how many hours of sleep is good?

just wondering how many is enough to try to have an LD.

i’ve had about 3 in the past and never bothered to find out what the experience was all about (or even called), and they were so awesome that i’d like to try and force myself to have them again.

:content:

In my opinion I would say at least 7-8 hours and it’s best if you can get 9 to 10 hours sleep. This does not mean you can’t get lucid dreams with less sleep. Just as a general rule the more sleep you get the better your chances.

I’ve read recently that scientists found that 7 hours is the best for health, but the longer you sleep the longer are your dreams. A compromise is WBTB method, it can also be used if you are busy and have no time to sleep long.

Yes at least 6-7 hours. The more you sleep, the longer the dream cycles so the more chance you have to become lucid. However, you cán become lucid already after 1.5 hours of sleep, during the first short dream cycle, but that’s pretty rare…

I would say about 11-12 hours. But thats just me. Actually it doesn’t really matter I"ve had some of my best and longest LDs when I just slept for maybe 5-30 minutes.

All you really need is the right frame of mind and a minute or so.

Is sleeping for too long bad for your health? I find that if I sleep for 12 hours or more I usually wake up with a headache…

Yes I’ve read something about negative effects of ultralong sleeping… You might wake up feeling more tired than when you went to bed. I think everyone has an optimal sleep length whereby the body and mind are refreshed in the best way, probably somewhere between 7-9 hours. If one sleeps less or more, several side effect might appear.

I have a horrible sleep schedule, but I aim for 8 hours.
Some nights I get only 4 hours, and other days I get 10 hours.

During days/nights that I’m more sleep deprived I can enter into a LD in less than an hour, but this isn’t under normal sleeping conditions. Most of my LDs are at the end of my sleep cycle after a good healthy dose of a few hours sleep.

There is no inherent reason that peeople will be different in the “best amount of time” for sleeping.

It depends when LD s happen for you, mine never happen in the morning and always happen at night, so if they happen at night you need less, and if they happen in the morning you need more.

For ages I’ve wanted to change my hours of sleep but it seems to be impossible. :neutral: During the week I wake up at 8am, feel tired all morning and somethimes the afternoon as well. Then I often don’t go to bed until 1.30am and end up getting 6-6.5 hours sleep. At weekends I get 10-12 hours (too much). My body seems to naturally wake up in the evening so when it’s 11pm it only feels like 8pm to me.

i’ve been trying to sleep 12 hours a day… it’s going to be so sad when school starts up.

my lds may actually improve though because i get all those 6 a.m. i should get up because the alarm is about to go off and sleeping for 15 minutes wil just make me tired but i’m going to wild anyway… type… things.

I have found that if I sleep too much I get a bit tired and then I have to sleep a bit more than usual then next days because I’m tired. And I will also keep waking up all the time after about 6-7 hours of sleep and then I won’t remember to write down my dreams and my memory seems more blurry than usual.

And if I sleep a bit less than usual I will get lots of HI and remember my dreams better and also have longer dreams than usual. And scene changes seem to happen less often and if they happen they are usually connected to the previous part so that the dream will make a longer story than usual.

Or that’s how it works for me :cool:

I managed to go to bed half an hour earlier than usual two nights running this week. But in the morning I woke up with a headache and feeling even more tired. :sad:

My sleep cycles gone crazy recently due to summer holidays. I’ve been getting up at times from 12-3pm. Last night I tried to go to bed at 2 and get up at 11, but it just didnt work. I was too awake when I went to bed and couldnt get to sleep for ages. Then I couldnt get out of bed in the morning :sad:

Some people can function fine on as few as 6 hours of sleep a day. My suggestion is to find out 3 numbers for your sleep duration. Not only is this useful for considering your dreams, but it’s useful if you have to live on a schedule IRL.

  1. Ideal duration: How long you sleep naturally when you don’t have an alarm, but do have a regular bed time. (Me: 9.5-10 hours)
  2. Optimized time: The shortest time you can sleep and still be fully refreshed. (Me: 8 hours)
  3. Minimum time: The shortest time you can sleep and still be fine, but cannot do regularly because it’s really not enough. (Me: 6 hours)

#1 should be easy enough to find, all you need is a day off.
#2 shouldn’t be that hard, but may require a few days of experimentation.
#3 also requires a few days of experimentation, but those days should be spread out because undersleeping should be done sparingly.

Try to keep a regular bedtime, even if you aren’t living on a schedule. If you don’t like waking up to an alarm, you still need something to regulate your sleep, because a lot of LD techniques rely on knowing approximately what time of the night you’ll be actually dreaming, and things are going to be messed up if you’re living on 30-hour days.

that sounds like some good advice BeefotronX. Maybe if I wasn’t nocturnal I’d try it! … one day I will :wink:

Back when I was in school, I never got enough sleep. Usually around 4-5 hours, due to insomnia. I rarely remembered my dreams then. The only times I could remember them was on weekends when I spent ~12 hours sleeping.

i sleep alap(as long as possible) partially cause i’m lazy but then there’s also more time to have dreams and explore in LD’s, i have to wake myself up somehow every 3-4 hours though or i’ll never remember early dreams i have or anything.

I’m 14 years old, making me still a child :-\

I sleep 9-10 hours usually, but sometimes i get 7-8 hours of sleep and i feel tired in the morning, especially when i have school.