Falken
11-27-2008, 06:00 PM
Lucid dreams - I wrote this Aug. 18th, 2008
In my research, I came across something that I had to know more about. Here is everything I know so far about Lucid Dreaming - the practice of identifying a dream while in it, and taking control in various ways, thus becoming "lucid".
Dreams - a phenomenon no one fully understands, even though all mammals experience it. Categorized by a plethora of sensory input falsified by the brain during periods of extended sleep, dreams are the subject of abundant research.
While the function of dreams is not understood, the environment in which they occur is well established. Dreams in humans happen in stages, every night, in five stages on average. These stages happen every hour and a half, and start out short, only lasting around 10 minutes. However as sleep progresses they become longer ending up closer to 45 minutes by the fifth stage.
These stages of sleep are called "REM" sleep. REM stands for "Rapid Eye Movement" sleep, a stage of sleep in the eyes make quick, jarring motions, and electric brain waves change dramatically. Sleep studies have shown that this stage of sleep is where the brain behaves most as if it were awake, despite being the deepest stage of sleep.
Many people will claim that they do not dream. This is untrue, because all humans experience REM sleep, which has been shown in deprivation studies to be an apparently vital mammalian function. The difference lies in dream recall, which is the first step towards lucid dreaming.
The concept of a lucid dream appealed to me greatly. The idea that in an instant I could gain control of the entire world and do whatever I wanted made me determined to have a lucid dream.
Deeper into lucid dreams comes conversations. The characters in a dream are made up of thoughts in the mind and the subconscious mind, thus no character can say or do anything outside the experience of the dreamer. However, they can have access to deep parts of the mind rarely visited by the dreamer, old memories, real feelings, thoughts that the dreamer is unaware exist.
Because of this the most interesting thing to do in a lucid dream (in my opinion at least) is have a conversation with someone. These conversations can be very revealing. These are harder to control - you can control what they say if you try very hard, but honestly why would you want to? They can only tell you what some part of you already knows or thinks.
Studies have shown that the sense of time during a lucid dream is very similar to the sense of time when awake.
Some people like flying around, some people like fighting. If you can maintain control some people even use it to study for tests, having all the time in the world to memorize or practice while still resting. Note that even during a lucid dream, all the benefits of sleep are still there, lucid dreaming does not make you tired, and it does not take away from sleep.
I found when I began researching this topic was that remembering dreams opened the door to easy induction techniques. Basically, the idea is, write down every dream that you have. Every detail, every whisp of anything, needs to be written down. After a while you will be able to draw parallels between your dreams. My biggest one happens to be fancy cars.
The induction of a lucid dream involves training yourself to do a reality check whenever you notice one of your dream parallels in real life. For me, whenever I see a nice car, hear about a nice car, or read about a nice car, I do three things. I hold my nose shut and try and breathe through it, because if I was dreaming I would be able to breathe. I look at my hands and count the fingers. If I was dreaming it is very likely there would be more or less than five on each hand. Finally, I find some text, read it, look away, and read it again. If I was dreaming, it would likely have changed.
Using these three checks I can establish that what I am experiencing is, in fact, real and not a dream. The idea of recall is that once you train yourself to instinctively check reality when you see a dream parallel in real life, you will eventually find yourself doing it while dreaming as well. The reality check will probably come out negative, you will realize you are dreaming, and become lucid.
I'll tell ya, after a month, that simply does not work for me, although it is the most widely accepted technique for induction.
In fact after a month I hadn't had any type of lucid dream.
Than one night I was in the twilight zone between consciousness and sleep, right at the moment when my thoughts were beginning to stretch out into autonimity (is that a word? you know what I mean) I saw a stack of napkins at a picnic, and for some reason in that instant became lucid. Over excited to begin controlling my dream I told the napkins "change colors". They did, from red to blue. Than to my horror continued quickly flashing all colors. I realized I was lying down, and thought to myself that I should stand up to take more control. When I thought that, I woke up.
Last night I got it again. I seem to have more success becoming lucid in that middle-zone. This time it was much more vivid. The moment I became lucid I spun in place. The vividness was amazing, spinning there I could feel the wind on my face as if it were real. My dream recall is not the best yet, so its true, I had a lucid dream the majority of which I do not remember! What I do remember is being in my kitchen, spinning, opening my freezer to find a container of salt, manipulating the salt inside just by thinking about it, and flying around the room. I remember the sensation of standing up.
If I thought to myself "can I feel the bed from this dream??" I began to lose control and had to spin around again.
As soon as I decided it was time to try shooting that giant ass laser out of my mouth that I had been looking forward to so much, I lost control, and woke up.
Written by me Nov. 27th, 2008
Since I began lucid dreaming, I have slowly become more proficient at it. I now have a lucid dream around once a week and I have further common experiences to share with the two or so people who have managed not to stop reading yet.
1. While being totally conscious of my dream as it is happening, I have failed to recognize PEOPLE in my dream as being projections of my imagination. One such case was my teacher Mr. Schill - I realized I was dreaming while in a dream in his room at school. I looked around and marveled at the environment around me - expecting everything outside my specific few degrees of central vision to be blurred and swimming. To my surprise, it was all acute - everything was in perfect detail. I exclaimed to Mr. Schill:
"This is my dream! Look at this environment, it's all in my imagination!"
