Control freaks, icebergs and unopened mail
So what is lucid dreaming? It’s the art of becoming conscious within your dreams. A lucid dream is one in which you think, Aha! I’m dreaming! while you’re still asleep. Once you become conscious within a dream, you can interact with and direct it at will, dancing with your unconscious mind.
If you have any interest in psychology, mindfulness, imagination, or the power of the unconscious, you’ll love lucid dreaming. It allows you conscious access to the deepest depths of your mind, and the opportunity to guide your dreams at will.
In a lucid dream you’ve not woken up – in fact, you’re still sound asleep – but part of the brain has reactivated (the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, in case you’re wondering), allowing you to experience the dream state consciously with self-reflective awareness. Once you know that you’re dreaming as you’re dreaming, you gain access to the most powerful virtual-reality generator in existence: the human mind.
For me, one of the most revolutionary aspects of lucid dreaming is that it makes sleep fun! It completely reconfigures our relationship with the third of our lives that we spend in bed. Suddenly, sleep is not just ‘wasted time’, as some people see it, but rather a potential training ground for psycho-spiritual growth and a laboratory of internal exploration that makes us more lucidly aware in our waking lives too. Once we become conscious within our unconscious, we see that we’re limitless, boundless and creative beyond our wildest imaginings.
Most people have had a lucid dream at some point in their lives, but through the process of learning the art of lucid dreaming we can come to experience this amazing phenomenon intentionally and at will. In fact, the term ‘lucid dreaming’ is a bit of a misnomer – it should really be ‘conscious dreaming’, because it’s the aspect of conscious awareness that defines the experience, rather than its lucid clarity, but for now we’ll stick with it.
However, given that there’s so much misunderstanding around what lucid dreaming actually is, it’s worth taking a moment to look at what lucid dreaming is not…
Lucid dreaming is a dream in which you know you’re dreaming as you’re dreaming. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up!
Once lucid, you become fully conscious within a three-dimensional construct of your own mind. You can literally walk – or fly – around a projection of your own psychology and have complex, involved conversations with personifications of your own psyche.
With high level lucidity comes high level clarity of mind. This means you can reflect on the fact that you’re asleep and that your body is lying in bed. You can think to yourself, Wow this is so cool, I can’t wait to tell people about this when I wake up! and you can access your waking memories and personal experience. It’s you in there, but that you is limitless. This means you can heal, meditate and learn in ways that might seem impossible in the waking state.
That’s pretty far out, but it’s not the most far out thing by a long way. What really shocks most newbie lucid dreamers is how real it feels. A lucid dream looks, feels, tastes and smells as real as waking reality and yet it’s primarily a projection of the mind. If you’re struggling to imagine just how a lucid dream feels, check out the dream reports in the case studies throughout the book. Case study: Conquering nicotine addiction is a good one to start with.
And for any sceptics or naysayers out there, know this – lucid dreaming is for real. It has been a scientifically verified phenomenon of dreaming sleep for almost 40 years. It exists, and we know this because it has unique and ‘discernable neural correlates’, which means that it’s not just psychological, it’s physical.
In 2009, researchers at Frankfurt University’s neurological clinic confirmed that ‘lucid dreaming constitutes a hybrid state of consciousness with definable and measurable differences from the waking state and from the REM (rapid eye movement) dream state.’1 Then in 2012, at Munich’s Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, it was discovered that when lucid consciousness was attained within the dream, activity in ‘brain areas associated with self-assessment and self-perception, including the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and frontopolar regions, increase markedly within seconds.’2
How did they discover this? If you hook someone up to brain-monitoring equipment such as EEG, or a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device – a type of scanner that uses magnetic resonance imaging to create a live picture of the brain’s activity – and watch them dream, you’ll see that the brain stem and occipital lobe in the back part of the brain become highly active, whereas the very front part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is almost entirely inactive.
Scientists believe that the personality centres3 and the sense of self originate in areas in the prefrontal cortex,4 so, as these areas of the brain are ‘offline’ while we dream,5 we can happily accept that we really are, say, the queen of Egypt. Until we wake up, our prefrontal cortex comes back ‘online’ and we realize that being the queen of Egypt was just a dream.
