Thread: Is it possible to Lucid Dream without being in REM sleep?

Right so something happened last night I am really curious about

As I was falling asleep at the start of the night I was planning to MILD but as usual I fell asleep during my relaxation techniques. I woke up twice having had two really short lucid dreams. The second I was in a corridor with my friend and we both aimed our guns at someone but they shot me and I instantly realised I was dreaming due to the lack of pain and then woke up.

I recorded both short dreams on my laptop but then realised that only 20 minutes had past from when I had started my relaxation techniques…

Were these two short dreams lucid? Or were they even dreams? I understand the different stages of sleep and so I’m confused as to how I could have had TWO dreams in such a short period (and likely still in STAGE 1 of sleep).

Do I count these as lucid dreams or were they something else?

I ended up using WBTB later that night and having a really Vivid LD anyway but just wondered about the first two.

If you knew you were dreaming, then that counts as a lucid dream.

It's not that people don't "dream" persay in non-REM sleep, but the mind is less active when not in REM and it's much more difficult to recall. But I've had those experiences where I have a vague "dream" as I'm falling asleep... sometimes to be jerked awake when I feel like I'm stepping down or someone's about to touch me and I flinch away.

From what I've gathered, all lucid dreams take place in REM sleep. If you are trying to WILD, it's of the utmost importance that you discover and hit your REM stages.
REM stages are narrow windows of opporitunity during the night.

Well, the time you spend in REM increases the longer you sleep. When you first go to bed, you spend most of your time in non-REM sleep, but as the night goes on, you spend more time in REM sleep, and thus more time dreaming. That's also why you're more likely to remember dreams that you've had in the morning rather than in the middle of the night. Also, since both nREM and REM stages are important for one's physical and mental well-being, people who don't get sufficient sleep and/or are for some reason deprived of REM sleep can suffer physical side-effects from that.

Indeed, REM stage length increases towards the end of the night. Your first REM stage being only a few minutes, and your last being 45 minutes to an hour.
With that said, REM stages are still narrow windows of opportunity in the night. I think it's imperative that anyone attempting WILDs must understand and learn their "dream schedule".
Here's a thread where we're trying to figure out all this REM craziness.
The Dream Schedule Thread
I'm under the personal impression that REM timing is extremely significant for WILDs.

Yes, it is entirely plausible that these were actual lucid dreams. You do not need to be in the REM stage of sleep to dream although it is during the REM stage that most people dream and dreams are the most vivid. I won't go into detail here, but it has a lot to do with how the brain is activated throughout the night and what neurotransmitters ("brain chemicals") are modulating the activity. Psychologists early on argued that REM=Dreaming, but later studies, especially those done by Mark Solms, have shown that vivid dreaming may take place outside of REM sleep. Though the best brain/mind environment for lucid dreaming is during REM sleep.

In short, if you experienced a dream and were conscious of it, you probably had a lucid dream.

It is not only possible to dream in NREM, but to lucid dream as well. I've had a brief lucid dream when practicing WILD and I knew it was way too early for a REM cycle because it happened within a short time (unless I fell asleep without knowing), and the dream wasn't clear. Most NREM dreams lack a 1st person perspective and usually make little/no sense. In one of my NREM dreams, I was dreaming about King of the Hill, and Peggy said something like "deal it with a spoon", I mean what is that?

Yes, it's possible to dream and even lucid dream in NREM, these dreams are often unclear, and not very detailed

This topic interests me.

Can a dream be clearly attributed to either REM or NREM or is the REM-NREM crossover fluent?

I've had lucids (brief ones) in non REM sleep. I know this because I sometimes fall asleep when talking to my girlfriend in bed and she'll wake me. But I can be asleep for seconds and dream.

Lol, the topic title and the post's questions are for the most part unrelated, so I'll answer all of them.

In response to the title: It may be, seeing as NREM dreams are possible. I see no reason there shouldn't be any.
Do I count these as lucid dreams?: I'd say they were dreams, because if you didn't know anything about REM and NREM sleep you would've called them dreams without question. If they were lucid then yes you'd count them as such, but what you consider "counting" is slightly ambiguous. Should they "count" toward your LD number? Sure. Should they "count" toward as something that you'd write about in your dream journal? I'd say yes to that as well.

i sometimes have detailed, first person, vivid dreams within 30-45 mins of when i first go to bed, on a regular schedule.

i do not think our sleep cycles are as consistent as people make them out to be.

Originally Posted by zhineTech

i do not think our sleep cycles are as consistent as people make them out to be.

While it's undoubted that deviation does occur, it's not like REM and NREM phases/stages are random for everyone. They're called sleep patterns for a reason, after all.

Sorry I couldn't find a nicer one, but that says it all, basically.

right. trust me, i understand this, and believe the general trend that "REM gets longer as the night goes on," but i have found such charts to be overly simplistic. based on this chart i should never have REM type dreams (of which i believe i can differentiate the types, or at least differentiate a "first person, detailed" vs a "third person, symbolic") until two hours after i go to sleep. however, even when on a basically consistent pattern i find that i often have them within 30-40 mins, but not always.

i am interested in (and discuss this in the thread w/ the enthusiast listed above, where curiously enough i posted the same image to him that you are ow posting to me) in how the cycles overlay and are affected by our waking days and larger monthly and seasonal cycles.

for example, if i usually go to bed at 12:00, and then one night i go to bed at 1:00, i believe it is too simplistic to think it merely shifts the cycle one hour to the right. it must either shorten / lengthen / or change it in some appreciable manner. the same holds true for nap times. often one can enter REM quickly, but not always, depending on the nap and the amount of sleep beforehand.

from berkley courses i have listened to the importance of REM in dreaming has been greatly overstated in research for the last 50 or so years, and studies of dreaming in N-REM sleep is just now becoming more widespread. i can definitely verify that most of the dreams i remember happen in the early morning REM periods, but the last few LD's i have had have been within less than an hour of falling asleep. granted neither was very long, but none of my LD's to this point have been that long anyhow.

in summary, i do not believe our cycles are random per se, but i do believe that these charts are too simplistic. i am looking for further research and articles in this direction if anyone else knows them.

I most sincerely agree that such charts are overly simplistic - I was trying to find a way to type it out to you when I posted last, but opted to just get the chart to you as soon as I could in case you'd never been shown one. However, I use them as a general guideline, as I believe they should be, for determining such things as when I had my last dream, when to set alarms for, etc. I've found that such events as "REM rebound" from breaking a sleep pattern are enough to cause such wide deviations in the chart as to make it useful for little more than a general guideline for determining when that lucid occured during the night.

Glad to see others are ever-questioning of the world around them and of the way their mind and body works.

Originally Posted by Clyde Machine

Glad to see others are ever-questioning of the world around them and of the way their mind and body works.

hi five!

Hello, I've just found this thread so apologies for lateness - it interests me as I've wondered the very same thing. Possibly the best lucid dream I've ever had (in terms of vividness, detail, and achieving a desired aim) occurred less than an hour after first falling asleep, which I found very puzzling at the time. However, it had taken me a very long time to get to sleep. Being somewhat insomniac, I think my sleep patterns are messed up quite a bit, but it does suggest how far things can diverge from the 'normal'.

Don't post in old threads please. That is considered necroing, and you will be much better off by making a new topic, especially since the OP hasn't logged in 2 years. Thanks

Closing this thread.