Mr Schill replied
"Yes, It's very detailed!"
I was overjoyed. After a few minutes, control of my dream slipped away - but I remember not realizing that Mr. Schill's opinions on my dream were not new opinions, they were merely my own opinions projected onto an apparition of my mind.
Similarly, in one lucid dream, I recall flying among the skyscrapers of chicago, with a friend Robert flying along side. I became lucid at that moment - and exclaimed again in excitement about how beautiful and vivid this dream really was. Than I woke up....
Last night, another friend Sabrina was in front of me as I stood over a huge salad. I became lucid, and started on my usual routine of flying around blowing up skyscrapers. I remember talking to sabrina - who was for some reason able to shoot some huge blue laser that I couldn't shoot - exactly how she was doing that.
The point is that while lucid dreaming is coming easier and easier, recognition of people as artificial is still impossible for me.
2. Exciting activities lead to earlier awakening. I have observed that when I am doing something while dreaming that would normally excite me or raise my heartbeat, it becomes exceedingly hard to maintain control over my lucid dream. I think that it might be because the activity is raising my heartbeat in reality, I'm having an adrenaline rush, and waking up because of it. Calming down in the dream doesn't help.
What that means is that I can only beat the undead shit out of zombies for so long before my real body gets excited and wakes me up.
3. Sense of time. I have noticed that my sense of time, contrary to what I thought before, is actually much SLOWER than reality, i.e. three-ish minutes of lucid dream time is equal to one minute of real time. I have noticed this through testing my sense of time by waking myself up after three "minutes" have gone by. Sense of time isn't constant either, it can be significantly faster or a little slower than that, but lucid time to real time seems to be at about a 3:1 ratio.
4. Waking up. I have found the easiest way to wake up from a lucid dream is to recall what position you fell asleep in, and try to feel the bed beneath your actual body. I sleep on my back, so I try to see if I can feel the bed on my back. I usually can - at that point I wiggle my toes or something and wake up.
5. Prolonging lucid dreams. This is very frustrating and I haven't found a foolproof strategy yet. When it starts to fade its gonna keep fading, you can prolong it a little by spinning or rubbing your hands together, but once all I can see is fuzzy black, I can't bring myself back into the dream without waking up.
6. Restfullness. Despite dreaming lucidly for up to 1.5 hours from an 8 hour sleep cycle, I feel just fine in the morning. It seems that lucid dreaming is just as restful and rejuvinating as regular sleep. REM is unaffected.
In my research, I came across something that I had to know more about. Here is everything I know so far about Lucid Dreaming - the practice of identifying a dream while in it, and taking control in various ways, thus becoming "lucid".
Dreams - a phenomenon no one fully understands, even though all mammals experience it. Categorized by a plethora of sensory input falsified by the brain during periods of extended sleep, dreams are the subject of abundant research.
While the function of dreams is not understood, the environment in which they occur is well established. Dreams in humans happen in stages, every night, in five stages on average. These stages happen every hour and a half, and start out short, only lasting around 10 minutes. However as sleep progresses they become longer ending up closer to 45 minutes by the fifth stage.
These stages of sleep are called "REM" sleep. REM stands for "Rapid Eye Movement" sleep, a stage of sleep in the eyes make quick, jarring motions, and electric brain waves change dramatically. Sleep studies have shown that this stage of sleep is where the brain behaves most as if it were awake, despite being the deepest stage of sleep.
Many people will claim that they do not dream. This is untrue, because all humans experience REM sleep, which has been shown in deprivation studies to be an apparently vital mammalian function. The difference lies in dream recall, which is the first step towards lucid dreaming.
The concept of a lucid dream appealed to me greatly. The idea that in an instant I could gain control of the entire world and do whatever I wanted made me determined to have a lucid dream.
Deeper into lucid dreams comes conversations. The characters in a dream are made up of thoughts in the mind and the subconscious mind, thus no character can say or do anything outside the experience of the dreamer. However, they can have access to deep parts of the mind rarely visited by the dreamer, old memories, real feelings, thoughts that the dreamer is unaware exist.
Because of this the most interesting thing to do in a lucid dream (in my opinion at least) is have a conversation with someone. These conversations can be very revealing. These are harder to control - you can control what they say if you try very hard, but honestly why would you want to? They can only tell you what some part of you already knows or thinks.
Studies have shown that the sense of time during a lucid dream is very similar to the sense of time when awake.
Some people like flying around, some people like fighting. If you can maintain control some people even use it to study for tests, having all the time in the world to memorize or practice while still resting. Note that even during a lucid dream, all the benefits of sleep are still there, lucid dreaming does not make you tired, and it does not take away from sleep.
I found when I began researching this topic was that remembering dreams opened the door to easy induction techniques. Basically, the idea is, write down every dream that you have. Every detail, every whisp of anything, needs to be written down. After a while you will be able to draw parallels between your dreams. My biggest one happens to be fancy cars.
