designed, written & curated by Savannah Lee Fortune
Lucid dreaming is a state of sleep with aspects of waking up and dreaming combined. In lucid dreams you can break all boundaries of the real world. With the ability to control everything around you the possibilities are endless.
What is Lucid Dreaming?
AN UNEXPLAINABLE PHENOMENA Lucid dreaming is when someone in a dream state comes to the realization that they’re dreaming and uses this consciousness to control the dream. The dreamer can influence the dream’s setting, characters or narrative. In order to Lucid dream a lot must happen inside your whole body. Lucid dreaming can only occur during REM sleep, the 5th stage of sleep when your limbs are paralyzed. You are not “awake”, you’re still sound asleep. Part of your brain (the pre-frontal cortex) gets reactivated, allowing you to experience the dream state consciously. Once you become aware that you’re dreaming you gain access to the best virtual reality simulator in existence: the human mind. The dream world can serve as a training ground for psycho-spiritual growth and a space for internal exploration. What stuns most first time lucid dreamers is how real the dreams feel. Lucid dreams look, feel, smell and even taste as real as waking life but it is merely a projection of the mind. Lucid dreams are so powerfully vivid that they’re often mistaken for out-of-body experiences, sometimes called astral
projection. This is because in a lucid dream you can walk around a projection of yourself and even have a conversation with “yourself”. Although it’s widely debated by lucid dream practitioners, there is no scientific evidence that this is true.
As Told By Lucid Dreamers
The Casual Lucid Dreamer / Casey Fortune Q: When was the first time you had a lucid dream? A: I used to have a recurring dream of myself running on top of Ayers Rock, in the Austrailian outback. I had the dream so often that I was eventually able to recognize that I was dreaming while I was in the middle of the dream. I was 8 years old. I didn’t feel like I had a level of control over the content of my dreams until much later, around age 19 or 20. I have never had the experience I have heard some describe of having complete mastery over a dream. Q: How did you practice lucid dreaming? A: From the process of beginning a dream journal and documenting common motifs and themes in my dreams, to actually being able to recognize when I was dreaming reliably and exert control over the dream environment was probably a year and a half period. My initial goal was just to get to a point where I could change my dreams reliably and consistently. By keeping a log of themes, colors, events, that would happen in my dreams I began to be able to recognize when things looked familiar enough and at that point I could begin to manipulate the narrative of the dream. I aimed for this out of pure curiosity driven by some experiences in my youth with recurring dreams.
Q: What does lucid dreaming mean to you? A: Of course lucid dreaming is known for being fun but it also has helped me sleep better at night. I had a problem for a while with recurring realistic nightmares that would keep me from sleeping for days at a time. Being able to recognize those dreams and change them eventually helped me achieve a more restful sleep. Being able to realize you are dreaming severely decreases instances of your regular dreams turning into nightmares because you can typically wake yourself up. Q: Do you still lucid dream? A: On occasion. It takes a lot of practice to be able to have consistent lucid dreams but I will still fall into one every so often.
The Professional Lucid Dreamer / Rebecca Turner Q: When was the first time you had a lucid dream? A: I discovered lucid dreaming in a magazine article when I was 14 years old. I couldn’t quite believe it was actually possible to become conscious inside the dream world. Like anyone with a pulse, I was very excited by the idea and had to try it for myself. Q: How did you practice lucid dreaming? A: I practiced a number of basic techniques including self hypnosis, reality checks and keeping a dream journal. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was persistent. I focused on remembering my dreams nightly and developing rich waking fantasies of how my lucid dream world would be.
Within a few weeks, I had my first spontaneous lucid dream. Experts call this a Dream Induced Lucid Dream (DILD) which simply means that it started like any normal dream, and the sudden realization that I was dreaming made me become lucid. Q: What does lucid dreaming mean to you? A: To have dual awareness; to acknowledge the existence of two separate planes of conscious existence (the waking world and the dream world). I’m not talking about anything paranormal or mystical - but the simple truth that every night, we can shift our perception inwards and experience an entirely different world. A world within. To experience that to the fullest means making the effort to become lucid (consciously aware). Q: Do you still lucid dream? A: When I’m determined, I have lucid dreams every night. It’s thrilling when you have the ability to tap into lucidity so often - but it’s not realistic for most people to maintain this consistency. Lucid dreaming every night usually takes a lot of waking focus and pre-programming of your dreams. Sometimes, for those who are fluent in the language of lucidity, this is as easy as thinking “oh I’ll lucid dream about this tonight!” Other times, and for just about all beginners, it will require more preparation - such as 30 minutes of deep meditation and numerous reality checks throughout the day.
