There is an hour late in the night when the house has said everything it intends to say and gone quiet, and the only light left in the window belongs to somebody else.
A lucid dream is one you know you are having.
The dream keeps running around you — the street, the weather in it, the stranger halfway down the corridor — and the sleeper inside it is awake.
Walls hold their shape. The corridor leads wherever you decide to send it.
This ritual is used when you wish to enter that state on purpose.
It is worked at night, by a single candle, with a phrase carried down into sleep the way a coin is carried in a closed hand.
Nothing rare or costly is asked for. No part of it depends on skill you do not have.
What the Lucid Dreaming Spell Does
The working does not create the dream.
Dreams arrive on their own every night, unbidden and unpaid, whether or not a candle is lit and a word is spoken.
What the ritual adds is a marker set down before sleep — small and pale, like a white stone dropped on a dark path.
A phrase, a scent and a small drawn sign are pressed into the mind at the edge of sleep.
When the dream begins, one of the three surfaces: a word in your own voice, a thread of bitter green smoke, a crescent inked on a palm. The sleeper notices it.
Noticing is very nearly the whole of it. The moment you know you are dreaming, the dream changes character entirely.
The picture you were sitting in front of turns into a room with a floor beneath it. It becomes a place to walk through rather than a film to watch.
That is what a spell to control your dreams is actually able to do.
What the Night Asks For
Gather everything while the light is still ordinary, before the quiet hour begins. Nothing should have to be hunted for later, when the room is half dark and the mind is already leaning toward sleep.
- One silver or pale blue candle
- A small bowl of clean water
- Dried mugwort, or lavender where mugwort is not at hand
- A pen with dark ink
- A notebook, and a place beside the bed to keep it
- A stone to sleep beside, amethyst or moonstone
- One quiet hour with nothing after it
Substitutions are permitted, provided the substitute is chosen with attention rather than with convenience. A plain white candle stands in for any color at all.
When to Perform the Spell
Choose a night that has nothing on the other side of it — no bell, no journey, nobody waiting at the door in the morning.
Lucid dreaming rewards long and unhurried sleep. An alarm set for the early morning undoes an entire evening of preparation in one shrill second.
The waxing moon suits a first attempt better than any other phase, while the light in the sky is still gathering rather than spending itself. Dreams have long been reckoned by the moon rather than by the sun.
The moon phases may be used to time the working.
The full moon brings vivid dreams and shallow sleep together — silver at the window, and the mind turning all night behind it. Some sleepers find that combination helpful, and others find it exhausting.
Preparing the Room
Begin while an hour of waking still remains in you, and let that hour be a slow one.
Turn off every screen in the room. Phone light flattens the mind and leaves the surface too hard for any sign to be planted in.
Set the candle where it can be seen from the bed, so that the last thing the eyes hold is a small standing flame. Place the bowl of water beside it, within easy reach.
Put the notebook and the pen on the floor, where a sleeping hand can find them without waking the rest of you.
The room should be slightly cool, and wholly dark once the candle is out.
Charging the Water and Lighting the Candle
Take a pinch of mugwort and hold it above the bowl.
Rub it once between the fingers so the scent lifts — dry, green, faintly bitter — then let it fall onto the water, where it turns slowly and settles.
Mugwort is the herb most often named in connection with dreaming, and with sight in sleep.
Where lavender is used instead, the working leans toward calm rather than toward vividness.
Stir the water once with the index finger, moving clockwise. The ring of candlelight on the surface breaks, and gathers itself again.
Now light the candle and sit with it a while.
A new wick gutters before it steadies, leaning and recovering, deciding whether to stay. The working begins only when the flame stands still.
Breathe slowly, four counts drawn in and four counts let out. The four breaths technique serves well here for anyone who already practices it.
When the body has quieted and the flame is even, speak into it:
Small light, stay lit behind my eyes. When the dream comes, wake me inside it.
Say it once only, and without hurry. Let the room keep it.
The Sign Drawn on the Hand
Draw a small mark on the palm of the hand you write with — dark ink on warm skin — and hold the hand open until it dries.
A crescent is enough, though some prefer a single open eye and others a plain closed circle.
The shape matters far less than the choosing does. Choose one sign and keep it for every repetition of this working.
Familiarity is what allows the sign to surface later, inside a dream where nothing else is familiar, where the stairs are wrong and the street belongs to no city you have ever walked in.
Look at the mark for a slow count of ten, until the ink is the only thing left in the room, then say:
When I see this sign, I will know that I am dreaming.
The Phrase Carried Into Sleep
Wet the fingertips in the bowl and touch them to the forehead. The water is cool, and cooler still as it dries. Touch them again, lightly, to each closed eyelid.
Now take up the phrase itself. It must be short enough to survive the loss of language at the edge of sleep, where whole sentences come apart like wet paper.
Tonight I will know that I am dreaming.
Repeat it slowly, twelve times or more, until the counting stops mattering.
The number is not important, and what matters is that the words become dull, automatic and half-attended, worn down the way a stone step is worn by the same foot.
A phrase must be worn perfectly smooth before it will follow you down.
Putting Out the Candle and Lying Down
Do not blow the candle out. Pinch the flame or cover it, so the light ends without a gust of air and the dark comes in quietly.
The light goes inward now.
Get into the bed at once, without pausing for anything at all. Do not check the time, and do not answer a message.
An hour of careful preparation is undone in thirty seconds of ordinary attention.
Lie on your back with the marked palm turned upward, open to the ceiling. Let the stone rest under the pillow, or inside the marked hand, where it warms slowly against the skin.
Repeat the phrase again, quietly, somewhere behind the teeth where it barely sounds.
