I actually have a real, studied, easy thing you can try!

I found out by accident because I was taking b vitamins daily and started taking them at night, and noticed I was suddenly having very vivid dreams.

So much so that I googled it and it turns out that taking b6 before bed can cause vivid dreams and dream recall!

Here’s a study, there are a few.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29665762/

Step one, write in a dream journal or just try to remember the dream as soon as you wake up. Doing this will improve your dream memory instead of it just fading away.

Step two, have a check to see if you’re dreaming as a habit. Holding your nose closed and breathing through it is a nice one since you’ll be able to breath anyway in a dream.

Step three, establish cues, like every time you walk through a door or whatever just so you’re doing it frequently, the more the better.

Step four, wait until you get a dream where you try breathing through your nose. You’ll become lucid instantly and gain control over the dream.

Step five is just exploration of how to maintain the lucid dream state. Generally it’s very exciting to have a lucid dream but excitement wakes you up. Spinning around in circles and trying to involve all senses such as touch, smell, taste etc will help you make the dream clearer and more real.

I used to be into this and had a blast flying around, teleporting, conjuring and whatnot.

I got so good with lucid dreaming when I was younger that I could pretty cleanly drop straight through full consciousness into the half sleep stage of paralysis and then into unconsciousness in which I would immediately find myself lucid in a dream, but having been aware of everything in between.

This is quite difficult to do from what I recall because you have to completely clear your conscious mind of all thought while maintaining awareness of what you are intending to accomplish in some lower part of your brain. It’s quite hard because you have to be aware but not thinking. Practicing meditation is about this exact kind of thing, and while I have never really done meditation, I expect practicing it would help a lot for this.

I could actually feel the point at which I went into the paralysis and had no input to my body anymore, and the oddities of perception beginning to shift due to my half awake brain.

When I actually dropped through that floor into sleep (which for me did not take that long after the paralysis from what I could sense), the feeling of moving through into actual sleep was pretty wild to experience as it is something usually not remembered or noticed, and I have no great way of describing how it was for me other than it kind of felt like I folded or collapsed inward on myself.

Sort of like if everything around you and every sense you had rushed away suddenly. My sense of sight, touch, smell, taste, hearing, balance - but not like it all just disappeared instantly, more like it was all “pushed” off of me over the course of a moment or two, which is why it’s just such a difficult and strange thing to try to describe. In a way it did feel kind of like falling - in the least a sense of motion is the closest thing that could be used to describe it, but that also is not really it either.

Then I was immediately aware of the dream and knew that I had accomplished the goal, after which I was free to release the strong awareness I had been maintaining and turn my focus to what I was actually looking to do in the dream otherwise.

So yes, you can learn it and get quite good at it, but I think it depends on the person, a lot of practice, and a lot of trial and error. There are other methods that can be used to discover the dream mid-way through as well described in this thread, but you can enter the dream at the beginning in my experience too.

Sleeping is a great time for the brain to synthesize and assimilate recently learned things, so new ideas stemming from what you’ve learned could manifest in a dream. Like the structure of benzene that came to a scientist in a dream and now is the accepted chemical structure.

I personally once had this dream where I got blonde hair and blue eyes and while playing baseball, I noticed that the sky was brighter than usual and the sun’s glare was really bad. Found out later when I got up that people with blue eyes do see more glare when it is bright out.

As for learning in the sense of having a TV or speaker on an educational program while you sleep, it’s enough to disrupt sleep patterns, but hasn’t consistently been shown to be enough for learning.

We always dream, but usually we cant remember the dreams. It helps to keep a dream journal, ie every morning directly after waking up, write down as much as you remember from last nights dreams (or instead talk about it with someone). Over time you will remember more and more details.

I was(I guess still am) really into lucid dreaming in college. You can kinda teach yourself how to do this but it’s a lot of specific things you have to do … Like every time you walk thru a doorway, ask yourself, how did I get here? Like what was the pathway, reason and such. If you don’t recall, you’re likely dreaming.

There’s also a tea you can make that helps… But it tastes pretty bad…but quite effective. I can’t remember the scientific name but the ‘Mexican leaves of god’ should point you in the right direction…calea something with a z… I think. and blend it with normal tea. It can be smoked…but I found the tea way more impactful.