dumb question mabey… mabey should just be a plot of a star trek episode…
but lucid dreaming, how do you know it exists? couldn’t you be dreaming that your controling your dreams?
it seems to me that when people talk about controling their dreams they tend to do sort of abstract stuff.
like flying, yeah, it would be fun to fly, but given the power to realisticly do anything you want, the best you can come up with is flying!?
so yeah, is there any reason to belive that lucid dreaming is anything more than dreaming that your lucid dreaming? is “I can control my dreams” more reasonable than “I had a dream I could control my dreams”
is there any way to prove, even to yourself, which you are doing?
Lucid dreaming is not controlling your dreams. Lucid dreaming is simply being aware that you are dreaming.
Once you are sufficiently aware that you are dreaming you get a kind of rush/kick/increase in awareness. Controlling your dream is only a perk of lucid dreaming.
I have had a few lucid dreams myself. And, oh boy, they’re real!
It is possible to have a dream where you think you are lucid dreaming, but where the awareness is not enough to make it a full-blown lucid dream.
“Lucid dreaming” means that you are aware that “it just a dream” as you are dreaming it (unbroken reflective consciousness). That’s it, it isn’t that exciting.
There have been well-documented and reputed studies of lucid dreaming in the context of psychology and psychophysiology. Unfortunately, if you do a Google serach you’re also going to find a lot of odd, new age type stuff as well that sems to like to encorporate the idea of lucid dreaming with astral projection. So if you want to read up on it, read carefully cause there’s a lot of realted quackery.
I think there is “proof” of lucid dreaming in the form of monitoring brain wave activity. But I don’t know enough about the subject to vouch for its veracity.
The quality of the “lucidity” might vary from “oh, that’s not possible, so this must be a dream” to actively being able to modify and “control” the dream.
Some lucid dreams are often caused by quickly returning going back into REM from a brief awakening. Other times the awareness can be triggered by a reaction to implausible events in a dream. (Some psychology experiments were done with children who have chronic nightmares and post-hypnotic suggestion to trigger lucid dreaming.)
I am a lucid dreamer though I usually only become lucid during nightmares when the dream becomes so illogical that I realize it can’t be happening in real life.
I rarely think to “take control.” The dream usually continues with me a being a little less frightened because I have the knowledge that I’m really safe, at home in bed. So I can enjoy the trill of a nightmare as if I’m watching a movie. I am fully aware that it is not real. I have exceptionally good recall of dreams as well (yes, I dream in colour).
In regular dreaming, I wouldn’t know where it was going, or what was going to happen. The one time I’ve ever had a lucid dream, I could control everything, which included the reactions of other people. In the lucid dream, the only things that could happen were things that I could consciously imagine – it was no different than daydreaming. In real dreams, I can’t control what happens, and the dreams can be beyond the scope of my regular imagination. I don’t know I’m dreaming in a normal dream, but I did in the lucid one, as the definition requires.
I guess I just consider it a case of the willful suspension of disbelief. The lucid dream was like a science fiction movie with bad science; I couldn’t get past the point that it was fake, so there was no joy in it. My dreams are more interesting when I’m not making them up, but I wish I had Eats_Crayons’ ability to break out of a nightmare.
Wow, it’s hard to talk about this sort of thing without sounding like a nut.
I have never had what I would think of as a lucid dream but I am generally aware that a nightmare isn’t real and can enjoy it in a watching-TV way.
On occassion though, I have a dream which is not horrific or nightmarish but absolutely terrifies me.
One I had, I’m walking along the footpath when this white station-wagon drives past. Looking into the car I can see that an alsation dog is driving. Normally this would qualify as mildly amusing in my dreams but in this one the dog turns as he drives past and looks at me… right into my eyes… into what I can only describe as my soul. Then I struggled to wake feeling mildly scared and suffered a semi sleep paralisis episode. I knew where I was in real life, could sense my position in bed, but I couldn’t move or open my eyes or even breath. At this point I heard a noise which scared the living shit out of me. I was pretty sure at this stage that I was awake as far as hearing/seeing and general awareness goes but I heard a noise like the sound of that cartoon dog (Hush Puppy? Precious?) laughing, hoarse laughing like hhh hhh hhh or something. That’s when I broke out of the sleep paralisis and curled up into the fetal position. Sends shivers through my body just thinking about it.
You need to get more creative with it my friend. I lucid dream all the time and bored is the last thing that comes to mind. Try flying, it’s alot of fun.
Everyone else:
You can train yourself to lucid dream relatively easily. Check out “Lucid Dreaming” by Stephen LeBarge. There are also these lucid dreaming goggles that detect when your entering REM sleep and flash a red light in your eyes as a cue that your dreaming. On the whole unnecessary though.
I recall reading about this method many years ago fro training yourself for lucid dreaming.
