Experience Of Achieving Lucid Dreaming

Dreaming, the stories our brains tell while we are asleep- including images, clips, feelings, and memories from our waking life that occur during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep. We all dream or at least anybody who reaches REM sleep. We all may have the ability to dream, but not everyone has the ability to Lucid dream. Lucid dreaming is the experience of achieving conscious awareness of dreaming while asleep. This is basically the brain during REM sleep noticing that oneself is dreaming and he or she is able to alter the dream that he or she is in.

Lucid dreaming is not a new concept, but the research into it is relatively new. Lucid dreaming dates all the way back to the 8th century when Tibetan Buddhists were the first to have the ability to Lucid dream. According to the article “A History of Sleep” by Rebecca Turner, the term lucid dream was first coined in 1867 by Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denys in his book “Dreams and the Ways to Direct them: Practical Observations.

However, the most famous book about lucid dreaming was by a Dutch psychiatrist, Frederik Van Eeden in his book “A Study of Dreams.” Frederick Van Eeden wrote about all types of dreams but stressed the importance of the seventh dream which he called the lucid dream. The research and studies into lucid dreaming didn’t start until 1953 when REM sleep was discovered. Aserinsky and Kleitman in 1953 discovered REM sleep when they opened the first sleep research laboratory, where they discovered the correlation between the rapid eye movement of their patients and the remembering of their dreams.

Get quality help now

Bella Hamilton

Verified

Proficient in: Dream

5 (234)

“ Very organized ,I enjoyed and Loved every bit of our professional interaction ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

They discovered that 74.1% of their patients remembered their dreams in REM sleep and 17.4% of patients remembered their dreams in NREM sleep, which is Non REM sleep. There has been more research into this topic since Aserinsky and Kleitman made this observation in 1952 that proves their observation to be in line with other research into the topic.

More recently there have been studies into the connection between lucid dreaming and brain activity. A study in 2009 by Doctors Ursula Voss, Romain Holzmann, Inka Tuin, and J. Allan Hobson called “Lucid Dreaming: A State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking and Non-Lucid Dreaming” shows the connection between GAMMA rays and lucid dreaming. The experiment took place in a Neurological Laboratory in Frankfurt where six subjects were tested. Out of the six subjects, three of them were able to reach lucidity. They tested the subject’s brain activity by hooking the subject up to an EEG (electroencephalogram) which detects abnormalities in brain activities. They asked the patients to move their eyes in a certain pattern once they reach lucidity so the doctors know when to observe the EEG to identify any abnormal brain activity. The researchers saw brain activity in the 40Hz range which is much higher than the normal 4-7 Hz range most normal dreaming state. The researchers also observed increased activity to the frontal region of the brain. The frontal region is normally linked with self-awareness and also an altered state of consciousness, which proves that lucid dream does have effects on brain activity.

Another study in 2009 showed a correlation between lucid dreaming and mental health. An article called “DREAMING, LUCID DREAMING, AND PERSONALITY” by Evelyn Doll, Georg Gittler & Brigitte Holzinger examined the correlation between mental health and lucid dreaming. This article confirmed that there was indeed a correlation between subjects that lucid dream and the state of their mental health. Lucid dreaming impacted the subject’s mental health in a positive way because it the subjects showed signs of heightened mental capacity when dealing with conflict. Even though this study showed increased skills in dealing with conflicts it cannot be said with full confidence that this is the case in every subject for a couple reasons. First of all, it was just a small sample size so it’s not a good picture of the population as a whole. It would also be unethical to say that this is true because it’s important to note that “correlation is not causation.” However, it is still important to study because of the abundance of mental health issues in our world.

Research in Lucid dreaming is important, but so is the practice of lucid dreaming. There are many techniques that have been developed to lucid dreams throughout the many years. It is also important to study the possibility of lucid dreaming for any person. Lucid dreaming is something that anyone can do if they put much time and effort into learning the techniques of lucid dreaming. Some people may even be able to lucid dream already and just not know it yet. By definition, Lucid dreaming is the conscious awareness or state of wakefulness when one is asleep. So if one can differentiate their own dream from a waking state then you are lucid dreaming, even if you don’t try to alter the dream-like many good lucid dreamers can do. The goal of a lucid dreamer is to alter their dream in such a way that they are able to do things that a normal human can’t do in a normal waking state. For example, go to Mars or fly without any sort of plane or propulsion. These are two things that humans cannot do in the normal waking state, but lucid dreaming allows them to be able to do it.

There are four ways at which people learn to lucid dream. The first is called Wake-Induced Lucid Dream (WILD). This form of lucid dreaming stems from the Tibetan Buddhist techniques used for meditation. It focuses on the total relaxation of the body and mind. You must lay down in a corpse pose then while your eyes are closed you must observe your Hypnagogia, which is the flowing colors behind your closed eyelids. Stay calm focus on your breathing and not fall asleep. Then once you feel like you are in a totally relaxed state and almost feel as if you’re having an out-of-body experience you then must create a dream scene. The dream scene will be the place at which you choose to have your lucid dream. This is way easier said than done, that is why it is one of the less common practices of having a lucid dream.

Another way to lucid dream is to focus on your surroundings and become fully aware of where you are and what is around you during the day. You must do this because mental habits performed during the waking state can often follow over to the sleep state. If you do this and become fully aware of your consciousness and your surroundings then when it comes time of a dream one can notice something off or strange in the dream that isn’t supposed to be there, then one can notice that they’re in a dream. It takes more practice to actually be able to alter your dream once you are aware that you are dreaming but this is a good step towards being fully lucid.

Keeping a dream journal. Keeping a dream journal is another way in which people can practice becoming lucid. When you wake up from a dream you should write that dream down somewhere and keep it someplace safe. After a while of keeping track of your dreams, you can then go through your journal and find patterns in your dreams or reoccurring objects. Circle those things and take note of them because next time you dream and notice one of these things that has been reoccurring you can notice that you are in a dream and therefore be lucid. However, like the technique above this only helps with becoming lucid not with altering your dream.

The last technique for becoming lucid is Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreams (MILD). This is the practice that once a person has a dream they can try to remember that dream and visualize themselves back in the dream until they fall asleep. This is perhaps one of the toughest just because of the fact that it takes so much mental strength to only think about that one dream and to try to put oneself back into that dream. Lucid dreaming has many influences on the body and mind. During a lucid dream, the body is in REM sleep and during REM sleep the entire body is paralyzed, however, the mind is working actively.

The brain shows gamma rays which are at 40Hz during a lucid dream, but during pre-sleep, it is only seen to have alpha waves which are at roughly 8-10 Hz. So why is there so much increase in activity during a lucid dream? Not only are your brain waves abnormal, but so is the activity in the frontal area of your brain because there is a large increase in activity in that area during a lucid dream versus normal REM sleep. Some scientist believes a lucid state to be a mixture of a REM sleep state and a waking state, which seems very logical because the transition from non-lucid REM sleep to a lucid REM sleep has to be in the direction of a waking state because it is a mixture of the two. This is an interesting topic because lucidity wouldn’t be its own state of consciousness, but a combination of the two.