I don’t really dream. It’s extremely rare to the point where I’ll have a handful in a year and I don’t remember them. Waking up with an emotional reaction to an odd dream inspired by life events or entertainment… Then the details slip away from me and I can’t even talk to anyone about the experience.
What’s it like for you?
Do you enjoy, dislike or analyze your dreams?
Is it really a window to the subconscious for you?
If you want to have lucid dreams, set an alarm clock to two hours before you have to wake up and another one to when you have to wake up.
With this two-hour interval you should wake up right in the middle of the dream.
Once that works out, keep telling yourself that the next thing you’ll experience will be a dream when you fall asleep after the first alarm.
With a bit of practice you should be able to get to lucid dreams.
For what it’s like to dream: Imagine being in a simulation, and whenever you look somewhere or you think of something, your brain autofills whatever you focus on.
Say you are on a beach. So you think “How did I get here?” and while doing so, your brain generates a memory of you driving there with other people in the car.
“But who are these people?” And the brain fills in your wife and your son. “I didn’t know I had a wife and a son.” And the brain fills in memories of your first date, the wedding and the birth of your son. And so on.
For me, the biggest tell that I am in a dream is that electronics UIs don’t work. My brain isn’t fast enough to simulate e.g. a working smartphone interface. They are always screwed up and non-functional.