What Are Lucid Dreams and How Do I Get Started?

Welcome to the workshop Lifehacker’s Lucid’s Dream Workshop . Each week we learn a little more about the mysterious realm of the science of sleep, dreaming, and how to “wake up” when we are sound asleep.

What kind of dreams?

Experts cannot agree on what dreams are, exactly. Some say that dreams are the brain that solves problems or processes emotions from your waking life; some say it’s just a collection of memory data that your brain is trying to accommodate . But perhaps the simplest possible definition is that dreams are your brain’s way of knowing that they exist. Your brain has a lot to do while awake when you have continuous external stimuli to process, but when you sleep, it has very few stimuli to filter out. When your brain is out of touch with the world, it adapts, creating its own to keep it functioning normally and to keep it sharp.

We may not know why we have dreams, but we know when we have them. When you get a good night’s rest, you experience four main stages of sleep :

• NREM 1 (N1): Also known as slow eye movement 1 or light sleep. Your body temperature, heart rate, respiration rate, and energy consumption are falling all over the place. Your muscles are still active and you can still respond to environmental stimuli. Basically, you fall asleep.
• NREM 2 (N2): Movement towards deep sleep. It’s harder to wake you up, and the conscious awareness of your surroundings goes away. This stage accounts for about half of your sleep.
• NREM 3 (N3): deep sleep or slow sleep. Environmental stimuli no longer elicit any responses. It is believed to be the most restful phase of sleep, accounting for about a quarter of your sleep. This phase leads to the fourth phase and is sometimes also considered part of the fourth phase.
• REM (Rapid Eye Movement): Also known as the “sleep state”. Your muscles are paralyzed and your breathing and heart rate are no longer regulated. The true function of REM sleep is unknown, but its absence can impair your ability to absorb difficult tasks. This phase also accounts for about a quarter of your sleep.

Every night you go through each stage four or five times in the order N1, N2, N3, N2, REM, and then repeat. REM sleep is where your most vivid, memorable dreams occur, and you experience this state for about 90 minutes at a time.

What is lucid dream?

Normal dreams are a lot like the rides in an amusement park that you didn’t want to go to; you are driving on rails, there are strange things around you that seem real, and you are forced to experience everything that comes your way. You may have the ability to react, but you cannot go astray, love it or hate it.

Lucid dreaming, on the other hand, is like exploring an amusement park you built yourself. You can not only go where you want, but you can do whatever you want. This is your world. In essence, fully lucid dream is a dream that you have complete control over. Do you want to fly like a superhero? Perhaps – I did it. Do you want to confront the bully without fear? No sweat. Do you want to strike up a romantic relationship with the beautiful person you dream of? You definitely can. Imagine going to bed every night and pursuing your most extravagant fantasies, and then waking up feeling refreshed and refreshed. This is a lucid dream.

I’m sure you can’t wait to try lucid dreaming, but like most other wonderful things, it will take some patience and effort. Over time, we will learn to identify the state of sleep and subordinate each phase of REM sleep to our will. But for now, we need to focus on another state of consciousness: the one in which you are now.

Assignment: get to know your current state of consciousness better.

Dream awareness is not much different from the awareness you currently feel as you read these words, except that the worlds in your dreams are lacking in a certain sequence. For example, if you clicked again in your browser at this very moment and then clicked forward, you would be back on this web page. When you are asleep, you can click back, then go forward and find yourself on another web page or on a sailboat. Dreams are inconsistent, and finding these inconsistencies is one of the easiest ways to become aware that you are dreaming, which is the first step to realizing.

But to truly understand what it means to be clear in a dream, you need to better understand what it is like to be clear in the real world. This exercise, from the book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming , by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D., and Howard Reingold, will be your first assignment. Complete all of these steps once a day:

• Look: be aware of what you see: pay attention to the varied and vivid impressions – shapes, colors, movement, dimension, the entire visible world.
• Listen: Be aware of what you are hearing: register different sounds being perceived by your ears – different ranges of intensity, pitch and tone, perhaps including a banal miracle of speech or a miracle of music.
• Feeling: Be aware of what you are touching: texture (smooth, rough, dry, sticky or wet), weight (heavy, light, hard or empty), temperature, and everything else. Also note how your body is feeling right now, and compare it to many other sensations it experiences at other times: fatigue or energy, stiffness or flexibility, soreness or pleasantness, etc.
• Taste: Find out what it is like: try different foods and substances, or remember and visualize their tastes.
• Smell: be aware of what you are smelling: the smell of warm bodies, earth, incense, smoke, perfume, coffee, onions, alcohol and the sea. Memorize and imagine as many of them as possible.
• Breathing: Pay attention to your breathing. A moment ago, you were probably not aware of your breathing, although during this exercise you breathed in and out fifty times. Hold your breath for a few seconds. Let it out. Now take a deep breath. Note that being aware of your breathing allows you to consciously change it.
• Emotions: Be aware of your feelings. Remember the difference between anger and joy, serenity and excitement, and many other emotions you want to experience. How real are emotions?
• Thoughts: Be aware of your thoughts. What were you thinking while doing this exercise? What are you thinking about now? How real do thoughts seem?

Pause and reflect on these things, or even write them down. You use these feelings and experience other things all the time throughout the day, but how often do you really pay attention to them? The more you tune in to your feelings and feelings, the easier you can use them as tools in your sleep state. After all, you cannot imagine a pleasant sunset on the beach unless you know how to identify and remember the smell of the ocean breeze, the texture of the sand between your toes, the color of the light on the horizon, or how relaxing it is to be in such a calm place.

Once you’ve done that, move on to these last two steps:

• Self: Be aware of the fact that your world always includes you . As William James pointed out, this I see, I hear, I feel, I think this is the basic fact of the experience. You are not what you see, hear, think or feel; you have this experience. Perhaps most significantly, you who knows. You are always at the center of your multidimensional universe of experience, but you are not always consciously aware of yourself. Briefly repeat the exercise with the following difference: at the same time as you pay attention to each of the different aspects of your experience, remember that you are noticing these things (“I see the light …”).
• Awareness of awareness: Finally, become aware of your awareness. Usually, awareness focuses on objects outside of us, but it itself can be an object of awareness … Here, the experience cannot be adequately expressed in language.

Congratulations: you have taken the first step towards becoming aOneuronaut , or Dream Researcher. Next week we will look at the many benefits of lucid dreaming – and some of the minor dangers – and discuss the importance of developing dream memory. You will also receive a completely new assignment.

Until then, feel free to ask questions or discuss your own experiences in the comments below. How did you feel completing the assignment? Have you had a lucid dream before? Some people are lucky newbies, and they have a lucid dream just after they first hear about this phenomenon. This is your class, so discuss your dreams with your classmates.

You spend a third of your life asleep. Why not do something about it? Okay, oneuronauts: sleep well and keep dreaming.

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