The Guide
Covering all the Basics for a Lucid Life
Hello, Adventurer!
Here, I want to build a guide that covers all the basics of lucid living and lucid dreaming, all based on what has worked for me and what hasn’t. What habits increase calm and clarity? Where do I see priorities, and what comes later? What is the best way towards lucid dreaming? I want to answer all these questions and more as I keep filling in these pages.
The point of this guide isn’t just to help you learn lucid dreaming; it is to use principles I learned from lucid dreaming to improve life as a whole. To reduce suffering and learn to accept the things we cannot change. To create a feeling of agency from a life that feels overwhelming. To turn constant anxiety into clarity and calm, bad habits into good ones, and so on.
And most importantly, the point of this is to offer you ideas and experiences that might help you. Don’t turn this into a strict to-do list that adds more stress than it relieves.
These really are just the basics. Sometimes I will add links and recommendations where you can learn more, and perhaps I will expand on this guide someday in book form.
In the list below, all topics are ordered roughly by priority. The biggest impact comes first.
As time progresses, I will fill more of these in. Topics I haven’t done yet will be bracketed out ( ). It’s like a video game. The more you follow the practice, the more of these I will fill in ;)
Layer 1 - The Essentials
Even without looking at dreams or lucid dreaming, sleep is one of the most important aspects of well-being.
It’s not rocket science.
- Try to get around 8 hours of sleep (listen to your body’s individual need).
- Try to go to bed and get up at roughly the same time each day (my condolences to shift workers).
- Have lots of bright light in the morning after waking up (very important for circadian rhythm!)
- Have good amounts of bright light throughout the day.
- Have only dim and low blue lights in the evening.
More important than any of that, though, is the reduction of stress. You can do everything right, yet still sleep like crap when you’re anxious about the next day. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a miracle cure against stress, but if you do decide to follow this guide’s path a bit longer, then it should be realistic to become calmer and less stressed even with the same amount of problems. Something I definitely recommend is to take 10-20 minutes before bed to calm down and reflect. Maybe just sit and let the thoughts come, so they won’t come while you try to sleep. Maybe write down what’s on your mind right now. Maybe use a habit tracker to reflect on everything you did today. It does help. You can also try background noises like a fan, an air filter, or white noise or calm music. Experiment, everyone is different. And what you need will not be the same every night. Sometimes, calm music can really calm you down; other times, just silence feels better, so don’t make it a hard rule.
It’s generally recommended to sleep in a cool environment, but that comes down to personal preference. I usually prefer being more on the warm side.
If you have a bright or noisy environment, you can try sleeping with an eye mask or earplugs. You don’t have to use these out of principle, though. Some people tolerate noise and light exposure during morning sleep hours well. But I did find a strong correlation that the ones who dream more are often the ones more sensitive to these things.
I also use a grounding blanket. Google it, very new agey science, but I have found that it makes my body more relaxed and relieves some tension.
You can also try out valerian root and melatonin supplements before bed. Valerian root just has a calming effect, quite subtle, but it helps. Melatonin is the hormone that your body produces to become tired and sleep, but you can take it externally as well. Valerian is pretty safe, but the issue with melatonin is that the more you help out your body by getting it externally, the more it gets used to it and produces less on its own. It picks back up again, of course, once you stop, so there’s no permanent damage, just something to keep in mind. I use both situationally. If I can sleep fine without it, I don’t take it. If I find myself stressed before bed, I take valerian. If I want to go to bed earlier than usual and am not tired yet, I use melatonin just once. I also had times when I was very stressed and used both every day to get by, but it shouldn’t be the norm, as it becomes less and less effective over time.
While this isn’t exactly something you can buy off Amazon, having a stable long-term partner also has a strong effect on sleep, especially when they’re there with you. During sex especially, but also just during physical touch (spoon!), oxytocin is released in the body. This is a big feel-good hormone that makes us feel safe and protected, and if that feeling doesn’t lead to deep sleep and good dreams, then I don’t know what will. The emphasis is on the stable and long-term part, though. You don’t get that from a one-night stand or a relationship that feels unstable. Trust me, I’d know.