While awake make it a point to consciously ask yourself, “Am I dreaming?” Simple enough but the you must prove it to yourself. To prove you aren’t dreaming find something to read. Anything will do and it need not be long (say one paragraph in a book). Read your selection, look away for a few moments then look back and read it again. If the text is the same you are awake…if it has changed you are dreaming. If you get in the habit of doing this while awake sooner or later it should occur to you while you’re dreaming. When whatever you read changes on the second reading you know you are dreaming. Once you’ve become aware you’re dreaming you have taken the first step to lucid dreaming.
The article also suggested a method for staying in a dream if you sense you are waking. The method is called ‘Dream Spinning’. In your dream, close your eyes and extend your arms out to your sides then make yourself spin like a top. How fast I have no idea and why this should work I have no idea either so take it FWIW.
Once you are aware you’re dreaming you can start manipulating your dream. I have no idea how far an experienced lucid dreamer can go with this. Can they create any world they like and do anything they wish? I have no idea. In my lucid dreaming experiences I find some limitations to what I can do (or more appropriately I may be ‘aware’ I’m dreaming but I don’t have full cognitive capacity to logically thinkout the world I want to create…mostly just go with what’s already there and modify it to some extent).
Flying is one of the easiest things you can do and a blast. The article gave flying lessons for a lucid dream. First practice levitating off of the ground and concentrate on controlling your height. After that attempt moon-jumps (i.e. running and jumping a hundred feet at a time). After that practice flying around properly…go slowly at first.
The best lucid dream I ever had however was drug induced. I accidentally took some codeine (I thought I was taking regular Tylenol). I realized my mistake fairly quickly and fortunately was at home so I just crawled into bed. I got into a steady half-sleep where I was able to dream but was still awake enough to pay attention to what was going on. Never had occasion to get there again though which is probably just as well.
[sub]Humorous Side Note: I told my girlfriend at the time I read the article about lucid dreaming how to do the reading trick. She then attempted the experiment on her own and one night she was dreaming she ‘asked’ herself the question and procedded around her house to find something to read. However, she could not find a single thing in her house (while in her dream) to read. Not a box of cereal, bottle f cleaner, book, nothing. She said she spent the entire night (or dream rather) looking for something to read and got really frustrated. She took that frustration out on me the following day ;-). [/sub]
Nice to see so many Dopers familiar with LDs. They are definitely “real” in many ways.
For strictly scientific verification LaBerge and others have had lab studies where subjects who were confirmed asleep(according to brain wave monitoring) but were able to give eye-signals to report their dream status.
Personally I’ve been able to remember to conduct “dream experiments”(eg hand through mirror, levitate down stairs,etc) and to remember waking world facts (eg when/where I went to bed,which day/month it is). Also many times I’ve woken with continuity of conciousness so dream memory was quite clear.
Consider: If you only dreamt that you were aware of being in a dream, also dreaming that you could control the dream and further dreaming that you had knowledge of your waking life(which you confirm as accurate on waking) – how would you differentiate that from actually being aware you are dreaming, may control it and remember details from waking life?
Couldn’t be more right about the need to actually prove it. When I first started using this method I asked myself every half hour if I was dreaming but was relatively uncritical of whether I was really dreaming or not. When your awake it’s easy to say your not dreaming but it’s not easy to tell your not awake when your dreaming. So I would actually ask myself in my dreams, “Am I dreaming” but just blow it off like I did when I was awake and not go lucid. I would remember doing this after I woke up but didn’t go lucid consistently until I started really being critical.
I fly in my regular dreams, and it is fun, except the odd nightmares like Skogcat’s.
I fly almost every night, on my way home from work. It’s undoubtedly dangerous to myself, but there’s absolutely no traffic and I can just drift off into my thoughts or daydreams of just pulling back on the steering wheel and making the drive home more interesting. I’m not asleep, I’m just not all there. Many nights I can’t remember most of the trip home because I’ve been elsewhere most of the trip. Some jobs at work I could do the same thing.
Anyway, back to ‘real’ dreams, what I said is true for me. The only difference between daydreaming or lucid dreaming versus real dreaming is the amount of control I have over it, and less is better.
I was a teenage boy at the time, what do you think I was doing? The real dreams were still better. I had one so… interesting… that I could barely look at the person for weeks.
To bring it all the way around back to the topic, I had the lucid dream after I’d researched the concept and attempted to do it. Like I said, it was boring, so I never bothered to try it again. Maybe I will.
My own personal (perhaps slightly less) humorous side note: I had read about lucid dreaming and maintained a great interest for some time (Highly recommend Lebarge. He is, or at least was a few years ago, the leading authority on the subject). So I had a few friends who I would always talk with about it. On the night following my very first really lucid dream, in my dream I mentioned to one of my friends, “Hey man, last night I had the most awesome lucid dream” and I then proceeded to tell him about it in detail. The punchline: I did not become lucid.