The induction of a lucid dream involves training yourself to do a reality check whenever you notice one of your dream parallels in real life. For me, whenever I see a nice car, hear about a nice car, or read about a nice car, I do three things. I hold my nose shut and try and breathe through it, because if I was dreaming I would be able to breathe. I look at my hands and count the fingers. If I was dreaming it is very likely there would be more or less than five on each hand. Finally, I find some text, read it, look away, and read it again. If I was dreaming, it would likely have changed.
Using these three checks I can establish that what I am experiencing is, in fact, real and not a dream. The idea of recall is that once you train yourself to instinctively check reality when you see a dream parallel in real life, you will eventually find yourself doing it while dreaming as well. The reality check will probably come out negative, you will realize you are dreaming, and become lucid.
I'll tell ya, after a month, that simply does not work for me, although it is the most widely accepted technique for induction.
In fact after a month I hadn't had any type of lucid dream.
Than one night I was in the twilight zone between consciousness and sleep, right at the moment when my thoughts were beginning to stretch out into autonimity (is that a word? you know what I mean) I saw a stack of napkins at a picnic, and for some reason in that instant became lucid. Over excited to begin controlling my dream I told the napkins "change colors". They did, from red to blue. Than to my horror continued quickly flashing all colors. I realized I was lying down, and thought to myself that I should stand up to take more control. When I thought that, I woke up.
Last night I got it again. I seem to have more success becoming lucid in that middle-zone. This time it was much more vivid. The moment I became lucid I spun in place. The vividness was amazing, spinning there I could feel the wind on my face as if it were real. My dream recall is not the best yet, so its true, I had a lucid dream the majority of which I do not remember! What I do remember is being in my kitchen, spinning, opening my freezer to find a container of salt, manipulating the salt inside just by thinking about it, and flying around the room. I remember the sensation of standing up.
If I thought to myself "can I feel the bed from this dream??" I began to lose control and had to spin around again.
As soon as I decided it was time to try shooting that giant ass laser out of my mouth that I had been looking forward to so much, I lost control, and woke up.
Written by me Nov. 27th, 2008
Since I began lucid dreaming, I have slowly become more proficient at it. I now have a lucid dream around once a week and I have further common experiences to share with the two or so people who have managed not to stop reading yet.
1. While being totally conscious of my dream as it is happening, I have failed to recognize PEOPLE in my dream as being projections of my imagination. One such case was my teacher Mr. Schill - I realized I was dreaming while in a dream in his room at school. I looked around and marveled at the environment around me - expecting everything outside my specific few degrees of central vision to be blurred and swimming. To my surprise, it was all acute - everything was in perfect detail. I exclaimed to Mr. Schill:
"This is my dream! Look at this environment, it's all in my imagination!"
Mr Schill replied
"Yes, It's very detailed!"
I was overjoyed. After a few minutes, control of my dream slipped away - but I remember not realizing that Mr. Schill's opinions on my dream were not new opinions, they were merely my own opinions projected onto an apparition of my mind.
Similarly, in one lucid dream, I recall flying among the skyscrapers of chicago, with a friend Robert flying along side. I became lucid at that moment - and exclaimed again in excitement about how beautiful and vivid this dream really was. Than I woke up....
Last night, another friend Sabrina was in front of me as I stood over a huge salad. I became lucid, and started on my usual routine of flying around blowing up skyscrapers. I remember talking to sabrina - who was for some reason able to shoot some huge blue laser that I couldn't shoot - exactly how she was doing that.
The point is that while lucid dreaming is coming easier and easier, recognition of people as artificial is still impossible for me.
2. Exciting activities lead to earlier awakening. I have observed that when I am doing something while dreaming that would normally excite me or raise my heartbeat, it becomes exceedingly hard to maintain control over my lucid dream. I think that it might be because the activity is raising my heartbeat in reality, I'm having an adrenaline rush, and waking up because of it. Calming down in the dream doesn't help.
What that means is that I can only beat the undead shit out of zombies for so long before my real body gets excited and wakes me up.
3. Sense of time. I have noticed that my sense of time, contrary to what I thought before, is actually much SLOWER than reality, i.e. three-ish minutes of lucid dream time is equal to one minute of real time. I have noticed this through testing my sense of time by waking myself up after three "minutes" have gone by. Sense of time isn't constant either, it can be significantly faster or a little slower than that, but lucid time to real time seems to be at about a 3:1 ratio.
4. Waking up. I have found the easiest way to wake up from a lucid dream is to recall what position you fell asleep in, and try to feel the bed beneath your actual body. I sleep on my back, so I try to see if I can feel the bed on my back. I usually can - at that point I wiggle my toes or something and wake up.
5. Prolonging lucid dreams. This is very frustrating and I haven't found a foolproof strategy yet. When it starts to fade its gonna keep fading, you can prolong it a little by spinning or rubbing your hands together, but once all I can see is fuzzy black, I can't bring myself back into the dream without waking up.
6. Restfullness. Despite dreaming lucidly for up to 1.5 hours from an 8 hour sleep cycle, I feel just fine in the morning. It seems that lucid dreaming is just as restful and rejuvinating as regular sleep. REM is unaffected.