My dream signs were in my journal the whole time

Last Saturday I pulled up my dream journal on my phone and started scrolling. I wasn't looking for anything specific at first. I'd just finished a month of trying the MILD technique and gotten one clean lucid dream out of it, plus a few near-misses. But something I'd read in Stephen LaBerge's original research kept nagging me: that lucid dreaming isn't really about any one technique. It's about knowing your own dreams well enough to recognize when you're in one.

I had years of entries. Hundreds of dreams. So I went looking for dream signs, the recurring weird details that could, if you caught them in the moment, tip you off that you're dreaming.

They were everywhere. I just hadn't been looking.

What dream signs actually are

LaBerge coined the term in the 1980s during his PhD work at Stanford. He sorted dream signs into four categories: action (you're doing something impossible, like breathing underwater), form (something looks wrong, like text that changes when you re-read it), context (the setting doesn't make sense, like your childhood kitchen inside your office), and inner awareness (you feel something off, like knowing a stranger is actually your mother).

Not all categories are equal, though. In LaBerge's data, action and inner awareness signs were the ones most likely to trigger lucidity. Form and context signs, the ones that seem like they'd be most obvious, often just get absorbed into the dream logic without raising any flags.

That tracked with my experience. My recurring airport dream has a massive context sign: the airport is different every time, but somehow I always know exactly which gate I need. That contradiction never registered while I was in it.

Flipping back through my journal

I spent the morning going through about eight months of entries. I wasn't being systematic at first, just reading and underlining anything that repeated.

Some of what I found:

I'm late for something in roughly a third of my dreams. Not always the airport. Sometimes it's a meeting, sometimes a class I haven't been enrolled in since undergrad. The lateness shows up way more than I realized.

Phones almost never work. I'll try to call someone and the screen is blank, or the numbers rearrange themselves, or I can't remember how to unlock it. This happened in at least a dozen entries. I had no idea.

People swap identities. Someone will start as a coworker and become my cousin, and I just accept it. This one is an inner awareness sign — the feeling shifts even when the face changes.

Running shows up constantly, but it's always strange. I'm running somewhere specific, but the route makes no sense, or my legs feel heavy, or the ground is soft. The weirdness of the running is the sign, not the running itself.

The research says recall comes first

A 2020 study by Denholm Aspy at the University of Adelaide looked at this directly. His International Lucid Dream Induction Study had 355 participants try different techniques over a week. The best predictor of whether someone had a lucid dream wasn't which technique they used. It was how well they remembered their dreams in general.

A large survey during the pandemic (1,528 participants) found a correlation of .343 between dream recall frequency and lucid dream frequency. That's not a huge number in isolation, but it's consistent and it shows up in other studies too. People who remember more dreams have more lucid dreams.

That wasn't surprising to me, but it was useful to see it quantified. Because it reframes the question. The thing that matters most for lucid dreaming isn't the induction method. It's whether you're paying attention to your dreams at all.

And you can't recognize a pattern you never wrote down. If you journal three dreams a week, you've got 150 entries in a year. That's enough to see what repeats. If you journal once a month, you're working with fragments. The signs are still there, you just can't see them.

A representative German sample of 919 adults found that 51% had experienced at least one lucid dream, which is higher than I would have guessed. But the people who have them regularly are almost always people who pay close attention to their dreams in the first place.

Using dream signs on purpose

After cataloging my signs, I started doing something simple. Each night before bed, I'd pick one from the list (broken phones, being late, weird running) and tell myself: "Next time I see this, I'll realize I'm dreaming."

This is basically what LaBerge's MILD technique does, but more targeted. Instead of a general "I'll know I'm dreaming," I'm giving my prospective memory something concrete to look for.

I've been doing this for about two weeks. No lucid dreams yet from this approach alone. But I've noticed something else: my recall has gotten sharper. The act of reviewing my signs before bed seems to prime my brain to hold onto dream details in the morning. I'm writing longer entries without trying harder.

That lines up with what the Aspy study found. Dream recall and lucid dreaming seem to feed each other. Better recall gives you more material for spotting signs. More signs give you more specific intentions to set before bed. And setting those intentions seems to make you more attentive to your dreams the next morning. The journal is what holds that loop together.

What I'm still figuring out

I don't know yet whether targeting specific dream signs will work better for me than the general MILD approach. The research doesn't separate them cleanly. Most studies combine dream journaling with one or more induction techniques, so it's hard to isolate what the journal alone contributes.

I also don't know if my dream signs are stable. The broken phones and the lateness have been consistent for months. But some patterns I noticed in older entries, like water showing up in strange places, or a specific hallway I used to dream about, seem to have faded. Dream signs might drift as your life changes, which means the journal needs to stay current.

The thing I keep coming back to is how long I had this information without using it. Years of entries, hundreds of dreams, and I never once sat down and asked: what keeps showing up? The journal was doing most of the work already. I just needed to read it differently.

If you've been journaling for a while and you're curious about lucid dreaming, try going back through your last few months and underlining the weird stuff that repeats. I wish I'd done it sooner.