NT: Napping to LD (was: 'Ehh?')

[danharber]

Im about to take a nap and i was wondering what kind of success people have had and what techniques you have used to become lucid during a nap.

Thanks

[Darxide]

Here’s a technique:

Don’t take naps!
Unless you don’t mind not being able to fall asleep at your normal bed time…

[ToBedAndBeyond]

ive heard of lots of people say that taking naps is the best way to have a lucid dream.

As for me, it usually never works, just because i have horrible naptime recall.

[Basilus_West]

That’s right. You’ve better chance to achieve lucidity during naps than during the night. Laberge made some experiments about that. Morning naps are better that afternoon naps.
Some quotes from lucidity.com :

Furthermore, in LaBerge’s data on his own lucid dream times, he noted that he was much more likely to achieve lucidity during afternoon naps than during nightly sleep.

WILDs are most likely to occur after awakening in the morning or during afternoon naps (LaBerge, 1980).

In this study, participants maintained the same total number of hours of sleep, while shifting the last two hours of their nights’ sleep to either two or four hours after rising. Thus, in the two hour condition, they were returning to bed at their usual waking time, and in the four hour condition they napped two hours after their usual waking time.

The findings were astonishing. Lucid dreams happened ten times more often in the nap periods than in the nights. Part of this result could arise from the fact that dreams are much more common in the latter hours of sleep. […]There was some sign that the two hour delayed nap was better for lucid dreaming than the four hour delayed nap, but the data set was too small for this finding to be conclusive.
Such strong results showed that nap-taking was worth a lot of attention as a potentially very powerful lucid dream induction technique.

[Cyrus]

Naps are great if you want to have OBE by SP, and for LD. Although for me so far (but i’m having nap-s very infrequently) naps have produced not so high level LD-s. But the chance that you will become aware during nap about the dream is much more possible than during night, because you take a nap with conciously reminding yourself that anything you will see might be just a dream.

[tafflehota]

I forgot the guys name, but Laberge mentions this one oneirnaut that would wake up at his normal time, eat breakfast, and do stuff for like 2-3hours and then go back to bed and practice LDing. I guess you could consider that a morning nap. And this person was very successful at becoming lucid.

[Darxide]

Okaaay, take naps then. I am just telling you my experience with them:

I take a nap, get about an hour to two hours of sleep and then awaken feeling a little groggy. When bed time comes around I CAN’T SLEEP for that extra hour or two.

But, I guess you all know what’s best. So take your naps, and screw up your sleep cycle that I find vital to lucid dreaming.

[Lunatic]

eh, I had my first lucid dream during a nap, I was home sick and I didnt use any particular method. If I have the time and if I feel like it I will take naps occasionaly.

I still maintain a regular sleep cycle though…

[Darxide]

Well… then consider yourself blessed!

[Siiw (Infinite Impatience)]

Different things work for different people. If I am tired enough, I can nap and still be able to sleep and dream at the usual time. However, my work schedule makes me get up and fall asleep at different times every day! Napping after the usual night’s sleep is considered the most effective in some books

[Jack]

Naps indeed do wonders to lucid dreaming.What Darxide says about messing up the sleep schedule is only partially true- sure one can have problems falling asleep at night BUT that will only happen if you have your nap for too long.Everyone should experiment with the times but i guess something around 1 hr will work for most just great.
Naps are great mainly for Wild techs but with any other you will do fine.Reason for it is that we usually dont sleep long enough at night(school,parties,work) and we got ouirselves into sleep debt.That is the cause of REM starting right off when we take a nap.Therefore dreams are easier to enter conciously and cuz of short sleep better remembered.
good luck.

[danharber]

DAM, ive come to a conclusion, i smoke to much pot.

I am going to quit for a week and let everyone know my results of dream recall and lds compared to wen i do smoke

[discostu]

I take only 15 to 20 minute naps during the day and I have ld’s very frequently, well over half the times.

I used to have the same problem as darxide, that is, if I took a nap in the afternoon I’d always sleep too long and then not be able to fall asleep at night. But an effective nap, or powernap, is supposed to be only 20 minutes or so, it’s when you sleep longer than that that you wake up all groggy.

The problem for me was that i couldn’t really plan for 20 min naps, if I set the alarm to go off after 30 mins the kowledge that I had less time to sleep the longer it took me to fall asleep always made me too tense to actually manage to fall asleep.

What I do now is that I get up early, only allowing me to sleep for maybe 5-6 hours and then spend the day as I normally would. When sometime during the day I start feeling very tired I just go to bed and take a nap. I start falling asleep almost right away because the tiredness just hits me so it’s easy to feel myself drift off to sleep or remind myself to look for dremasigns in a minute or two. Then after having a lucid dream I always wake up and don’t feel very tired at all and this takes only 20 mins. I did it twice today, had ld’s both times and the naps were 20 and 14 minutes respectively. In the first one I was actually in a dreamworld complete with people, in the second one I just “woke up” in my room and started walking around the apartment.

So my trick is, get up early and go about your day. As soon as you feel the tiredness hit you, which is usually when youre not really doing anything anyway, go right to bed and set the alarm for 30 mins. Don’t try to force it, if you don’t feel like youre going to fall asleep within the next few minutes don’t waste your time, only go for the nap when just laying down on the bed to rest for a little bit is really what you want to do. If your not asleep within 10 minutes, do something else and try at another time.

It usually takes me a long time to fall asleep, but this way it’s easy and I can feel myself start to drift off pretty fast, and I ask myself if Im dreaming as soon as I get that feeling. It usually wakes me up from half slumber once or twice before Im asking the question when Ive actually started dreaming.

[Jack]

Sounds good:)Thing is that everyone finds his own times.In my case i.e best effect gives me sleeping for 5-6 hrs,get up do stuff for an hour or two and then go back to sleep for another hour or so.Plain WBTB tech used usually for WILDs but as i suck at it i dont really do anything but fall asleep.Seems the mind is in the right balance of being able to sleep and aware at the same time that it gives me OOBEs and LDs in 50% tries id say.
good luck.