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Lucid Dreaming - Consciousness During Sleep.

YouAreDreaming

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Lucid dreaming for those who do not know is when the body is asleep, you are awake and aware that you are dreaming. This is known the mind awake / body asleep state and can be achieved through attention focusing during the act of falling asleep. For some it is spontaneous and others something they may never experience in their lifetime.

For skeptics and atheists, this seemingly "paranormal" ability of people is largely accepted. Many skeptics have had lucid dreams and through this first-person account know it is a valid experience that a person can have. If the anecdotal facts are not enough, dream research and sleep laboratories back in the late 1970's started to build up a body of peer reviewed evidence showing specific EEG and eye movements which indicate when a person is in this lucid state during sleep.

Dreams are also anecdotal experiences yet people dream and evidence suggests that many animals also dream. Many people will commonly share times when they have seen their dog acting out during a dream while it slept. Skeptics also dream, and although cannot provide any evidence of what the dream content is through the scientific method, as it is all anecdotal know that regardless of the inability for the content to be measured, becomes an experience that is accepted but still regarded in an area of little interest to most.

The fact is, people do indeed dream and are capable of having a very vivid lucid dream which embodies the same type of awakened state that you are experiencing right now. A self-realized moment where you are conscious enough to know you exist; however during a lucid dream the setting will be a non-physical mind-generated hallucination.

What impresses me about this ability is it's not easily achieved and does require practice and discipline. It is learned as one might learn the guitar, and unlike riding a bike if you fall off it can take some time before you get back on again. It is a very unique and interesting aspect of human potential that is largely ignored by society and science.

Yet, in a reality where we only have one life and no after-life, this is a place where we can extend what it feels like to be real in a realm that becomes our own virtual reality simulator. A place where our thoughts come to life and render amazing experiences that are effectively natures virtual reality perfected during sleep.

Lucid dreams are often constructed in the same first-person third-dimensional view. The best example of what this view looks like is already occurring as you are awake. The detail and quality of experience during a lucid dream can easily mimic the same quality of details you have when awake.

It is literally like being in another reality, on some other world that is composed entirely of organized thoughts. You have a dream body that represents an avatar of your now lucid and awake self wandering in some setting that can be as exotic and fantasy based as Star Wars. The limits as to what this dream world can appear as is a self-inflicted limited imagination.

Your lucid dream avatar is equipped with sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste and can even feel heat, cold and pain. The quality and clarity of this perception linked to how engaged you are in the dream, and how awake [lucid] you are during the dream.

This dream world is an example of your ability to create and render out an amazingly complex and detailed virtual reality. In this dream world, you are literally, "God" and the characters, objects and location are your own thoughts.

Having lucid dreamed on and off for the last 23 years, I can only describe the experience as amazing and one that never leaves you without gaining some measure of experience. Even if the dream is merely a fun fantasy or epic adventure. A state that I find personally more entertaining than TV, Video Games or bing drinking. Lucid dreams offer far more virtual entertainment in a first-person view then any computer or technology invented to date.

The human brain has already evolved the perfect virtual reality simulator and all one has to do is willingly practice the skill of simply being consciously awake while the body falls asleep.

The rest is well... hopefully an amazing adventure in dreamland.
 
My wife experiences lucid dreaming, and never had to "learn" the ability; it just happens. A readers poll in the old magazine OMNI indicated about 30 percent of respondents claimed the ability to some degree.
Our brains are endlessly inventive...
 
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Yup, I've had quite a few lucid dreams, and they are memorable for their extraordinary vividness. All mine have been benign, but I wonder if alien abduction syndrome may sometimes involve lucid dreaming because many 'victims' emphasise the vivid apparent reality of the experience as proof it couldn't be just a dream...
 
YouAreDreaming said:
Lucid dreaming
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It will probably be a short thread, there doesn't seem to be anything to take issue with in your post.

I will just add that using the same techniques to induce lucid dreaming you can also influence the content and initial conditions, it can be useful as a tool in dealing with real life problems.
 
To follow up on my previous post, how can we objectively identify if someone is having a lucid dream? How do you tell if someone is actually controlling the dream as opposed to just dreaming that they're controlling the dream?
 
I don't generally remember my dreams, though I probably could if I established a routine to do it. I used to often have lucid dreams when I was a kid, frequently during nightmares, which I would shrug off in my sleep with the realisation of what they were. It came naturally to me and without attempts to learn.
 
nvidiot said:
To follow up on my previous post, how can we objectively identify if someone is having a lucid dream? How do you tell if someone is actually controlling the dream as opposed to just dreaming that they're controlling the dream?
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I can't control when they happen, but I have plenty of dreams where that would be the question. I'm not sure.

Sometimes they go far enough that I just say "Hey, I'm dreaming, might as well [do something evil]."

