Given the wealth of opportunities available to us in daily life, we possess the potential to do lots of stuff, but not everything. Now, what if I told you that if you wanted it, you really could have it all? Accessible to everyone, lucid dreaming holds the key to a world where anything is possible. We’ve seen lucid dreaming creatively explored in the hits Inception and Waking Life. What is it exactly and how can the average person learn this skill?
Dr. Dax Urbszat, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, is familiar with research on lucid dreaming and is also a longtime practitioner himself. He describes lucid dreaming as “the act of being conscious — or what others would call ‘awake’ — while dreaming.” When asked what the average person could do to increase the likelihood of experiencing a lucid dream, Dr. Urbszat pointed to the cultivation of an open attitude: “We have relegated dreams in Western culture to non-importance, but because lucid dreaming has been tied to past life regression, out of body experiences, and astral projection, which aren’t scientifically based, it’s dismissed and put in the realm of pseudoscience.” Urbszat also suggests keeping a dream journal. Dream recall is also far greater when you wake up naturally rather than rising abruptly to the sound of an alarm clock. “What’s important is the act of trying to remember, which builds the skill of lucid dreaming. In the morning when you wake up, try to remember first thing what dreams you had. Don’t even open your eyes or move; just think, ‘What was I dreaming about?’”
Another tip to increase the chance of lucid dreaming is to perform regular “reality checks” while awake. Because dreams are extremely fluid, their content is constantly being altered. For example, text in a dream may disappear or change rapidly into symbols or new text, making it difficult to decipher. Reality checks help trigger the realization that you are dreaming. Common reality checks include reading text, pinching yourself, or flipping on a light switch. If you perform enough reality checks in your daily life, they will transfer over into your dream content. If you try pinching yourself in a dream, you may suddenly realize that it does not induce any pain (we do not experience pain in dreams). You may also find that reading text is difficult because the words are constantly changing — an impossible occurrence in reality. This trigger will induce lucidity by helping you distinguish between reality and a dream.
“Mindfulness meditation” is another technique that can increase the chance of being lucid while dreaming. Dr. Tony Toneatto, Director of the Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health Program at the University of Toronto, describes a causal link between mindfulness meditation and lucid dreaming. He explains that mindfulness meditation can help enhance self-awareness and visualization skills, both of which are crucial to experience a lucid dream. These two skills can be acquired and refined through different forms of meditation in waking life and can help someone interact with their dreams as well as enhance the experience.
Lucid dreaming has also been studied scientifically. New research by scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, in partnership with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Charité hospital in Berlin, has successfully identified neural activity associated with dreaming. Up until now, scientists have only been able to visualize the patterns and location of sleep-related brain activity and have been less successful at measuring more specific neural activity associated with dream content alone. Unless researchers know the precise timing of a dream, it is impossible to identify the neural activity associated with it without a cue to signal the onset of a dream. Unfortunately, only the dreamer can report when he or she is dreaming, and is usually unaware that it has happened until after he or she has awoken. In response, researchers recruited lucid dreamers who were instructed to fall asleep in a functional magnetic resonance imaging chamber and to cue researchers, using eye movements, upon entering a state of lucid dreaming.
Electroencephalographic (EEG) technology was also employed to detect when and which region of the brain was most active while participants experienced a lucid dream. Participants were asked to dream that they were clenching their right fist followed by their left fist for ten seconds. EEG reports demonstrated that at that time, there was frequent activity in the sensorimotor cortex, the same area of the brain associated with the execution of movements while in a state of wakefulness.
Beyond the scientific progress, the positive implications for therapeutic and personal uses of lucid dreaming are manifold. Lucid dreaming can be applied to the treatment of phobias, harbours immense potential and has already been used in the treatment of depression and anxiety. Dr. Urbszat said, “Imagine if you could dream about your phobia and have superior control over the object; could you then completely overcome your fears?”
Aside from its beneficial application to phobias, lucid dreaming has also been used in sports and performance psychology. Studies have demonstrated that when a skill is practiced within a dream, performance of the skill will improve, be it playing guitar or mastering a martial arts move. Dr. Urbszat explains that the electrochemical impulses occurring during sleep are identical to that occur during wakefulness: “If I want to learn or improve on a certain skill, like riding a bike, I practise, and as a result, neural pathways are created in the brain. We create neural pathways even while we’re dreaming of ourselves performing this skill because the brain doesn’t differentiate when we’re dreaming from when we’re awake. This research is at the forefront of sports and performance psychology. It is used in visualization and imagining techniques to enhance and improve performance.”
With all the positive implications associated with lucid dreaming, what’s the catch? Dr. Urbszat reassures us that he has yet to encounter any scientific evidence suggesting that there are negative implications associated with lucid dreaming. However, he cautions that lack of evidence supporting negative implications does not entail that none exist. Rather, the negative consequences, if any, have yet to be recorded. However, there are many false myths about lucid dreaming that are worth debunking: lucid dreaming is linked to hallucinations while waking; you can get caught in a dream and never wake up; lucid dreaming is the same as sleep paralysis. Dr. Urbszat clarifies, “There aren’t really any issues or problems that I can foresee for lucid dreaming. It seems to be safe, healthy, and advantageous.”
Historically, dreams have been given quite a lot of attention and have been seen as gateways into unconscious realms. However, in recent years, dreams have garnered less enthusiasm from the scientific community and have sometimes been deemed pseudoscientific. Dr. Urbszat stresses that this is a mistake. “There is something to be said about being in touch with your unconscious, the part of you that you are rarely allowed to communicate with in a conscious way. Lucid dreaming lets us do this. Dreaming is something that every human-being and virtually every animal does, so it is a universal and critical phenomenon. We can’t stop it from happening.”
