. So do the WBTB technique. Try waking up after 6.5 hours of sleep then go back to bed about an hour later. If and when you have an LD you will be in the right stage.

3

The quick answer is yes, those later REM periods are very important.

The reason is because REM periods get progressively longer the more we sleep, and since they get longer they also occur more closely together as the night goes on. This helps lucid dreaming or even just remembering your dreams in general because:

  1. The more you dream, the more chance you have of successfully realizing you’re dreaming. It’s simple math.

  2. You reach REM sleep much faster after having awakened and returned to sleep, the longer you sleep. Your first REM period of the night might last ten minutes, after which you’ll wake up, probably so groggy that you’ll forget your dream, and then go back to sleep and start dreaming again in perhaps as long as 90 minutes. If, on the other hand, you’ve slept 8-9 hours and you awaken, you’ve probably been dreaming 1/2 an hour or longer…so you can recall a lot more, and when you fall back to sleep you’ll reach REM sleep much faster. This makes it much easier to use techniques like MILD or WILD.

Hope that helps :smile: