LUCID DREAMING- WHAT IS THIS AND HOW TO DO IT?

Let’s say you are in your house in your bed and when you look outside your window you see that the sky is not blue in color, as it usually is, but a combination of different shades of different colors. After that, you find yourself flying in the sky and there are elephants flying, waterfalls falling from the clouds, castle in the sky, and after this collection of your fantasies you wake up! ‘What was all this?’ you question yourself and you just remember a glimpse of your dream or you forget the whole scenario of your dream.

 Usually, everyone’s dream is hazy and sometimes you are not able to make out what it was. Well, what if I tell you can WAKE UP in your DREAM and you can feel as real as you feel by holding this book or device of yours, and you can do anything you can imagine, falling from the sky, flying over the oceans on your own and fulfilling all your fantasies. Now, if you are excited then it’s time for you to be familiar with the term LUCID DREAMING. 

The term ‘lucid dreaming’ refers to waking up in your dream. In other words, you should be aware that you are dreaming which many of you must have experienced but you were not able to ‘wake up’ in your dream because you don’t know how to do it. As we all know that our mind constitutes of two parts, conscious, which involves all the things we are currently aware of and thinking about. The second part is the subconscious, which is a data bank for everything, which is not in our conscious mind. It stores our beliefs, our previous experience, our memories, our skills, etc. According to the study of neuroscientists of Stanford, Harvard, MIT 2015, the subconscious consists of 90% of your brain, and your consciousness constitutes 10% of your brain. We can compare the conscious and subconscious parts of our brain with an iceberg.

As we are talking about dreams, we must be aware of our sleep cycle and in which stage we experience dreams. There are five stages of sleep:-

 ● Stage 1 & 2- Light sleep 

● Stage 3 & 4- Deep sleep

● Final and the 5th stage- REM or Rapid Eye Movement sleep 

● Repeat 

Light sleep is the starting of our cycle during which our muscles begin to relax and heartbeat and breathing slow down, in this stage, even the slightest sound can wake us up. In the next stage, deep sleep focuses on our bodies. We require this stage of sleep to restore ourselves and get ready for our next day. This stage of sleep promotes muscle growth and repair as well as the removal of waste from the brain. It is difficult for an individual to wake up someone in this stage of sleep. And the final stage, REM or Rapid Eye Movement sleep, which re-energizes our brain. This stage associate with dreaming, memories consolidation, and problem-solving.

The conscious part rests during our sleep cycle, but our subconscious is awake and it keeps processing and looping 24 hours a day and does not rest. The problem is that our conscious mind can tell if something is real or not, but the subconscious mind which is 90% of our brain treats every single thing as real and that’s why we are not aware when we are dreaming.

For example, let’s say you are all alone on a deserted road walking by yourself, and you start to think that a ghost or monster will show up. Even though you are convinced that it is 100% impossible but, you start to sweat. Your blood-pressure rises and you start getting goosebumps and you begin to react to even the slightest sound but in the end, you reach home safely. See? That is the power of our subconscious mind. So you only need to practice to achieve lucid dreaming and to convince your subconscious that the dream which you are seeing in your sleep is not real by awakening your consciousness in your REM stage. There are many techniques to experience your first lucid dream but firstly, if you are new to lucid dreaming then you should improve your dream recall. Many people can’t remember what they dreamt about and only remember hazy pictures of what they saw in dreams or completely forgets them. To improve your dream recall, you should start writing down your dreams in your ‘DREAM JOURNAL’.

 Make a notebook to start your dream writing. Keep the notebook beside your bed with a pen or pencil and as soon as you get up in the morning write down everything you remember from your dream. By doing this you can increase your chances of becoming aware that you are in a dream. Start meditating, as it will help you in lucid dreaming. After some nights of dream writing, you should perform the easiest technique of lucid dreaming for beginners MILD, which is, Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dream. It constitutes repeating a particular phrase again and again while drifting to sleep, like “I will lucid dream tonight” or “I will be aware when I am dreaming” etc. By doing this your subconscious mind will learn of this new fact that you are repeating and you have more chances of lucid dreaming. By doing this and perfecting yourself in lucid dreaming you can find out different levels of our mind as you are awake inside your mind and you can find out the lost memories of yours, that you have forgotten over the years. And... this is a very good thing to do in this pandemic! 

"You must learn to control your dreams or your dreams will control you forever." 

-Wayne Gerard Trotman

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