Nutrition is one of my favorite topics because I’ve put so much time into studying and experimenting with it, and yet, to be honest, I’m not sure what exactly to tell you. Nutrition science is constantly changing, even my favorite nutritionists that I follow preach something different every year. So I will start with what I see as universally true.
Nutrition is something that often gets little attention in our lives as we eat what is tasty, convenient, or simply what we’re used to. But what foods we put in our body has, after sleep, probably the strongest effect on our well-being.
When it comes to a recommendation I can give for most people, aligned with my overall idea of living with as much clarity and calm as possible, the main aspect is a whole foods diet. Fresh, unprocessed ingredients, lots of protein (for everyone, not just for men who try to build muscle), Healthy fats, healthy carbs, and many vitamins and minerals.
The only diets, or eating forms, that I can recommend are:
Carnivore: Meat, fish, eggs, cheese
Ketogenic: Meat, fish, eggs, dairy, (mostly leafy green) vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit and honey
Slow-Carb: Lean meat, lean fish, a few eggs, lean dairy, vegetables (leafy greens plus potatoes, sweet potatoes (most recommended!), beans for carbs), a few nuts and seeds, some fruit and honey
I do not recommend a vegetarian or vegan diet under any circumstances and don’t see it as healthy. I also firmly believe that the individual should always put their own well-being over making a small difference for the environment. If it is important to you, a vegetarian diet is still much better than a vegan one. Here’s why:
Against popular belief:
- Red meat does not cause cancer
- Cholesterol from foods does not increase the dangerous cholesterol blood markers (lots of sugar and unhealthy fats do)
- Vegetable oils (sunflower, palm, etc.) are extremely unhealthy and inflammatory for the body, and I would always recommend using butter instead.
- Animal products not only have a ton of vitamins and minerals, but they’re also much more bioavailable (absorbable) for humans than those in plants.
- A lot of plants contain different anti-nutrients. Basically, animals defend against being eaten by fighting or running away. Plants defend by killing you slowly when you eat a part of them.
The idea behind Slow-Carb is to have a ton of these nutrient-dense foods while still running mostly on carbs, but ones that absorb slowly. You see, there’s an issue with carbohydrates. When we always run on carbohydrates, the body loses the ability to use its own fat stores for fuel properly. So it really is a daily battle of filling up the tank, the tank runs out, and we stop functioning. Especially on fast-digesting carbs like noodles or rice, this can be an issue as we get a lot of energy from it very quickly, but then find ourselves lethargic and starving again soon after. Slow-carbs remedy this exactly by being slow to absorb. Potatoes, for example, offer their energy more slowly, so you end up with fewer afternoon crashes, blood-sugar drops, or hunger cravings.
A ketogenic diet avoids this completely by switching your main fuel source from carbohydrates to fats. Those fats get converted to ketones in the body (ergo the name), which are supposed to be a better overall fuel source for the body, especially for the brain. Additionally, by getting used to running on fats, the body learns to use its own fat stores much more efficiently, which leads to having a continuous source of energy even when you haven’t eaten in a while. Here, you still try to gain many micronutrients from plants, but there is a strong focus on picking out the ones with the most positives and least negatives.
The goal of the Carnivore diet is to eliminate all potential antinutrients and inflammatory compounds. It’s also called the elimination diet, and some people who struggle severely from chronic health issues that doctors can’t find an answer to have found great improvements when switching to this diet. It’s also just absolutely filled with nutrient-dense foods. On the other hand, reducing carbs to 0 can be stressful for the body, and many carnivore nutritionists now lean towards adding decent amounts of fruit and honey. (Both honey and fruit are made by nature to be eaten; therefore, no antinutrients). However, others report being perfectly fine after many years of pure carnivore. I suppose everyone is different.