The History of Lucid Dreams
A PRACTICE OLDER THAN WRITTEN LANGUAGE Lucid dreaming is a dissociated state with aspects of waking up and dreaming combined. To put it plainly, someone in a dream state comes to the realization that they are dreaming and sometimes can use this consciousness to control the dream. The dreamer can influence the dream’s setting, characters or narrative. Although the scientific community did not recognize lucid dreaming until 1978 it has been around and has been written about for centuries. The term “lucid dreaming” was coined by Dutch writer and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in his 1913 article A Study of Dreams. Eeden was the first to name the phenomenon but lucid dreaming was first noted in the Hindu oral traditions called The Upanishads. The Upanishads date back to 1000 BCE. They explain how to direct one’s consciousness within a vision state. Since Indian tradition spread to Tibet in the early centuries, the practice of lucid dreaming has been a part of meditation there for over 12,000 years. It’s greatly debated whether or not lucid dreaming had a key role in the creation of some religions like
Islam and Buddhism. This is because they were created after a revelation that came to someone in a dream that required spiritual initiation. Lucid dreaming was also popular in Ancient Greece among philosophers. Although in his early years Aristotle believed in Plato’s idea of the separation between body and soul, he later changed to more non-dualistic views. He believed the soul was that which animated the body. This is not far off from how we see the relationship between body and mind today. Aristotle was the first writer to systematically attempt to study dreams. He wrote three treatises about sleep and waking life. They’re called De Somno et Vigilia; De Insomnis; and De Divinatione Per Somnum (On Sleep and Dreams, On Sleeping and Waking & On Divination Through Sleep). In 350 BC Aristotle wrote On Dreams, which is often quoted by practitioners of lucid dreaming and sleep researchers.
On Dreams By Aristotle Translated by J. I. Beare
PART 3 By night i.e. in sleep owing to the inaction of the particular senses, and their powerlessness to realize themselves, which arises from the reflux of the hot from the exterior parts to the interior, they i.e. the above ‘movements’ are borne in to the head quarters of sense-perception, and there display themselves as the disturbance (of waking life) subsides. For when the person was actually perceiving, his controlling and judging sensory faculty did not call it Koriskos, but, prompted by this [impression], called the genuine person yonder Koriskos. Accordingly, this sensory impulse, which, when actually perceiving, it [the controlling faculty] describes (unless completely inhibited by the blood), it now [in dreams] when quasi-perceiving, receives from the movements persisting in the sense-organs, and mistakes it-an impulse that is merely like the true [objective] impression-for the true impression itself, while the effect of sleep is so great that it causes this mistake to pass unnoticed. Accordingly, just as if a finger be inserted beneath the eyeball without being observed, one object will not only present two visual images, but will create an opinion of its being two objects; while if it [the finger] be observed, the presentation will be the same, but the same opinion will not be formed of it; exactly so it is in states of sleep: if the sleeper perceives that he is asleep, and is conscious of the sleeping state during
which the perception comes before his mind, it presents itself still, but something within him speaks to this effect: ‘the image of Koriskos presents itself, but the real Koriskos is not present’; for often, when one is asleep, there
is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream. If, however,
he is not aware of being asleep, there is nothing which will contradict the testimony of the bare presentation. From all this, then, the conclusion to be drawn is, that the dream is a sort of presentation, and, more particularly, one which occurs in sleep; since the phantoms just mentioned are not dreams, nor is any other a dream which presents itself when the sense-perceptions are in a state of freedom. Nor is every presentation which occurs in sleep necessarily a dream. For in the first place, some persons [when asleep] actually, in a certain way, perceive sounds, light, savour, and contact; feebly, however, and, as it were, remotely. For there have been cases in which persons while asleep, but with the eyes partly open, saw faintly in their sleep (as they supposed) the light of a lamp, and afterwards, on being awakened, straightway recognized it as the actual light of a real lamp; while, in other cases, persons who faintly heard the crowing of cocks or the barking of dogs identified these clearly with the real sounds as soon as they awoke. Some persons, too, return answers to questions put to them in sleep. For it is quite possible that, of waking or sleeping, while the one is present
in the ordinary sense, the other also should be present in a certain way. But none of these occurrences should be called a dream. Nor should the true thoughts, as distinct from the mere presentations, which occur in sleep [be called dreams]. The dream proper is a presentation based on the movement of sense impressions, when such presentation occurs during sleep, taking sleep in the strict sense of the term. There are cases of persons who in their whole lives have never had a dream, while others dream when considerably advanced in years, having never dreamed before. The cause of their not having dreams appears somewhat like that which operates in the case of infants, and that which operates immediately after meals. It is intelligible enough that no dream-presentation should occur to persons whose natural constitution is such that in them copious evaporation is borne upwards, which, when borne back downwards, causes a large quantity of motion. But it is not surprising that, as age advances, a dream should at length appear to them. Indeed, it is inevitable that, as a change is wrought in them in proportion to age or emotional experience, this reversal [from non-dreaming to dreaming] should occur also.