But in a lucid dream a different process occurs. When we become lucid, areas in the prefrontal cortex switch back on while we’re still dreaming, and so we think, Hang on, queen of Egypt?… I must be dreaming! Or, in the poetic terms of meditation expert Rob Nairn: ‘Once we realize that what we thought was real is actually a dream we experience a direct shift in consciousness. And so the labyrinthine psyche is revealed to us.6
One of the most common entries into a spontaneous lucid dream is spotting a dream ‘anomaly’ and realizing that you must be dreaming. How does this work? You’re dreaming away when something weird happens and you think, What the…? This can’t happen in real life, I must be dreaming!
For many beginner lucid dreamers, this leads to a rush of adrenaline – Wow, this is amazing! – and the next thing they know they’re awake in bed, heart pounding, buzzing with excitement from their first lucid dream. With practice, however, it’s possible to stay in the lucid dream for as long as we like – we’ll look at how to do this later.
If it feels as if you’ve been in a lucid dream for five minutes, you probably have. Research has shown that for most people the experience of time in the lucid dream state is roughly the same as in the waking state.7 Why? Because once lucid, we have much the same ability to estimate time as we do when awake. Imagine spending an hour (the length of your longest dream period) exploring the inside of your own mind.
No, it won’t – in fact most people wake up feeling much more refreshed from lucid dreams than from everyday, non-lucid ones. Lucid dreaming occurs almost exclusively within REM dreaming sleep, which is not actually a restful sleep state. In fact, the original name for REM sleep was ‘paradoxical sleep’ – the paradox being that the brain is often more active during dreaming than it is while we’re awake.
Every stage of sleep has a purpose. The non-REM and deep sleep stages that make up the majority of our sleep are needed primarily to rest the body and ‘clean the brain’,8 whereas the REM dreaming stages are needed to reconsolidate our memory and integrate our psychological processes.
Non-lucid dreaming does this naturally, of course, but once we become lucid within our dreams the brain has sometimes been observed to start exhibiting high-frequency gamma brain waves, which have been linked to high-level meditation,9 hypnosis and psychological growth. This may mean that, once lucid, the REM dreaming stage becomes even more beneficial than usual.
Also, for most people, lucid dreaming holds such a buzz of excitement that the day after a lucid dream will often be lit up with a sense of joy and achievement.
As I mentioned earlier, the weird thing about lucid dreams is that they’re often not very dreamlike at all. Fully lucid dreams can seem so completely realistic that many people believe they’ve entered another dimension of reality. In fact they have – but the dimension is not out in space somewhere, it’s in the space inside their mind.
The sophisticated detail of the lucid dream is outstanding. Put your hand on your heart and often you’ll be able to feel it beating, even though both your heart and your hand are all simply the stuff that dreams are made of. A lucid dream can feel even realer than real life, and this hyperreality comes from the fact that our senses are not limited to the constraints of the physical sense organs. For example, my eyesight was once quite poor in real life10 and yet perfect in the lucid dream. This is because, in the lucid dream, I wasn’t seeing through my eyes, I was seeing through my mind.
However, although the lucid dream world may look similar to the waking world, the same rules do not apply. This means that we can fly, teleport, communicate telepathically with dream characters and guide the narrative of the dream with our will and expectation. In fact, the lucid dream is a meticulously intricate mental construct that may seem so real that we come to question the very nature of waking reality.
So does this mean that lucid dreamers stand to lose touch with what’s real? No, in fact quite the opposite happens. Once we can see through the hallucinatory reality of the dreamscape, and know it as illusion, we become better equipped to recognize illusion in the waking state. This makes us more mentally stable and self-aware.
Dream researcher Jayne Gackenbach references a subject who used lucid dreaming to lose weight. The report shows that the woman would refrain from eating fatty foods during the day because she knew she could eat them in her dreams. Perhaps eating food in a lucid dream is so realistic that the brain sends satiation signals to the gut saying, ‘I’m full’. Hypnotic gastric band eat your heart out!
Trying to explain how lucid dreaming feels is like trying to describe the taste of chocolate. I can use all the adjectives under the sun but at no point will you truly know what chocolate tastes like until you actually eat some. So it is with lucid dreaming. This book will help you taste the chocolate. In fact, when people first start reading about lucid dreaming, they often start to smell the cocoa and realize they have had lucid dreams, and that they too can find the golden ticket for a visit to the chocolate factory.
