Lucid Dreaming – “Reality” re-defined

“Did you ever have a job that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes. And immediately you wake up and realize… that the whole day at work had been a dream. It’s bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.”

This quote is from the movie Waking Life, one of my all time favorites. If you’ve experienced this, or any other kind of unpleasant dream (and i’m betting you have), you likely know how depressing it can feel. It’s real emotion resulting from an “unreal” experience. In many cases, we react to our dreams the same way that we do to real-life situations. We might wake up feeling especially happy, hopeful, determined or let down. When we come to the realization that our emotion exists only because of a dream, we make the effort to immediately alter our emotional state. This is because we come “back to reality” and reason tells us that the feeling is now void.

Our brains are largely unaware of the difference between dream scenarios, and real-life scenarios. This is what makes it possible for people to become so terrified in their sleep that they can scream, flail their legs in attempt to run, punch and kick, and even wet the bed out of fear. Basically, it explains all of those dreams you’ve had throughout your life that you absolutely swear on your life were real. Your brain thinks it was real.

This is where lucid dreaming comes into play. If your brain thinks your dreams are real, why should you not soak up as much of the potential delightfulness of your dream world, as you do in your waking world?

“You got to be able to ask yourself, “Hey, man, is this a dream?” Most people never ask themselves that… when they’re awake or especially when they’re asleep. Seems like everyone’s sleep walking through their waking state… or wake walking through their dreams. Either way they’re not gonna get much out of it.” – Waking Life

From Wikipedia: “A lucid dream is a dream in which the sleeper is aware that he or she is dreaming. When the dreamer is lucid, he or she can actively participate in and often manipulate the imaginary experiences in the dream environment. Lucid dreams can seem extremely real and vivid depending on a person’s level of self-awareness during the lucid dream.”

Most people have experienced an episode of “going lucid” during a dream at least once or twice, without even consciously attempting to do so. Achieving a state of lucidity intentionally, however, can be difficult. But, it is possible, and very worth the effort.

What’s the benefit? Well, my best answer to that is that the benefits are infinite. It all depends on how you, personally, define benefit. If you’ve always wanted to fly, you can train your dream-self to fly around all night long (and keep in mind that dream world time feels much longer than waking world time). If you’re a pyromaniac, you can set fire to anything you want without any repercussions what-so-ever. Want to walk on water? Make it happen.

Lucidity is best achieved calmly and naturally, so truly, the easiest way to learn how to lucid dream is simply to think about it often. Desire it, and eventually, it will happen. I’ve had good luck with keeping a dream journal in the past, too, which can be very important. If you have a lucid dream and forget it upon wakening, what’s the point?

Here’s a link to a great podcast on lucid dreaming (click). I’ve listened through it myself, and I highly recommend it.

Enjoy the podcast (best listened to before bed) and happy dreaming.

Add comment September 17th, 2009