Do not strain toward sleep. Effort keeps the body awake, and effort keeps the dream standing at a distance in the doorway.
Allow the phrase to grow slurred and shapeless as the attention loosens its grip.
Let it break apart.
That breaking is the border, and the words cross it without you.
Recognizing the Dream
Something in the dream will look wrong.
A door opens onto a room that does not belong behind it. Text on a page refuses to hold still, the letters moving like fish beneath the surface of the paper.
These are the seams of the dream. The spell trains you to notice seams, and to do one thing whenever one appears.
Look at your hand.
The sign may be there, or a smear of it, or nothing at all — a bare palm in bad light.
The looking is the trigger, and the result hardly matters.
Three Tests
Once suspicion has arrived, confirm it with one of these.
- Count the fingers on one hand, look away, and count them a second time
- Pinch the nose closed and then try to breathe through it
- Read a line of text, look away, and read the same line again
Awake, the answers stay the same every time. Dreaming, the fingers multiply, the breath passes through a closed nose and the text rewrites itself behind your back.
Practice the tests in daylight as well as in the dark. A habit performed twenty times while awake will eventually be performed once while asleep.
Staying Inside the Dream
The first lucid moment is usually very brief indeed. Excitement wakes the sleeper almost at once, and the whole bright country collapses into a dark ceiling.
Calm is very nearly the whole of the skill being learned here.
When awareness arrives, do not celebrate the fact, but lower the attention onto something small and near.
Touch something solid.
Run a hand along a wall and feel the grain of it, the cold of plaster or the split in old paint, and look closely at a single leaf until its veins come forward.
Detail anchors the dream. A dream examined closely will hold its shape far longer than a dream merely enjoyed.
When the Dream Begins to Fade
Colors thin and the edges go gray, as though the place were being rained on from somewhere above it. This is the dream loosening its hold, and it can often be reversed.
Spin slowly in place with both arms held out to the sides.
Speak clearly, inside the dream:
Clarity now. The dream holds.
If it fades regardless, lie still where you wake and keep the eyes closed. The dream sometimes returns to a body that has not yet moved.
What May Be Done Inside the Dream
Many sleepers are content simply to walk about and look, to stand in the blue street of it and let the weather pass over them.
Others use the state for rehearsal, for practice, or for questions they cannot answer awake.
A question put to a figure inside the dream often returns an answer worth keeping, and that is the older working set out in getting answers in a dream.
Doors are useful. Decide what lies behind one before you put a hand to it.
Restraint is worth keeping even here. What is rehearsed in sleep tends in time to be practiced awake.
Waking and Writing It Down
Do not move when you wake. Keep the eyes shut and hold the last image still, the way a hand is held around a flame in a draught.
Dreams leave in the order they arrived, and the first movement scatters them like birds off a wire.
Then reach down for the notebook without sitting up in the bed.
Write in the present tense, badly, in whatever order the fragments choose to come.
Names, colors, weather, one line of speech. Neatness may be added later, or never added at all.
The Dream Journal
The journal is not a record of the past. It is the second half of the spell itself.
Written dreams are remembered dreams, and remembered dreams grow longer and clearer within a fortnight.
Patterns begin to surface after a few weeks. The same staircase. The same missing building. The same unchanging season, holding its one weather over everything.
Such recurring things become reliable private signs, and when a personal sign appears the dream is almost always a dream.
Many keep this record inside a book of shadows rather than in a separate notebook.
Herbs, Stones and Scent
Mugwort is the herb traditionally set aside for dreaming.
It may be kept dry in a small bag near the pillow, where the warmth of the head wakes the scent through the cloth, or burned briefly before bed.
Lavender quiets a restless sleeper without adding much to the dream.
Amethyst and moonstone are the stones most often carried into a working of this kind — one the color of deep dusk, the other the color of a clouded moon.
Keep the stone in the same place every night. Consistency does more of the work here than the mineral.
Difficulties
The commonest failure of all is plain exhaustion. A tired sleeper falls straight past dreaming, down through it without touching anything, and remembers nothing by morning.
Where sleep itself is the trouble, work a sleep spell first, and return to this one afterward.
The second failure is effort. Nights of forced concentration produce thin sleep and no lucidity at all.
Rest the working for three nights, then begin again without expectation.
Sleep Paralysis
Some sleepers wake unable to move at all.
The body is still held while the mind has returned, and the sensation frightens most people the first time.
It passes, and it has always passed.
Move one finger, or one toe, and the hold breaks quickly. Breathe slowly rather than quickly, and let the fear go out of you with the stiffness.
Grounding afterward settles the body, and the grounding meditation technique is well suited to it.
Cautions
This working is not aimed at anybody else. A dream belongs to the sleeper, and nothing here reaches across the dark into the sleep of another.
Do not use the spell as a way of avoiding waking life.
A dream visited nightly can become a hiding place, a lit room you would rather not leave, and that is the one real danger in the practice.
If the dreams turn distressing, set the working down for a season.
The door does not close behind you.
Repeating the Working
Success on a first night is uncommon.
Three nights in a week is a reasonable rhythm, with the journal kept every morning.
Repeat the same phrase each time, and draw the same sign each time.
Repetition is the mechanism here. The candle only marks the beginning, and the phrase does all of the carrying.
Most sleepers who keep to it find something within a month or two.
Closing the Working
When the practice is set aside for good, close it properly. Light the candle a final time and let it burn all the way down, until the flame stands in a shallow pool of its own wax and goes out on its own.
Wash the sign from the palm with the last of the charged water, then say:
What was opened for dreaming is closed for waking. The sign is spent.
Pour the water onto bare earth outside, away from the doorstep.
The notebook is kept.