Once you’re lucid you can actually choose what to do in your dream. This can be anything from going surfing to meditating within the dream or meeting a personification of your higher self, but many beginners choose to fly. They become lucid, set their intention to fly, and then zoom off over the dreamscape, controlling their speed and trajectory as they go. This degree of subjective control may well lead them to believe that they’re controlling the whole dream, but this is simply not the case.
In his book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self lucid dreaming expert Robert Waggoner said: ‘No sailor controls the sea. Similarly, no lucid dreamer controls the dream.’ This is very true, for just as it would be an arrogant sailor who believed that he was controlling the awesome power of the sea, so it is with our dreams.
To think that our paper-tiger ego (which we bring into the dream once lucid) can in any way control or dominate the awesome power of the unconscious is to attribute to it an inflated degree of influence. The unconscious dreaming mind is so much more powerful than the ego-mind, and lucid dreamers who believe they can control the dream have vastly underestimated what they’re dealing with.
To aim at control is often to subjugate, to dominate and to suppress – so, rather than control, let’s aim to choreograph, influence and direct the dream. I know it’s more a matter of semantics than anything else, but words have a powerful effect on the unconscious, so be mindful of the energy that your words contain. We must make an ally of our unconscious, not an enemy. Don’t try to control your dreaming mind – instead, try to befriend it, because once you’ve made a friend of your unconscious you’ll have access to more energy than you ever thought possible.
It seems that playing videos games can be good for lucid dreaming (sorry, parents!). Dream psychologists have reported that ‘gamers who are used to controlling their game environments can translate that into their dreams.’11 Research shows that people who frequently play video games are more likely to have lucid dreams, and they are also better able to influence their dream worlds once lucid.
We’ve long been told that ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’, but a wonderfully optimistic finding from neuroscience, called neuroplasticity, is asking us to rethink the outdated idea that the brain’s physical structure is unchangeable once we reach adulthood. Neuroplasticity is a term that refers to the brain’s ability to change and adapt in response to newly learned or repeated actions, and it can be engaged through lucid dreaming.
How? Our neurological system doesn’t differentiate between our waking experiences and our lucid dream experiences, which means that for our brain dreaming lucidly about doing something isn’t like imagining it – it’s like actually doing it. The lucid dream is so visceral that the brain will start to function in accordance with what we’re dreaming about. Ultimately, this means that you can learn in your lucid dreams, you can train in them, and you can even make lasting changes to the very fabric of your brain.
But how does this work? Thanks to the activation of the prefrontal brain areas that accompanies full lucidity, we can begin to engage the full potential of neuroplasticity while we sleep. During lucid dreams neural pathways in the brain can be strengthened and created, just as they can while we’re awake. This means that dreamers who consciously engage in certain practices within their lucid dreams (such as sport, art or acts of kindness) are creating and strengthening the pathways associated with those practices, making them easier to do in the waking state.
Therefore, each time you act with courage in a lucid dream you’re strengthening the neural pathways associated with courage in the waking state. And every time you extend the hand of friendship to your unconscious mind you’re cementing a relationship that’ll continue once you’re awake.
In non-lucid dreams, neuroplasticity is not engaged to the same extent (so don’t sweat that dream in which you throttled your boss!), but once we’re lucid, and we can decide what to do, we can affect our neural pathways based on the actions we perform. The implications of this are huge – we can change our brain while we sleep.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and author of The Interpretation of Dreams, did much to popularize the use of dream work in a therapeutic setting. Although many of his ideas seem quite dated today, his model of the psyche is as relevant now as it was 100 years ago.
Freud’s theories led to imagining the mind like an iceberg, which, as we know, is much bigger below the surface than it is above it. This comparison formed the basis of Freud’s distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. He believed that the immediately recognizable part of the mind, the ‘conscious mind’, is actually the much smaller aspect, and that the majority of the mind is ‘unconscious’ – the part hidden beneath the surface.
Many people believe that they’re nothing more than what they’re conscious of: their thoughts, feelings, beliefs and perceptions, but that’s only a fraction of who they really are. Sadly, most of us sleepwalk through our lives, limited by what we can see floating on the surface and unaware of the powerhouse of mental energy that lies beneath.
