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What to Expect in a Lucid Dream

ucid dreams come with a variety of physical sensations. Sounds of rushing water, numbness on the lips, a feeling of being pushed down or of sinking into your bed, or even a sense of a presence observing you are all common and normal. One of the most common sensations is to feel vibrations—anything from a mild tingling to feeling a bit like your body is coming apart or dissolving. Though understandably alarming at first, these sensations are nothing to worry about: they mean you’re becoming aware of the process of falling asleep, and they will pass as you relax. Consider the following dream experience I had:

Falling asleep, I feel the vibrations that normally come when I know I will have an out-of-body experience type dream. I open my eyes, and I’m in my room. Things seem slower, and I know that there is a good chance I am dreaming. I walk around my room and think that there is a chance that I am sleepwalking, as everything is very slow but still realistic. I fear my roommates will see me walking around the house but figure the risk is worth it and continue on my way to the bathroom to look in the mirror. . . .

Though prior to this I had had many lucid dreams, this example shows the level of realness that can be experienced in a lucid dream. The best way to prepare for experiences in lucid dreaming is to first expect the unexpected, and second, to practice being aware of whatever you experience. Both principles especially apply to physical sensations and surroundings. Compare the waking and dreaming versions of each.

UNDERSTANDING THE BODY

Some of the experiences around lucid dreaming can be scary and confusing, and they can cause a lucid dream to become negative or to end suddenly if the dream is poorly understood. If you can relax your body during these events, you can change the experience as well as the direction and results of the dream.

There are specific sensations that cue a lucid dream or out-of-body experience. Buzzing sounds are often heard before or during sleep paralysis and are a good indicator that a lucid dream or out-of-body experience is about to occur. Hypnotic hallucinations, paralysis, extreme vibrations, and a sense of floating or falling often are tied to these types of dreams as well. If you remind yourself that this is common, they will be less alarming should you experience them.

REALISM

When a person first starts to explore a lucid dream, they are often found testing the environment to see how real something is or is not. A normal lucid dream contains a type of realism that is below the realism of reality. There may be impossibilities in the physics of the dream world or unrealistic characters involved in the dream.

In cases where people have out-of-body-experience lucid dreams, the realism is increased to another level. In an out-of-body experience, there seems to be an even greater realization that they are dreaming or traveling to another level of reality. Details are more vivid in out-of-body experiences than they are in normal lucid dreams; out-of-body experiences often seem so real that many dreamers have believed that these dreams are, in fact, real 3D experiences.

Simple experiments within out-of-body experiences reveal that they pass standard reality checks in the dream, indicating they are more than just basic lucid dreams. I tested the reality of the following dream, which I introduced at the beginning of this chapter:

I flick on and off the light in the bathroom and it works as it should, which causes me to believe that I’m sleepwalking. I look at my face in the mirror and notice everything is slightly green. I walk down the stairs, which lead to outside the house, and see my shoes. I position my shoes so that when I awake the next day I will see that I was sleepwalking. I continue outside, where the sky is full of amazing stars and supernovas. After walking around for a while, I lose my lucidity and have a long dream. When I awake and check my shoes, I see that they are not positioned in any strange manner, and I notice that the temperature outside is around fifteen degrees, which would have caused me to wake up if I had gone outside in my sleeping clothes.

Although in this dream I thought the out-of-body experience was real, I still was unable to produce any results where the dream interacted with reality. Theories have been presented that when we have an out-of-body experience our minds tend to create a world that resembles the one we went to sleep in. Often there is a portal—literally, a door or window in the dream—that we walk (or run or fly) through to be transported into a unique dream world.

It is unknown exactly why these dreams seem so much more real than other types of lucid dreams, but it’s hypothesized that the area of the brain that deals with long-term memory and intention remains active during the dream. Another hypothesis is that these dreams are interacting with another form or level of reality called the astral. Regardless of the reason, often people who have out-of-body experiences also feel vibrations, have auditory and visual hallucinations, and even have sleep paralysis.