The world we enter in our dreams is as vivid and eventful as waking reality. Normally, we have no conscious influence on our dream imagery – we are passive observers. But in lucid dreaming, people can control their dream experiences.
When you dream, your brain’s conscious ‘control center ‘ shuts down, and you can no longer direct the focus of your attention or rationally examine your perceptions. This means that you accept your dream experiences, no matter how bizarre, as being completely normal. In lucid dreaming, this changes. The brain’s control center ‘wakes up’ and restores the sense of self. This allows you to direct your dream narratives as you choose. Experienced lucid dreamers do extraordinary things in their dreams. They can fly, chat with long-lost friends, sunbathe on a sunny beach, or eat an exquisite meal. In a lucid dream, you move into a rich dreamscape – seemingly as real as anything experienced in waking life, but with the freedom of being unconstrained by normal physical laws. The key is that you are able to recognize the dream as an illusion. For example, you might dream that a lion is chasing you. Becoming lucid, you realize that you are dreaming, and your fear subsides as you remember that you can control what happens. You can turn the lion into a fluffy toy or make it roll over and ask for its tummy to be tickled. Or you can continue the chase just for the thrill of it. Lucid dreams can occur spontaneously, but many people can train themselves to have lucid dreams by using visualization techniques (see opposite).
Therapeutic Lucid Dreaming
Lucid dreaming is not just entertaining – it can be therapeutic. People can overcome phobias, for example, by confronting and controlling them in lucid dreams. Some psychotherapists believe that significant dream symbols can be interrogated in these dreams, providing insights into unconscious motivations.
How to Become a Lucid Dreamer
Lucid dreaming is not a particularly ‘natural ‘ state because normal brain chemistry tends to produce either sleep (and dreaming) or wakefulness – not a mixture of the two. However, there is no evidence to suggest that training yourself to enter this state has any adverse effects. The following steps, followed every night, should produce lucid dreaming within weeks or months.
- Go to bed an hour or so earlier than usual, or have a lie-in. Alternatively, set an alarm a couple of hours earlier than usual, get up when it goes off, and then return to bed later for a nap. Lucid dreams tend to occur after one has had the normal dose of ordinary REM sleep.
- In the hours before bedtime, think hard and repeatedly: ‘I will have a lucid dream tonight. ‘ The thought will help to ‘prime’ the brain for clarity.
- Select a ‘cue’ or ‘dreamsign’ that your brain will recognize when it occurs in a normal dream. Decide that when the dream appears, you will ‘know ‘ that you are dreaming. For example, decide that whenever a red object appears in a dream, your brain will latch on to it and recall that this is a dream.
- Make an effort to become more aware of your ordinary dreams. Keep a notebook by your bed and, on waking, write down everything you can remember. Make a particular note of objects that seem to appear often and select them as dreamsigns.
- The moment you have a glimmering of awareness in a dream – the thought ‘this is too odd to be real,’ for instance – zoom in on it rather than letting it drift away. This type of awareness is the gateway to clarity. Most people experience it fleetingly during normal dreams: the trick is to hold on to the thought and elevate it into consciousness without waking up altogether.
- When lucidity dawns, relax into it. Do not get excited or try to alter the dreamscape immediately. Just relax and enjoy the scenery. Once you have latched on to the thought that you are dreaming, you will find that lucidity floods in. It feels like waking up – except that, instead of becoming sensorily aware of the outside world, your knowledge is purely conceptual. You ‘know’ you are in bed because you remember going to sleep, but you don’t actually feel the bed. The sights, sounds, and feelings you were experiencing when you were ordinarily dreaming continue unchanged – it is just that now you know they are e hallucinations.
- Test the dream. Sometimes, it can be not easy to distinguish a lucid dream from wakefulness. One way to test it is to try switching on any electrical apparatus – in lucid dreams, there is always a delay between throwing the switch and the device coming to life. And electric lights are always very dim in lucid dreams.
- Slowly start to control the dream. Decide, for example, to change the weather or the wallpaper of the room you are in. All you need to do is to have the thought, ‘Let it be sunny, ‘or ‘ walls turn blue.’ If you want to conjure up a person, think about seeing them appear, then turn away from the place where you want to see them. When you turn back, they will probably be there. If you want to fly, imagine yourself lifting very gently – when you feel yourself go, do not try to ‘help’; just let it happen.
- If you feel yourself waking up and don’t want to, try spinning your dream body around in a circle – it helps to maintain the dreamscape.
- Never panic. Lucid dreams occasionally produce unpleasant experiences, such as a feeling of a charged atmosphere or a sinister presence. And ‘false awakenings’ are common – you think you have properly woken up but find that you cannot move. This is because you are still in sleep paralysis. Fighting against the feeling is pointless and may make you feel as though you are suffocating. Instead, relax, remind yourself that this is a false awakening, and float back into your dream world.
