Lucid Dreaming: What Are the Best Techniques for Controlling Your Dreams According to Science

Of course, there is a wide spectrum of what can happen in a dream of this kind: from fleeting, passive awareness that you are in a dream, to controlling and being able to direct the dream.

If people were able to signal eye movements during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, we would agree that they were lucid dreams, says Karen Concolli, PhD, a research psychologist at Northwestern University in Illinois at Sleep Research Laboratories. United State.

Rapid eye movement is the stage in which dreams occur.

While some people experience lucid dreams automatically, others only have them through an external trigger (such as having a conversation, watching a video, reading an article about lucid dreaming, or after working hard to achieve one).

“There are people who can learn (get one) in a few days, and some who need three months,” explains Michael Schriedl, a researcher in the sleep laboratory at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

Studies have found that the main motivation for having a lucid dream is to have fun or make a wish come true, however Lucid dreams are also used by many to better deal with nightmares bad dreams, solving problems, exploring creative ideas, or practicing a skill.

Some research has revealed that participants who practice simple motor skills in their lucid dreams, such as finger tapping, improve their ability to wake up compared to control groups.

One study found that people who clasped their hands during lucid dreams showed activity in the same regions of the motor cortex as in the waking state.

It was even suggested Lucid dreams can be used to treat serious psychological disorderss, such as clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

After I first heard about lucid dreams in the early 2000s, I started keeping a dream diary and Very soon I had my first lucid dream: I was walking down a street near my school and I ran into a friend and we stopped to chat.

For some reason, the conversation had something unreal about it, and that made me realize I was dreaming. I yelled at my friend and she immediately jumped up and started flying, while my partner waved at me.

Over the years, I’ve had a few lucid dreams. I belong to the average population when it comes to experiencing lucid dreams. In a 1998 survey of the dream behavior of 1,000 Austrians, at least 26% reported having vivid dreams sometimes.

A 2011 survey of 900 German adults found that half reported having lucid dreaming, and it was more common among women and young adults. A 2016 meta-analysis had similar results.

Most lucid dreamers have these dreams naturally and spontaneously, without intent.

Often, normal, lucid dreams It begins in adolescence, sometimes as a coping mechanism for recurring nightmaressays Tadas Stomperis, a professor of psychology at Vilnius University in Lithuania.

Because lucid dreamers are often rare, researchers may find it difficult to achieve high success rates in inducing lucid dreams, making them difficult to study, especially in laboratory settings.

For this reason, research is currently focused on determining which technologies work best

“at the moment, We don’t have a single technology It can induce lucid dreaming reliably and with a high success rate,” Stompers says.

However, there are several easy ways to make it easier.

people that Remember dreams wellfor example, they are more likely to remember having lucid dreams.

Dream recall can be improved with a file Dream JournalRecording audio on your phone about the dream or playing it in your mind for 10 minutes after waking up, says Denholm Aspe, a research psychologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Reality test It is another widely used technique. It consists in asking yourself several times a day if you are dreaming or not, with the hope that you will also do so when you are asleep, and this will lead to lucid dreaming.

“In general, when we sleep, we uncritically accept what is happening in our dreams,” Stompers says.

This is partly caused by frontal cortexwhich is responsible for our self-awareness and critical thinking, is slightly deactivated during REM sleep.

According to a study, the frontal regions of the brain can be activated a bit more during lucid dreams.

However, a lot of research suggests that the most effective means is to sleep for four to six hours, wake up for an hour to do exercises focused on inducing lucid dreams, and then go back to sleep.

“The idea is to do it as soon as you have about two hours of sleep left,” says Asby. “Most of us have about 50% of our dreams in that period.”

Konkoli thinks this is true The most effective way that people can do at home. The problem, he admits, is that “waking up at 4 a.m..M. It’s neither fun nor sustainable.”.

Aspy identified a specific variation of this technique in a study of 350 international participants published in 2020, which examined five different methods of inducing lucid dreaming. call her “clear dream mnemonic induction” (Mild, for its English abbreviation) and is considered the most effective.

This involves waking up after about five hours of sleep, setting an intention to lucid dream, and repeating The phrase “Next time I dream, I’ll remember that I’m dreaming”, before going back to sleep.

Asby points out that there are many potential technologies that have yet to be investigated. One of the approaches he identified in his study that he sees as promising is technology “The lucid dream initiated by the senses.”

This involves waking up after five hours and then repeatedly switching attention between visual, auditory and physical sensations before going back to sleep.

The Aspy study concluded that reality testing is not a very effective technique. But it is very likely that different techniques will work better depending on the person.

And of course, even the best won’t work if you don’t practice it regularly, says Shredl.

Another method called “Activate Guided Clarity”which aims to induce lucid dreaming in a single nap session in the lab, was tested in a 2020 study led by Michelle Carr, a sleep and neurophysiology researcher at the University of Rochester, New York.

The researchers provided the participants with lucid dream information and training using audio and visual cues before they took a 90-minute nap, during which the same audio and visual cues were played during REM sleep.

Participants indicated that they were dreaming explicitly using eye movements.

“This is made Half of the participants had lucid dreamssays Konkoli, co-author of the study.

Three out of five study participants who had never had a dream did so in the laboratory using this method.

One problem with lucid dream research is that studies are often overdone Small range or was methodological problemsalthough this seems to be getting better.

In fact, many psychologists did not believe that lucid dreaming existed until the 1980s, after several major studies showed that lucid dreamers could send signals to the outside world during REM sleep.

Since then, research has progressed: Konkoli’s study, for example, showed that conscious dreamers can use predetermined eye movements to correctly answer simple math problems whispered to them by researchers, demonstrating the two-way communication between conscious dreamers and experimenters.

However, debate continues about what exactly happens during lucid dreaming.

In the end, scholars like Konkoli They hope the research will allow them to understand more about how and why we dream. She also hopes that they will shed light on consciousness itself.

“It’s a very unique state of consciousness with unique properties,” he says. “For me, if you understand how that happens, and what the difference is in lucid dreaming compared to being awake, we will know more about what the human mind does in general.”

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