Lucid Dreams and Their Benefits

Lucid dreaming occurs when in the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage of your sleep. Most people go through several cycles of the five stages of sleep during their nightly rest. The REM stage may occur three or four different times per night, each getting longer than the previous one. Learning to recognize, remember, and control your dreams can benefit your dream world as well as your life in the real world.

A dream becomes a lucid dream when you become aware of the fact that you are dreaming. This is both easier and harder than it sounds. It is easy because anyone can learn to do it, but for some it takes a lot of practice and determination while for others it comes more naturally. It is hard because it is easy to lose your concentration while dreaming. Just when you are about to question whether or not a cat can be green, your boss starts yelling at you about some work he is waiting for and the green cat is quickly forgotten. One must train themselves to recognize when they are dreaming. Although merely recognizing that you are in a dream has its benefits, learning to control your dreams is where all the fun is.

Lucid dreaming has benefitted many people with habitual or returning nightmares. One doesn't actually need to be in control of their dreams for this to work. Merely recognizing that one is dreaming often diminishes or even completely eliminates the fear and stress some nightmares cause. If, for example, you have a recurring dream where you drive your car over the side of a cliff, recognizing that you are dreaming during the nightmare allows you to realize that there is no real danger involved and the dream will no longer scare you, or it may stop coming altogether.

There are many ways to learn to recognize when you are in a dream. But first you need to rehearse. One method is to buy a watch that beeps every hour on the hour. Every time the watch beeps during the day, you stop what you are doing for a few seconds and look around and deem that you are not dreaming. Every night, put the watch next to your bed. After developing the habit of checking your surroundings for dream material in your waking hours, you will eventually start doing the same thing in your sleeping hours whenever your mind hears the beep. Once you start a reality check in your dream, you will be forced to recognize that green cat as a dream cat and you will consciously know you are dreaming while you are in the dream. Another method would be to form the habit of looking at your hands a lot during the day, but you must do it often and every day in order to develop it as habit so that you will eventually also start looking at your hands a lot in your dreams. Again, when they don't look right or the background is swimming or not what logic would dictate it to be, then you are dreaming. You may develop your own method of day time reality checks, but whatever it is, it must become habit so that you will continue the habit in your sleep.

Once you have learned to recognize when you are dreaming, then you can start controlling your dreams. This is a great way to overcome the fear of public speaking or initiating conversations with strangers or the opposite sex. You can give problems or conversations a trial run in your sleep and have more confidence in yourself when the moment comes in the real world. You can also revisit all your favorite moments in life and relive them as often as you like. There's nothing you can't do in your dreams as long as you believe it is possible.

Flying is one of the most often desired activities of people who can control their dreams. Even though we all know that one cannot fly like Superman in reality, once you have learned how to recognize that you are dreaming, you can reason with yourself one can certainly fly in the dream world, making the impossible quite possible. Your own imagination becomes the only limit to what you can do in a dream.

Finally, you will need to start remembering your dreams. This also takes time and practice and patience. Again, some people remember their dreams more often than others, but everyone can train themselves to remember more than they do. Keeping a dream log will help. If you are in the habit of reaching for your dream log every time you wake up, you will find that you will begin remembering more of your dreams. It also helps to verbally remind yourself that you are going to remember your dreams when you wake up as you go to sleep. But this step is equally important. You will not be able to benefit from your dreams while awake if you never remember them after waking up.

It sounds simple, and it is, but much of your success will be in how strongly you can instill your habits. For some it takes as much as a year or more, for others it may just be a matter of months. The biggest reason for failure is simply people giving up too soon. But everyone is very capable of making much better use of the twenty-two years the average person sleeps.

There are also several different videos and tools available to help accelerate your success, but most of them are very pricy. Although these products may help you attain lucid dreams and the control of them more quickly, you will find that you no longer need them once you begin achieving lucidity with any regularity. If you can afford them, most of them do indeed work. But if you can't, just work on your habits. You can do it.