I was wondering, if you listen to your ipod or some kind of portable music device whilst on your way to sleep, would you hear the music in your dream and could you use that to become lucid?
There was some tries like that, mostly with recorded “You are dreaming” voice. Can work, but can be really annyoing, mostly if you are hearing it in whole LD. It could cause ot wake up. But also sometimes works. You can also listen to LDing BWG presets, it also seems to work.
I almost never go to bed without having the tv on, there’s one instance a year ago when I suddenly dreamt I was on mythbusters (i.m.o. discovery channel is the best to fall asleep to ^^).
Apart from that, never heard a thing.
Absolutely. This is known as external induction, and is one of the most reliable methods of achieving lucidity I’ve ever come across.
Basically, all sensory information (sounds, changes in light levels, tactile sensations, smells, etc) is still received and interpreted by the brain while you’re unconscious. It may be difficult to tell which sensations are coming from the real world, and which are simply part of the dream, but that doesn’t matter. The key is to influence the dream in a way that gets you thinking about lucid dreaming, and this can be quite easy with audio cues that are timed to play at specific intervals throughout the night (which hopefully coincide with at least some of your REM cycles).
I used to use a series of sound clips that repeated phrases like, “Am I dreaming?”, “Is this a dream?” and so on. I’d time them to play after I had already been sleeping for an hour and a half (first REM cycle), and then every half-hour or so thereafter, just to maximize the chances of having them play during subsequent REM cycles. Sure enough, I had a lot of success with them. Sometimes I’d become lucid spontaneously, without realizing why, and other times I’d actually have someone in the dream ask me if I was dreaming, which I knew was due to the sound file that had just started playing beside my bed.
I’ve also tried using sequences of beeps, with a similar rate of success. The idea is to train yourself to do a reality check whenever you hear three beeps of a particular tone in quick succession. My old watch had a setting to beep three times on the hour, and I’d use that throughout the day to get in the habit of performing a watch-based RC. Then, by sleeping with the watch right next to my bed, sometimes the beeps would make their way into a dream, and I’d find myself instinctually questioning my state, which would lead to a lucid realization.
I understand that a lot of people don’t have the necessary equipment to set audio files to play at specific times during the night, but you don’t have to do anything that fancy. If you’re able to fall asleep with the sound already playing, then it should work just as well. I prefer silence, so in my case, I had much more success when I could trigger it to start playing after a few hours delay. The simplest way to do that is just to record an hour of silence before the actual message (giving you time to fall asleep), and have that file repeat throughout the night.
If you decide to give it a try, be sure to post your results. I’d be interested to see how well it works for other people.
BMW entertainment’s Lucid Dream Cycle by any chance?
I tried it out once to try to get more lighter LD’s. Could’nt sleep all night ‘till I turned the bleemin’ thing off.
Their voiceless CD’s are quite good though.
Don’t think I’ve heard of that one. I used to use a couple of tracks from a series called Brainwave Voyages. They were a combination of bi-neural beats to increase relaxation, and intermittent messages to get you thinking about lucidity. Aside from that, I had great success with a 2-hour Stephen LaBerge interview that was floating around the net a couple of years ago. He’s basically the father of academic research in the field of lucid dreaming, so hearing his voice talking about LDs was often enough to trigger a realization in the dream.
However, the problem with continuous sound files that never stop, is that they can often take over the dream entirely. Sure, they help you to work out that you’re dreaming in the first place, but then the sound will often continue to make its way into your dream for the entire duration of that REM cycle. I once found myself running around trying to escape from Stephen’s voice, only to have it spew forth from every TV and radio I encountered on the way. I just couldn’t get away from him!
So, after that experience, I preferred audio cues that only played for a second or two, every few minutes. 
I once tried this meditation tape, and it basically got me into a Lucid dream while just sitting on a coutch- except it was a guys voice telling me what to picture in my head.
Hey Atheist, you wouldn’t happen to have any audio files like this that you could share, would you?
I’ll give it a try tonight and I’ll post tomorrow. Hope it will work! 
BTW. I downloaded a sound that says “you are dreaming”. Shoud I use that or just ordinary beeps? 
I fell asleep listening to the Ramones once and had a dream I was at a Ramones concert. Then i realized that I couldn’t be at their concert because Joey Ramone, Johnny Ramone, and Dee Dee Ramones were dead. So i got on stage and danced 
The Brainwave Voyages series unfortunately isn’t free, and the forum rules prohibit linking to copyrighted material. However, the Stephen LaBerge interview that I mentioned is very useful, and can be obtained in ogg format here. Thanks to Tomas for hosting the file.
From what I’ve read, though, it’s apparently better to record your own voice, as this is a more effective way of getting the message into a dream. If you have a microphone or MP3 player with this capability, it’s very easy to do. Just say, “This is a dream,” “Check if you’re dreaming,” or whatever else you can think of, then add twenty minutes or so of silence between the phrases (using a program like Windows Sound Recorder if you don’t have anything more professional).
If all else fails, just do a search for audio files on the topic of lucid dreaming, and you’ll undoubtedly find a number of free ones that have been designed for the purpose. 
i tried finding some files like the one you described, 1hr 30 mins of silence, then “are you dreaming?” once every couple of minutes for thirty minutes. i couldnt find any.
then i tried to make some but for some reason i cant, im too stupid.
nobody’s posted here in a day or so, i thought i’d bump it and ask another question:
does anyone have a good audio file similar to what Atheist described? (1.5 - 3 hr of silence or voiceless/beatless sounds [eg. rain] and then the words “are you dreaming?” or something to that effect every 30 minutes or so.
I downloaded a couple files that were meant to do this, but it was just some really annoying guy talking to me like he’s trying to hypnotize me, and a robotic voice saying “you are dreaming.” every 5 seconds… both really annoying.
Well I tried this last night. I’m using a very basic method, ie. setting the alarm clock on my iPod for 6:30. It woke me up good, something it wasn’t supposed to do, and I then remembered the chaining technique, where you don’t move, and fall directly back into a dream right away, subsequently becoming vividly lucid.
Well, I got into sleep paralysis, but I put 15 minutes of, “Are you dreaming?” I couldn’t fall back to sleep! I was so close! hehehe, but this did help me to come up with a different technique, where I will put a number of noises waking me up, but only 20 seconds of it, so I can fall back to sleep. Success sometimes comes from failures, ladies and gents
I’ve had my ipod in whilst goin 2 sleep but weneva I wake up its just on the floor or sumwhere else on the bed but not in my ears.
I like listening to music before falling asleep. Sometimes I drift off while listening to the music, and usually after few minutes I find myself having advanced HH. I think, that if I didn’t worry about the battery in my mp3 player, I would be able to have a LD this way.
There are a couple of these on itunes, look up ‘white noise’. Not sure how good they are but you can sample them there. 
A friend of mine actually tries to WILD with Hammerfall music. And its actually working pretty well for him.
I thought about this the other day,I had a normal dream about me and my friend going to buy these exercising machines, and some guys went on talking about “imagine going to the beach and not being embarrassed by the way you look” woke up and TV-shop was on…
Why wouldn’t a voice saying “you’re dreaming” trigger me in the same way?
If you were very luky (VERY) and you played the audio to a whole movie through your ipod while you were sleeping, might that let you dream out a movie?