(chris’s) blog

My latest focus is on lucid dreaming. I’m unaware of its prevalence so pardon this introduction. We dream every night, even if you do not remember it. (It’s a fact that the area of your brain responsible for long-term memory is mostly dormant during sleep, hence your inability to recall your dreams.) Assuming you sleep 6-8 hours, you experience a handful of dreams in one night. Lucid dreaming, which has been the object of scientific inquiry since the 1960s, is essentially the ability to “wake up while dreaming.” You may have done this accidentally. By questioning whether or not you’re dreaming, it is possible to come into conscious awareness, and, in its end result, even control your dreams.
You may have already experienced this. It’s not too difficult to achieve lucid dreaming, although it’s unlikely to occur every night.
The first step in lucid dreaming is remembering your dreams. The easiest way to do this is to write down your dreams the moment you wake up. Keeping a dream journal, as a habit, trains your brain to recall your dreams, if only fragmentary. As an interesting note, the areas of your brain which are affected by REM (the sleep cycle in which dreams occur) are “wiped clean” by motor function, that is, by trying to move. When you first wake up, you’ll have a better ability to recall your dreams if you just lay there motionless. After you’ve recited as much as you can, reinforcing the details in your short-term (waking) memory, grab your journal and write down as much as you can.
If you can remember your dreams (and thus your lucid dreams), you can achieve a lucid dream every now and again by simply telling yourself you’re going to have a lucid dream. Much like anxious self-recital of a particular alarm time (”I have to get up by 4:00am to make it to the airport!”), your brain will somewhat respond to your own demand and this will increase your chances of lucid dreaming.
The only part now is to prevent yourself from waking up. The REM cycles right before you wake up, 6 hours into your sleep, are the longest and you can thus have dreams up to 45 minutes. Once you take conscious control however, you’re likely to wake up. Two simple methods have over a 90% chance of keeping you asleep: (in your dream) 1) try to spin yourself or 2) try to rub your hands together. Both of these will throw off your brain’s response to the feeling of your bed and help keep you asleep. Spinning is particularly helpful, because it encourages the REM cycle-part of the brain.
I’m no neurologist and I don’t professionally study dreams, but most of this can be found from a few hours of reading Google. Exciting!

Tagged as Dreams, imagination, lucid dreaming, sleep + Categorized as Life