Lucid dreaming: Controlling the stories of sleep

Lucid dreaming has recently been popularized by movies such as Inception.

(Online)- 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.

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.

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:
"My 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 MNTtold 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.

Lucid dreaming is certainly an attractive and fascinating prospect — being able to explore our own inner worlds with full awareness that we are in a dream state is intriguing and has an almost magical flavor about it.

However, can lucid dreaming have any practical applications?

Dr. Denholm Aspy, at the University of Adelaide in Australia, is a researcher who specializes in lucid dreaming. He explained for MNT that this experience can actually be therapeutic.

Its main application, Dr. Aspy said, is to address nightmares — especially recurring nightmares, which may affect a person’s quality of life.

The practice of learning to lucid dream in order to stop nightmares from occurring or reoccurring, he explained, is called "lucid dreaming therapy."

"If you can help someone who’s having nightmares to become lucid during that nightmare," he explained to us, "then that gives them the ability to exert control over themselves or over the nightmare itself."

"Let’s say you’re being attacked by someone in a nightmare. You could try to talk to the attacker. You could ask them ‘why are you appearing in my dreams?’ or ‘what do you need to resolve this conflict with me

Some people," he added, "take on superpowers or special abilities, [so] they can fight back against the attacker. And then you can also try to escape, so things like flying away, or even doing techniques to deliberately wake up from the nightmare."

Lucid dreaming also has the potential to help people with phobias, such as fear of flying or animal phobias including arachnophobia (the fear of spiders).

"If a person has a particular phobia, then their lucid dream environment [...] provides an interesting opportunity to do things like exposure therapy, where you gradually expose yourself to the thing you’re afraid of, in an attempt to gradually overcome that fear," Dr. Aspy said.

This is possible, he said, because dream environments can provide a realistic enough experience without it actually feeling unsafe. During lucid dreaming, the individual knows that they are not in the real world, so they may safely explore their fears without actually feeling threatened.

At the same time, lucid dreaming is also attractive as an unusual means of entertainment — kind of like the immersive experience of virtual reality.

An experienced lucid dreamer might be able to "go on an adventure" and interact with people and things in a way that they may not be able to do in real life.

The lucid dreamer who spoke to MNT said that she thinks of the experience as something akin to storytelling, which makes her feel happier upon waking up.