Lucid dreaming: Controlling the stories of sleep
08 October, 2018
Have you ever started dreaming and suddenly realized that you were in a dream? Have you ever managed to gain control over your dream narrative? If your answer to these is "yes," you've experienced what is called lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreaming has recently been popularized by movies such as Inception.
The movie features impressive dream artisans who are able not just to control the shape and content of their own dreams, but also those of others.
Such feats of dream manipulation may not seem possible to the same extent in our real lives, but they are not altogether absent.
In fact, certain people are able to experience something referred to as lucid dreaming, and some of them are able to control some of the elements of their nightly dreams.
In his much-cited poem, Edgar Allan Poe once wrote, "All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream."
Whether or not he is right is a matter for philosophers to debate, but the boundary between dream and reality is something that lucid dreaming seems to explore.
In this Spotlight, we look at what qualifies as lucid dreaming, whether these experiences can have any practical applications, and how one might be able to become a lucid dreamer.
What is lucid dreaming?
Typically, when we dream, we are not conscious that the dream is not real. As a character from the movie Inception quite aptly puts it, "Well, dreams, they feel real while we're in them right? It's only when we wake up then we realize that something was actually strange."
However, some of us are able to enter a dream and be fully aware of the fact that we are actually dreaming.
"A lucid dream is defined as a dream during which dreamers, while dreaming, are aware they are dreaming," specialists explain.
The very first record of lucid dreaming appears to feature in the treatise On Dreams by the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. In it, he describes an instance of self-awareness during a dream state.
"[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,'" he wrote.
It is unclear how many people actually experience lucid dreaming, though certain studies have tried to gather information regarding its prevalence; and it seems that this phenomenon may be quite common.
For instance, a study conducted in Brazil surveyed 3,427 participants with the median age of 25. The results of the survey indicated that 77 percent of the respondents had experienced lucid dreaming at least once.
When does it happen, and what is it like?
Like most dreams, lucid dreaming will typically occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. For some people, it occurs spontaneously. However, others train themselves to start dreaming lucidly, or to become better at it.
As one experienced lucid dreamer told Medical News Today:
"[M]y lucid dreaming [...] occurs when I'm waking up, or sometimes if I've woken up briefly and I'm going back to sleep. Nowadays I can pretty much do it on a whim, as long as I'm in that half-asleep half-awake process."
The degree to which a person can influence their dream if they are lucid while dreaming also varies to a great extent. Some people may simply wake up immediately upon realizing that they had been dreaming.
Other people may be able to influence their own actions within the dream, or parts of the dream itself. The lucid dreamer who spoke to MNT told us that she was able to manipulate the dream narrative in order to create a pleasant experience for herself.
"Usually I can control the narrative in the dream, so for example if I'm unhappy with the way things are going in the dream, I can change it," she explained.