Can You Lucid Dream?

Imagine if we had power over our dreams. Most of us act and think automatically while we dream. Although the dream unfolds as if we were watching a movie, not every dream is the same. In contrast to viewing a movie, lucid dreaming is a different type of dreaming that is more like playing a video game.

Lucid dreaming is, by definition, the act of being aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming. The majority of people actually think of lucid dreaming more in terms of actually starting to influence what you're dreaming, gaining volitional control, and choosing what is going to happen within your dream. It may seem improbable and until recently we lacked the technology to prove if lucid dreaming was real or not, but a series of recent studies has shed light on the phenomenon. Scientists have designed experiments and they've been able to demonstrate objectively that when people say that they can control many parts of the dream, such as teleporting themselves to another location learning to improve real-life skills, or even eating fire.

Scientists first asked participants to clench their fists while they were awake, which lit up key areas of the brain on the fMRI scanner for the study, then participants were asked to dream lucidly for a period of time. This was one of the first experiments that objectively measured lucid dreams using fMRI scanners, which measure the rate of blood flow to different areas of the brain. However, that doesn't mean it's impossible. How can we actually become more capable of loose dreaming? It's a little tricky, but you can certainly try to tell yourself that you will remember that you're dreaming while you're dreaming before you actually fall asleep. Try to go through a mantra chant as it were. Some people actually try to do deliberate things.

In both cases, lucid dreaming comes naturally to some, but many of us have never experienced the sensation. However, lucid dreamers have also reported terrifying accounts where they have difficulty telling reality from the dream; in some cases, this can be a sign of mental illness and should be taken seriously.

But why do some people have the ability to loose a dream but not others, and what is happening in our brains that allows us to control our dreams so easily? We still have a lot to learn about the causes and effects of lucid dreaming because only twenty to thirty percent of people are naturally lucid dreamers. If lucid dreaming were so beneficial, mother nature would have made us all capable of it, so perhaps the fact that we aren't means that it's not necessarily beneficial. However, we don't know whether those twenty to thirty percent of people who do lucid dream are at risk for anything in particular.

With today's considerably more sophisticated equipment, we can investigate the lucid dream state and contrast it with the waking and REM sleep states. In light of this, researchers are now debating whether REM sleep could facilitate reflective awareness or whether lucid dreams represent a hybrid state of consciousness in which one portion of the brain is awake and the other is dreaming. To transform these speculations into truths, a ton more research will be required in the future. However, thanks to all of this study, we now have a much better understanding of how to teach individuals to regularly have lucid dreams and how to put them in a variety of fun lucid dream studies where they could perform a variety of tasks in their dreams. Scientists might then investigate how such lucid dreams affected their performance in the waking world.