Dream Sorcery: The Ritual & Magick of Lucid Dreaming

by Nikki Wardwell Sleath, Stephanie Woodfield (foreword)

Don't just wake up in your dreams—use that lucid space to hone your magickal practice with this book that is unlike any other dreaming guide.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath teaches you how to go from spectator to active magician in your dreams. She provides everything you need to both develop your lucid dreaming ability and enhance your magick while lucid. She teaches how to improve your dreamtime divination, healing, energy work, spirit communication, shapeshifting, and more.

When you achieve lucidity in a dream, you can practice ritual actions and feel their energetic effects without the constraints of the material world. You can activate pentagrams, glyphs, runes, the ogham, and more, and receive their energies firsthand. Sleath also shares spells to cast while awake that make it easier to become lucid while asleep. This book demonstrates that lucid dreaming is a metaphorical alchemy lab where you can transform your occult practice in amazing ways.

360 pages, Paperback

Published May 8, 2025

Reviews

[Kristy Marquez]

This was an excellent read. Definitely worth the read and is going on my recommendation list.

[Kevin Worcester]

really liked this one. dream sorcery is easily one of the better books i’ve read on combining lucid dreaming with actual magical practice. nikki wardwell sleath goes beyond simply teaching you how to become lucid and explores what you can actually do magically once you’re there, including divination, spirit communication, healing, energy work, shapeshifting, and ritual. loved the idea of using the dream state almost like a magical laboratory where you can experiment with symbols, energies, and techniques without the limitations of the physical world. there are also plenty of exercises and practices for improving lucidity itself, so you’re given a way to actually work toward the experiences being discussed. a few sections could have gone deeper, but overall this is a creative, practical, and genuinely useful contribution to a subject that doesn’t have nearly enough good books written about it.

[Tait]

A book of general witchcraft praxis wrapped inside a dream.

This is one of the few books on dreaming written from a wholly occult perspective that takes dreaming seriously as a magical practice. It is also the only text I’ve found that looks at oneiromantic spells found in ancient grimoires (albeit only a few of them). And she’s done at least some research into the misconceptions of gods commonly associated with dreams enough to be hesitant to call them that (but not enough to go back to primary sources).

Unfortunately, Sleath frames her book through the concepts of “dream alchemy” and transformative metaphors, but does not actually talk about either of them as a form of magical practice. There is no discussion of actual alchemical dream practices, nor of how to work within and transform the metaphors in dreams.

[Paola Dunbar]

Loved this book!! It has some really good techniques for achieving lucid dreaming and once you do start lucid dreaming it goes into some intresting things to do while lucid dreaming like using ceremonial magic techniques, symbols, and flying. Then the book goes into spirits, herbs, crystals, sigils you can use to achieve dream recall, and lucid dreaming. It has a wide variety of Deities and sigils from all traditions, from your own ancestors, Deities, angels, and demons (like the key of Solomon pentacles among others). At the end of the book she goes through some spells and techniques to use to create your own spells, and using talismans. It was a super intresting read, and the most indepth book on the subject.

[Dara]

DNF at 10%. I guess I should’ve known this wouldn’t be for me considering the word “magick” is in the title. I love Robert Waggoner’s books on the same subject & I especially love how his works tend toward the esoteric, the baffling & metaphysical aspects of lucid dreams & the connections they have with waking reality. This, on the other hand, just tends toward silliness. What do “fair folk” have to do with lucid dreaming? How can you take your practice seriously when you call it magick with a K?

[Mitchell]

A solid primer on lucid dreaming and sorcery but one that is a bit specifically tailored to Norse and Celtic-derived practices.