The unconscious contains huge stores of information (everything we’ve ever done, said, heard or seen), to which the conscious mind has limited access in the waking state. Using this iceberg image we can imagine that about 10 per cent of our mind is conscious, observable and available to our rational waking awareness, whereas about 90 per cent of it is unconscious,12 often unrecognized and made of seemingly irrational content – irrational to our conscious mind, that is.
So, what’s one of the easiest ways to explore the unconscious? Through our dreams. Dreams are primarily created and sourced from the unconscious mind, so to explore our dreams is to explore our unconscious. Lucid dreaming takes this exploration a step further because, as hypnotherapy expert Valerie Austin once told me, it allows us ‘access to this data straight from the unconscious without it being edited by our rational, conscious mind’.
Our true capacity is just waiting to be revealed to us, and when we start to do mind-training work such as meditation, self-hypnosis, energy work and, of course, lucid dreaming, we begin to get an idea of just how deep the iceberg goes.
So, if our mind is like an iceberg, what’s the ocean in which it floats? And can we access that ocean from within our lucid dream? The answer is ‘yes’. It seems that once we access the depths of the iceberg through our lucid dreams we can explore its outer reaches, which will bring us into contact with the transpersonal collective unconscious and beyond (more about this later).
With practice we can even leave the iceberg entirely, through the partially permeable membrane of the lucid dream, and explore the universal oceanic mind in which it floats. For more information about how this kind of out-of-body exploration works, check out my first book, Dreams of Awakening.
It’s been said that every time we dream our unconscious mind writes us a letter. Many of us don’t bother to read these letters – and some of us are unaware that we’re even receiving them – but everybody dreams, and so we’re all receiving letters from our dreaming mind each night. Sometimes the letters are just summaries of the day’s events but at other times they offer profound insights into our current mental state. Each letter is unique and each night offers new letters to read.
Imagine writing to a friend every night for their entire life, knowing full well that they aren’t even collecting their post, let alone reading your letters. Nonetheless you tirelessly keep writing to them. Then one day you see that your friend is finally beginning to read your letters. How would that feel? You’d probably feel a joyous sense of connection to that friend you’d not felt before, and you might also begin writing more juicy, interesting and exciting letters. So it is with our dreams.
But how can we begin to read the letters from our unconscious, and to bear witness to what it’s trying to communicate? We need to start collecting our post, which means that we need to start remembering our dreams. This not only offers you a valuable insight into the content and tone of your unconscious mind, but it also tells the unconscious that you’re ready to listen to it. Suddenly the letter writer is being heard after all those years of being ignored. What joy! And now the unconscious wants to write more letters, of deeper significance this time, and to share more profound insights.
One day you decide that you’d like to meet your pen friend face to face, so you start practising the lucid dreaming techniques which makes that possible. That night, you find yourself fully lucid within your dream. The letter writer is busy writing away and then suddenly you walk into the dream while she’s writing.
Imagine how pleased she’d be to see you! Imagine the conversation you’d have. Think of the friendship you could form. This is what happens when we become lucid within our dreams: we finally meet the letter writer face to face. But take heed, the letter writer has been writing to us for years and now that she finally has a chance to speak to us we can be sure that she won’t bother with small talk – she may well get straight to the juicy bits. This is why our lucid dreams can be such intense, revealing experiences. We learn about aspects of our mind that have been hidden from view for so much of our life.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before you meet the letter writer you need to start reading her letters. How? By training yourself to remember your dreams. Dream recall is not only the foundation of our relationship with our unconscious, it’s also the foundation of our lucid dreaming practice. It’s this foundation that we’re going to lay now as we open up our first lucid dreaming toolbox and explore how to recall and document our dreams.
TOOLBOX 1: REMEMBER, REMEMBERDream recall is one of the most important aspects of lucid dream training. Some say that until you regularly remember your dreams you might be having lucid dreams every night without realizing it! Although that’s a possibility, it’s actually far more likely that if you don’t remember your dreams you probably aren’t going to have many lucid ones. Why? Because ‘the more conscious you are of your dreams, the easier it will be to become conscious within your dreams’.13
Most people have four or five dream periods every night, but not everybody remembers these. I believe the main reason is simply because we don’t try to remember them.