And then there are the most confusing dreams, where I'm dreaming that I'm dreaming, then wake up from the second dream. I can tell the real world isn't a dream because my dreams have no consistency. Nothing at all tying them together; not between different dreams, not even in themselves.
 
nvidiot said:
To follow up on my previous post, how can we objectively identify if someone is having a lucid dream? How do you tell if someone is actually controlling the dream as opposed to just dreaming that they're controlling the dream?
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My understanding of lucid dreaming is that is it generally not about controlling the dream--it is about being aware you are dreaming when you are doing so. Dream control evidently can be accomplished.

As I linked to in the previous thread:

http://www.lucidity.com/LucidDreamingFAQ2.html#LD
 
One trick I used, unsuccessfully, was to leave yourself little notes saying 'am I dreaming?' in all sorts of strange places. Once you're used to finding these notes when awake, you'll start finding them when you're dreaming.

That was the theory, anyway.
 
One thing I've noticed in this state: most normal dreams seems very constrained by comparison. Things happen in normal dreams that I tend not to question, that conflict with the real world. Like, being back in school or at a previous job, or the layout of my home being different, or hanging out with people that are long gone - or like last night, seeing my new email list displaying on the sidewalk.

When lucid dreaming happens, it feels like the dream becomes less constrained: like those parts of my brain that are perhaps asleep, and not catching all those discrepancies, suddenly wake up. My awareness of the real state of my world is back, and I know I'm dreaming, but the dream doesn't go away. The dream also becomes more vivid: details, my breathing, etc.
 
I've had dreams where I believed I had identified that I was dreaming and woke myself up, only to find out when I actually woke up that the whole nonsense thing had been a dream.

In particular: I was driving at night. I realized that I had no memory of where I'd been or where I was going, so concluded I must be dreaming. I then wished myself awake. I woke up feeling absolutely normal and went about my day, pleased that I had been lucid in a dream.

Then I actually woke up in my bed at home. When I "woke up" in my dream, it was in a damn circus tent and I walked into a cage full of tigers but suddenly there was no cage and I had to be very careful because if the tigers stepped outside the ring, my father would shoot them.

So, I realized the unreality of driving a car at night but not of training tigers with my father. In retrospect, I doubt I was ever lucid. The whole feeling of control was, in itself, a dream.
 
nvidiot said:
To follow up on my previous post, how can we objectively identify if someone is having a lucid dream? How do you tell if someone is actually controlling the dream as opposed to just dreaming that they're controlling the dream?
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Since the experience takes place entirely within your own brain, and doesn't produce any data that is any different from normal REM state(AFAIK) there is no way to objectively identify it.

Emet said:
My understanding of lucid dreaming is that is it generally not about controlling the dream--it is about being aware you are dreaming when you are doing so. Dream control evidently can be accomplished.

As I linked to in the previous thread:

http://www.lucidity.com/LucidDreamingFAQ2.html#LD
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You can lucid dream without exerting control, but exerting control is the fun part. Flying, in particular, is my favorite activity.

arthwollipot said:
One trick I used, unsuccessfully, was to leave yourself little notes saying 'am I dreaming?' in all sorts of strange places. Once you're used to finding these notes when awake, you'll start finding them when you're dreaming.

That was the theory, anyway.
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There a number of different triggers you can use, the main thing is to be thinking about your trigger in the moments before you fall asleep. Not as easy as it sounds, your mind naturally wanders in those moments.
 
It's been a while since my last lucid dream, but for me they usually happen when I am close to waking up. I assume my brain is just about to come out of REM sleep and that is why a bit of woken-up consciousness starts to creep in, and I realize I am dreaming. That's why for me lucid dreams are usually quite short and end up with me waking up.

They can be quite fun while they last, though. I can control things as well.
 
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Marcus said:
You can lucid dream without exerting control, but exerting control is the fun part. Flying, in particular, is my favorite activity.
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No doubt. :)

Don't think I ever experienced lucid dreaming, or tried to, but had a run of what I believe was sleep paralysis many decades ago, and it was quite disturbing and frightening at the time.
 
arthwollipot said:
Nope. Never managed it. I've used all sorts of tricks and techniques but I never got the knack.
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That's unfortunate, I'm one of those who has to really work hard to have them which makes me envious of those who simply do it without any effort.

I employ a technique that sleep studies prove can increase your chance of having lucid dreams by up to 10 times. Here is the study.

http://www.lucidity.com/NL63.RU.Naps.html

That seems to work the best for reducing the effort and challenge.
 
nvidiot said:
To follow up on my previous post, how can we objectively identify if someone is having a lucid dream? How do you tell if someone is actually controlling the dream as opposed to just dreaming that they're controlling the dream?
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Since we cannot yet measure content of a dream ie... a dream recorder everything a person says about what they dreamed is anecdotal evidence.

However as I linked they have other methods with EEG etc that can show specific brainwave patterns associated with lucidity during sleep so there is at least some empirical evidence that psychologists can point at linked to the lucid aspect of dreaming.

The best evidence is the actual first-person act of having them, which is a blast depending on your imagination as dreams are simply a form of thinking.

Self-evident once you change the dream scape a few times at will. Just another way that we can think, but in a 3D virtual reality sort of way.
 
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