The other night I awoke from a very exciting dream, most of which I’ve now forgotten, but I vaguely remember it involved a car chase.
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I was extremely annoyed at having been roused from slumberland and tried to go back to sleep to find out what would happen next. But to no avail. We’ve all tried this, right?
Some folks want to control their dreams I just wanted to see how mine played out.
If you want to understand your unconscious cinema, you’re sooner or later going to run into the phrase “lucid dreaming.” It means dreaming while knowing you’re dreaming – a state most people usually have trouble conjuring. Apparently, it’s triggered by the dreamer’s realization that some impossible or unlikely occurrence is taking place in the dream. Perhaps you’re flying, or meeting the dead.
Some experts think this in-between state can be used to confront inner turmoil and heal the psyche. Others do a bit of eye-rolling. But, hey, playing with your consciousness has to be good exercise.
What the experts say
“We maintain a lot of unfinished business as a rule, and these patterns repeat themselves in dreams. Lucidity allows a dreamer to be more fearless in confronting situations that may be threatening. It takes a lot of effort and concentration. Start by using pre-sleep suggestion, saying to yourself, ‘I wish to become lucid in my dreams tonight.’ Ask yourself throughout the day, ‘Am I dreaming right now?’ and then test your experience to see if it stands up under the usual reality tests. If you do this, you’ll eventually ask the question while dreaming. Meditating in the middle of night during a spontaneous awakening helps, as does reliving a ‘bad’ dream in your imagination before going to sleep, and practising ‘lucid’ responses. This, too, can carry over into the dream state.”
SCOTT SPARROW, psychotherapist, professor, University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, Texas
“Lucid dreaming has a bad name scientifically because it’s tied to the New Age by people’s overenthusiastic endorsement of the state as a way of curing or enlightening. There’s no question that lucid dreaming occurs, but it’s rare. You’ve probably had doubts about your dreams, and to get lucid you have to recognize that those bizarre events are dreams. People assume they’re awake when they’re actually asleep. Normal dreaming fools you every time. Lucid dreaming is an unusual development of criticalness about the state you’re actually in. It can be practised. It’s a variation on hypnosis. Lucid dreaming is different from REM sleep dreams and from waking it has properties of both states. Your brain is both awake and asleep at the same time. This tells us your brain is capable of both monitoring and manipulating itself.”
ALLAN HOBSON, professor emeritus of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston
“In studies, video gamers report more lucid dreams than non-gamers. It’s also true with all interactive media use. Dreams are an artificially created alternative reality, and if you practise in technologically constructed realities, when you get into a biologically constructed one you’ve already been practising recognizing artificial reality. It could also be attention training. One place where you find huge levels of lucid dreamers is among meditators, and one way to conceptualize meditation is as an attention training technique. Video gaming is the new meditation.”
JAYNE GACKENBACH, professor of psychology, Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton
“People have had powerful, life-changing experiences that were lucid dreams. People have described lucid dreams as seeming more real than waking reality. Applications can be creative, spiritual and psychotherapeutic. Part of the brain that is self-aware is normally inhibited during a dream. If we’re dreaming that we’re walking, most of the time we’re still in our beds. The part of the brain that sends the signals to walk is inhibited as is the part of the brain associated with self-awareness and higher-level thinking skills. In a lucid dream, those parts get activated. One trigger is nightmares, which can be so intense that the part associated with metacognition gets awakened.”
CHRIS OLSEN, co-director of documentary Wake Up!: Exploring The Potential Of Lucid Dreaming, Palo Alto, California
“If you want to have more fun consciously in your dreams, hang out in the twilight zone. That is the non-academic term for that liminal state between sleep and waking. This is the solution state for creative people. It’s where they get their best ideas and make the best connections. Also, if you’re awakened from a dream, you can go on with it and be aware of your ability to make conscious choices. I’ve seen enormous healing accomplished through that method. We know the body believes in images and doesn’t seem able to distinguish a powerful image from a physical event. If we can just give the body the right images, the body will adjust. We’re constantly filling our minds and thereby our bodies with the wrong stories and images.”
ROBERT MOSS, author, Conscious Dreaming, mossdreams.com, Albany, New York
