Lucid Dreaming: Fact or Fiction?

What are lucid dreams and do we have them?

In recent years, more and more peo­ple have begun to talk about lucid dreams. This is the state of a per­son in a dream, when he real­izes that he is sleep­ing. Sure­ly each of you have had such cas­es: you some­where run, the streets are chang­ing fast, the road is leav­ing from under legs, with some­one talk­ing or try­ing to pre­vent a ter­ri­ble sit­u­a­tion.

Sud­den­ly, at the most tense moment, you begin to real­ize that you are sleep­ing. Your con­scious­ness is at this moment between sleep and real­i­ty. You are sleep­ing, but you know about it! Wak­ing up, remem­ber every­thing that hap­pened to you, and you begin to remem­ber, scroll through the details in your head.

How to get into those dreams where you feel everything

The French, Ital­ians, British, Danes — sci­en­tists from many coun­tries are try­ing to study lucid dreams and learn how to use this phe­nom­e­non for med­ical pur­pos­es. So far, all attempts to pen­e­trate dreams remain unsuc­cess­ful. Amer­i­can psy­chophys­i­ol­o­gist Stephen LaBerge knows how to achieve con­trol over dreams:

• train the abil­i­ty to feel when you fall asleep;
• per­form spe­cial exer­cis­es for self-aware­ness in a dream;
• use psy­choac­tive sub­stances;
• read books about dreams before going to bed.

Can you really control your sleep?

“How can you under­stand that you are sleep­ing?” — you ask and you will be very sur­prised when you find out how many peo­ple actu­al­ly con­trolled their dreams at least once in their lives. A soci­o­log­i­cal sur­vey con­duct­ed in Ger­many showed the fol­low­ing results:

• 77% of respon­dents were in a state when they under­stood that they were in a dream;
• 31% of the respon­dents, hav­ing wok­en up, fell asleep again and con­tin­ued to dream from the inter­rupt­ed place;
• 14% of men and women, real­iz­ing that they are in a dream, learned about very impor­tant events from their lives.

Try and you, falling asleep, fix the state between real­i­ty and sleep longer. It’s best if you over­pow­er sleep. Then insom­nia will tor­ment you for a while. But when you final­ly man­age to fall asleep, you will under­stand that a dream is just a fairy tale that you are watch­ing.

How to understand: you are sleeping or are awake

Some­times dreams are so real that you start to doubt whether you are real­ly dream­ing. There are five easy ways to fig­ure out where you are.

Method one. Keep track of time

Look sev­er­al times with­in a minute at the clock. If you see dif­fer­ent times all the time, you are in a dream. For exam­ple, 21.00, 16.25, 03.10.

Method two. Try not to breathe

Pinch your nos­trils with two fin­gers, close your mouth. If you are not sleep­ing, after a few sec­onds you will have an irre­sistible desire to inhale.

Method three. Watch the situation

In a dream, every­thing around is con­stant­ly chang­ing. There is no such thing as peo­ple sit­ting in the same room for a long time and talk­ing.

Method four. Something read

If you sleep, not a sin­gle inscrip­tion and infor­ma­tion is saved in its orig­i­nal form. Let’s say there’s a Per­fume sign on a store. When you look at the sign a few moments lat­er, it might say “Glavry­ba”.

Method five. Examine your hands

Look at your hands for a few min­utes. After a cou­ple of sec­onds, they will begin to blur, take on a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent shape, then com­plete­ly dis­ap­pear.

Why are lucid dreams dangerous?

Even refer­ring with ease and some humor to dreams in which you under­stand every­thing, one can­not help but think about their impact on the psy­che and life in gen­er­al. Such dreams can be so dan­ger­ous that you can go crazy if you play them.

What are the dan­gers of a lucid dream?

• a feel­ing of false awak­en­ing, when you think that you are awake, but in fact you are still sleep­ing;
• an attempt to hide in the world of dreams, which can lead to a con­stant desire to be in an unre­al world;
• mis­un­der­stand­ing of the real world, dis­tor­tion of facts, unwill­ing­ness to take seri­ous­ly every­thing that hap­pens in real­i­ty;
• a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the incom­pre­hen­si­ble, mys­ti­cal, which fright­ens and makes you start tak­ing psy­chotrop­ic sub­stances or con­tact a psy­chi­a­trist.

There is noth­ing wrong with hav­ing lucid dreams some­times. The most impor­tant thing is that you don’t need to try to arti­fi­cial­ly pen­e­trate the secret of dreams and try to com­pre­hend what nature itself has pro­tect­ed you from.