I want to use this opportunity to talk a bit about my journey with dieting. I struggled severely with health issues that no doctor ever wrote up as diet-related. I had severe brain fog that made it impossible to focus during classes. I had very unstable energy and bad mood swings. Maybe the worst, though, was the hunger. When I ate high-carb, the way people usually recommend, I ate so much every day, and my stomach got full, but I never stopped being hungry. Many years ago, I switched to a ketogenic diet. I experimented a lot and found exactly what works best for me and what doesn’t. All those symptoms I just mentioned disappeared completely.
Nowadays, I eat what I’d call a flexible ketovore diet. The two terms are mixed because I usually eat mostly animal products and only very few plants. Flexible because I still eat whatever I want, when I feel like it.
My main staple is eggs. Eggs are cheap and nutritious, so I can recommend them to anyone on a budget. Good quality meat is expensive, so I eat it rarely, but I like to eat minced beef from time to time. I also eat different cheeses and occasionally a protein shake. Nowadays, the only vegetables I eat regularly are spring onions on my animal based meals, and that’s only because I like the taste. I have nothing against vegetables and salads, but I’m lazy, and the animal products make the main difference to me. I also eat some nuts, dark chocolate, honey, and fruit.
And one thing I love so much about nutrition is that results are often immediate. Whenever I have one of my meals full of eggs or meat, I feel like absolute bliss right after. Energized, calm, my mood gets a boost, and that’s only while I’m eating pretty cheap foods because I’m on a budget. So I really don’t hate on vegan diets out of principle here. Whenever I eat purely vegan meals, I don’t get this feeling, and sometimes my body even feels irritated. I’ve been a vegetarian for five years of my life as well, and I would always prefer the high animal-product diet above it now.
But these meals I mentioned are just my staples. Something that I’ve learned during my adaptation and experimentation phase, when I was very strict, is that, while what you eat has a huge impact on your well-being from its nutrients, it can have an even bigger impact from the comfort it offers you. And food in our world is culture. Cutting ourselves off from foods that we used to eat our whole lives or that are sold in every restaurant is insane, and it can make you miserable. So in addition to my staple, I still go to restaurants and eat what I feel like (without asking for some fancy salad wrap that will make the staff hate me), or I still eat rice, noodles, chocolate, or whatever I feel like at home from time to time. I can only recommend that you do the same.
Since I can only scratch the surface here, here are some of my favorite nutritionists that I learned a lot from. If you ask me, they’re all very deep down the rabbit hole on controversial science, so they all seem to have a different kind of screw loose, some more than others, and I mean this with complete respect for these people. But I still think their expertise can be pure gold. Take everything they say, or what I said here, with a grain of salt, do your own research, try out on your own what works best for you specifically, and please make any changes slowly.
They also talk about intermittent fasting a lot, which is a whole other rabbit hole I haven’t covered here.
Siim is big on topics like one meal a day or reversing aging. He’s probably my favorite when it comes to info on this. I believe he’s on one meal a day slow carb now and used to be more on the ketogenic side, but always recommended lots of vegetables, never did carnivore.
https://www.youtube.com/@SiimLand
If you’re looking for a keto starter guide, I’d recommend Thomas. That’s where I started. He has a very salesperson vibe, so maybe think twice if you wanna buy his premium keto bars and other things, but his videos are gold with how much info he gets across in an easy-to-understand way. Thomas switches between slow-carb and keto, last time I checked.
https://www.youtube.com/@ThomasDeLauerOfficial
Dr. Eric Berg is basically a meme. He’s like that teacher you used to have who’s super nerdy and tries too hard, so everyone made fun of him. But deep down, he’s just adorable and likeable and you feel bad for him. He’s like the keto guy, recommends lots of big salads every day, has many breakdown videos of individual foods or deficiencies and what their causes could be. Overall, if you can tolerate the meme character, I’d recommend his content.
https://www.youtube.com/@Drberg
Shawn, I would see more as an influencer than a real nutritionist, but maybe I’m not up to date. I still think he does a lot of good content on carnivore.
https://www.youtube.com/@ShawnBakerMD
Jordan B Peterson and Mikhaila Peterson also follow a strict carnivore diet and talk about it from time to time, but their content isn’t focused on nutrition. They both had heavy autoimmune struggles for which the elimination diet was the solution.