What Are Dream Signs? How to Find and Use Yours
Dream signs are the recurring, often bizarre features of your dreams. Learn the four types, how to identify your personal signs, and how to turn them into lucidity triggers.
A dream sign is a feature of a dream that gives it away as a dream — something bizarre, impossible, or simply out of place that, if you noticed it, would tell you that you're asleep. Learning your personal dream signs is one of the most powerful things you can do for lucid dreaming, because recognizing one mid-dream is often the exact moment you become lucid.
The four kinds of dream signs
Lucid-dreaming researcher Stephen LaBerge grouped dream signs into four broad categories:
- Inner awareness — an unusual thought, emotion, or sensation: sudden fear with no cause, telepathy, or knowing something you couldn't possibly know.
- Action — you, another character, or an object does something impossible: flying, breathing underwater, a phone that melts in your hand.
- Form — something is shaped wrong or keeps changing: a familiar house with too many rooms, a face that won't hold still, an extra finger.
- Context — the situation itself is off: you're somewhere you'd never be, with people who don't belong together, in a time that doesn't fit.
How to find your dream signs
Your signs are personal, and the way to find them is simple: keep a dream journal. After a couple of weeks, read back through your entries and look for repeats — the same setting, the same anxiety, the same impossible action. Those recurring themes are your signs. (Start here: How to Remember Your Dreams.)
Common examples people discover include water, flying, being chased, teeth falling out, running late, old houses, and exams — but yours will be uniquely your own.
How to turn a dream sign into lucidity
Once you know a sign, you can target it:
- Reality-check on your signs while awake. When you meet a waking version of a dream sign — say you often dream of water, and you pass a fountain — do a reality check. This trains your mind to question the sign.
- Rehearse recognition with MILD. As you fall asleep, picture yourself noticing your sign in a dream and realizing you're dreaming. (See the MILD technique.)
Over time, your dream signs become tripwires: the next time the water rises around your feet in a dream, some part of you asks the question — and you wake up inside the dream. Aisling maps your recurring signs into a constellation, so the patterns are easy to see.