THE END
With the rise of the Judea-Christian culture came suspicion of dreams. Lucid dreaming became stifled by the religious atmosphere of Imperial Rome. Thomas Aquinas (St. Thomas) enforced this opinion when he suggested that some dreams hold truth but many come from demons. Lucid dreams became associated with things like witchcraft and Satanism. Because of the fear this induced, lucid dreaming became much less prominent culturally. It wasn’t until The Enlightenment of the west that lucid dreams came back into the spotlight. The European culture of reason looked past the stigma and superstitions about the practice and used lucid dreaming to observe their own emotions. In other cultures around the world, old and new, dreams are considered paths to Truth. They are so embedded into these cultures that the term “lucid”, it is merely a more engaging type of dream than the regular more passive kind.
Why Lucid Dream?
A WINDOW TO THE SUBCONSCIOUS To this day no one knows why we dream at all. Scientists theorize it is either for psychological or physiological reasons. It is thought to be “threat stimulation” as a way for us to prepare ourselves for stressful situations. This is similar to how we are using virtual reality today. Virtual reality therapy involves using virtual reality therapy as a form of exposure therapy. Lucid dreaming has been used as a means of therapy since the Roman Empire. Today it’s used to treat a wide range of mental issues. Issues as small as working out relationship woes to combating post-traumatic stress disorder. There is also anecdotal evidence of people ridding themselves of anxiety through lucid dream therapy. Researchers argue that it could be used to help understand consciousness and its disturbances. It also is a good therapy for people who are unable to sleep due to constant reoccurring nightmares. Once you learn how to lucid dream it is a completely cost-free form of therapy that is accessible by people of all classes and social statuses. 1. It creates freedom and escapism
9 Reasons Why Everyone Should Lucid Dream By Rebecca Turner
1. It creates freedom and escapism
We must, in the next place, investigate the subject of the dream, and first inquire to which of the faculties of the soul it presents itself, i.e. whether the affection is one which pertains to the faculty of intelligence or to that of sense-perception; for these are the only faculties within us by which we acquire knowledge.
2. It reveals the power of your brain
When you become conscious in the dream state, you have an astonishing opportunity to experience a vivid and tangible dreamworld that is not actually real. Probably the most shocking example of this is a false awakening, where the dreamer becomes convinced they are awake — so vivid is the detail of the dream. Think about that: in a sleep state, where your body is processing only the tiniest amounts of external stimulus, your internal world is as rich as it ever was. Your brain realistically reproduces a world with tables, buildings, gravity, air, emotions, atoms (in fact anything you can conceive of) and it’s very lifelike. While limited to the scope of your subconscious imagination, the lucid dream world is still a shocking place which truly has the capacity to mimic reality.
3. It prompts us to question the nature of reality
In questioning the nature of our perception, it naturally leads us to question the nature of reality — that is, the world as it
exists around us. Some New Age philosophies suggest that consciousness creates reality, but I tend to believe it is the other way around. The universe was born first and did rather well for 12 billion years before the little critters on planet Earth developed consciousness. But why did it all happen? Does our very existence spring from another universe? Are we a hypothetical outcome — Schrodinger’s living cat? Or is ours the only universe, the only reality, in existence? These are important theoretical questions but ones which can only really be pondered by stepping outside the box of everyday thinking. And lucid dreaming provides a useful platform. For instance, we can ask: where do our dreams take place? Why, when dreams are solely based on our conscious experiences, do we let them disobey the fundamental laws of cause and effect? What can dreams teach us about the nature of reality? And how can we use lucid dreaming as a lens on our conscious experience? Of course we can have no definitive answers, all we can do is theorize. But I think it is very exciting to use lucid dreaming as a tool to do so.
4. It is a direct line to the subconscious mind
Eat your heart out Sigmund Freud. Lucid dreamers can literally talk to their own subconscious mind in the dreamscape. I once had a nightmare, in which I was being flung by a dark pointy figure up and down a narrow hallway. I wasn’t lucid at first, although I was conscious enough to feel
pain and each smack really hurt. After two or three smashes I had the conscious insight to ask whether I was dreaming. Of course I was. I didn’t waste any time; I marched up to the silhouette man and grab him by the shoulders. “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME!” I shouted. His aggression immediately turned to sadness and childish frustration. “I can’t reconcile this,” he said, and shoved a notepad in my hands. He has scrawled the words “be loved, love yourself”, referring to a philosophical debate I had been having earlier that day: Is it more important to love yourself, or love someone else? Clearly, my conclusion was at odds with my subconscious. There was absolutely no symbolism required. My inner child was acting out with a massive tantrum — and demanded my attention. Yet it is only when lucid that I have the opportunity to resolve such issues face-to-face. Instead of fearing the pointy figure or wanting to banish him, I now felt empathy for him. He hadn’t understood. So I explained my reasons as if he were a child. Draining away both physically and emotionally, the creature left and I woke up in awe of the childish element that arose from my subconscious self.