At the first lucid dreaming workshop I ever ran, I met a gentleman who was convinced that he didn’t dream because he hadn’t remembered one in years. I tried to explain to him that everybody dreams, but he didn’t want to hear it. However, after just one week of setting a strong intention to remember his dreams, he told me: ‘Charlie, I realize that I’ve been dreaming for 62 years, I just never cared to notice!’
So, if we set a strong intention to recall our dreams, and if we ‘care to notice’, most of us will be able to recall at least part of them without too much difficulty after just a couple of nights. Here’s how:
The most important of these five steps is the first one: as you fall asleep strongly set your intention to remember your dreams.
The next tool in our toolbox is a dream-work classic: the dream diary. Keeping a dream diary is simple – here’s how to do it.
Many people like to type their dream recollections onto a tablet or a smartphone, while others like to use a notebook and pen. Either method is fine.
It seems that clean living might be able to help clean up our dream recall. Within the Tibetan dream yoga teachings the recipe for remembering your dreams is to ‘avoid pollutions and impurities’. So a Big Mac before bed is off the menu, I’m afraid. Check out Chapter 6 for more on eating a dreamy diet.
Yes, you have to! Sorry. Best just to get on with it, because if you want to learn how to lucid dream properly then keeping a dream diary is essential.
Every time you write down a dream you reinforce the habit of viewing them as something valuable. Once you see dreams as valuable you’ll naturally start to recall them with more ease. I advise that you even write an entry in your dream diary if you can’t remember any dreams. ‘Woke up with no dream recall’ is still a valid dream diary entry and it’ll help foster the habit of keeping a dream diary every night.
Besides, documenting your dreams is good for you! Don’t just take my word for it – take dream work pioneer Carl Jung’s, who believed that the beneficial integration of the unconscious happened primarily in our sleep, and that ‘remembering dreams and writing them down’ enhances this integration.14
And if you don’t believe Jung then believe my mum. One of the most helpful things she ever did for me was to encourage me to tell her my dreams each morning. She knew that it was good for me, and although I didn’t know it at the time she was helping me keep a kind of verbal dream diary throughout my formative years. This set me up with a pretty solid foundation in dream work that allowed me to start having spontaneous lucid dreams from the age of about seven.
I should say, though, that this wasn’t because I was some sort of lucid dreaming prodigy – it was actually down to laziness. These childhood lucid dreams were mainly a result of my wetting the bed from within the dream, because I couldn’t be bothered to wake up and use the toilet! I remember the feeling of a full bladder seeping into the dream and making me become fully lucid. Then, from within the dream, I would think to myself: I really don’t want to get out of bed to pee. Maybe I’ll just do it while I’m still in the dream?
Anyway, enough of me and my weirdly beneficial bed-wetting. Why do we have to keep a dream diary again? Because by recalling our dreams we’re getting to know the territory of our dreaming mind, and the better we know that, the more likely we are to recognize it when we’re in it and become lucid.
Write down your dreams as soon as you remember them – yes, even if this is in the middle of the night. It’s far better to write them down straight away because in the morning even the most memorable dream may well be forgotten.
I know it can seem pretty hectic, having to scrabble around for your dream diary at 5 a.m., but you’ll soon find the least disruptive method for you. Whether it’s going to the bathroom to write up your dreams or keeping a little torch by your bedside to avoid waking your partner, you’ll find a way. Personally, I use my iPhone as my dream diary, because it lights up and because I can type into it faster than I can write. I then email myself the dreams and print them out at the end of each month.
Mind maps, illustrations, spider diagrams and artwork can all be incorporated into your dream diary. The important thing is to recall the dream – how you do it is secondary. You can even dance out your dreams. Once a year I run a ‘Dance and Dreaming’ retreat with the School of Movement Medicine in which we dance out our dreams each morning, using the dance floor as our dream diary.
Oh, and one more thing: I would advise against using voice recorders, unless you’re super-mindful. Although it’s difficult to ‘sleep write’, we can definitely ‘sleep talk’, so if you try to record your dream into a voice recorder when you’re not fully awake, you may well end up with a recording of yourself falling asleep.
So that should be enough to get you started on recalling and documenting your dreams, but for those of you who want to step up a level, check out these tips from the king of dream recall and board member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Ryan Hurd.
Ryan Hurd is the author of Dream Like A Boss, and editor of the Dream Studies Portal. Visit www.DreamStudies.org for more of his dreamy advice.