5. It is a training ground for real life
Being a virtual reality simulation, the lucid dream world is an ideal place to practice real life skills – from the perfect flying kick to playing classical piano. Research has revealed that we can increase our procedural memory for
fine muscle movements inside a lucid dream. So, after practicing flying kicks for half an hour in a lucid dream, your kicks would literally be better upon waking. Likewise, in the book Exploring The World of Lucid Dreaming by Dr Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold, a surgeon explains how, before going to sleep at night, he would review his surgical cases for the next day. Then he would become lucid in his dreams and practice them in precise detail. As a result, he was able to refine and polish his techniques and perform procedures much faster than the average surgeon. He credited his edge to lucid dreaming.
6. It creates a natural high
The moment when you recognize that you’re dreaming, it creates a rush of excitement. It’s when you realize that you are back in lucid land, where anything and everything is possible. This natural high stays with you throughout the dream and on waking. A deliciously memorable lucid dream has colored many of my waking days. Whether you are a complete beginner or an expert oneironaut, we all relish the state of conscious dreaming and take away blissful new experiences almost every time it happens. Such dreams can be euphoric in nature and create memories and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life. It’s probably one of the best natural highs we are capable of creating, in the same class as jumping out of a plane or falling in love.
7. It helps you to grieve
Often when we lose loved ones, we have the sense that there is some unfinished business. Whether the death comes suddenly without warning, or slowly and predictably, we would all take that opportunity to have another hour with the deceased. Depending on your beliefs, you may feel the deceased has messages for you (reflections after life is over) and you, too, may have messages for them (unresolved feelings of guilt or anger or simply how much you miss them). So, how do you resolve your unfinished business? I don’t believe that spirits contact us from the afterlife, and the idea of contacting lost loved ones via psychic mediums is a sad state. (I used to believe; how painfully funny it is to look back at the messages I used to “make fit” with my reality. But no, after much experience and critical thinking, I strongly believe mediums are tricking their customers or tricking themselves – or both.) The idea of spirits appearing in our dreams is equally unsatisfying for me. However, dreams of the dead do have a capacity for grief and healing. You just have to accept that the deceased are not actually visiting you — and that it’s just a part of your own subconscious mind playing a role. These dreams tend to occur naturally when you are grieving the loss of someone close to you; thoughts of them during the day will filter into your dreams. But if your loved one doesn’t appear to you at night, or you just miss them and want to give them a hug, then dreaming lucidly about them is a wonderful proposition.Lucid dreams offer us the
closure we need to overcome our grief and move on with our lives. That’s not to say we want to forget. A lucid experience can enable us to consciously visit any period in our past and re-live those memories; playtime with a childhood pet, conversations with a late parent, and intimacy with a lost partner are all ways to grieve and remember loved ones.
8. It is like taking a creativity pill
We all know that regular dreams can be a bizarre place of inspiration… and when conscious dreaming, we can actively seek out creative ideas and bring them back to the waking world. Famous painters like Salvador Dali, William Blake and Paul Klee all created artwork inspired by their dreams. If you’re seeking artistic inspiration while lucid, head into a gallery and study the images you find there. They may arise from your memory, subconscious creativity, or a combination of both. But best of all, they will contain elements of your conceptual understanding of the world, which can make for beautiful and baffling interpretations. Equally, lucid dreams can give way to amazing musical inspiration. Composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner all pointed to dreams as the source of their creativity. Dreams reveal our most creative side because of the free-flow of ideas arising from the subconscious mind, unhindered by the rational conscious.
9. It can advance the human race
I believe that if every human being became a frequent lucid dreamer starting tonight, our culture, art, technology, medicine, science and even religion would quickly develop in a whole new direction. Imagine if every inventor suddenly had a breakthrough lucid dream about a new invention? If every artist suddenly began producing subconsciouslyinspired artwork? If every scientist could suddenly solve advanced problems that had previously left them stumped? In short, if we all had access to lucid dreams and used them in a productive capacity, we would tap into greater power within. The entire human race would be enriched as a result, individually‌ and universally.