The Lucid Dream: A Look at Conscious Dreaming

A lucid dream, also know as a conscious dream, is a dream in which the dreamer is fully aware of the fact that they are dreaming and is able to interact with their dream by consciously controlling their actions the same way one would in their waking life. Lucid dreams can often times feel as real to the dreamer as actually being awake. Nevertheless, because a lucid dream is in fact a dream, the person experiencing the dream, depending on their level of self awareness, can do things that would be impossible in the natural world (e.g., flying, walking through walls, teleportation).

Scientists have been researching lucid dreams for many decades; however, claims of people having lucid dreams have existed throughout history. Scientists were at one time very skeptical of lucid dreams due to the inability to accurately study a person's dreams and ascertain whether or not the person was lying or telling the truth when delineating what they dreamt, and if in fact they were lucid. Today, many scientists believe it is possible to study lucid dreaming, and conduct extensive research on the subject through REM (Rapid Eye Movement) tests, which they believe are directly correlated with lucid dreaming and can be used to indicate if the patient is having a lucid dream by communicating with the patient via their eye movements.

Both people who have experienced lucid dreams, and those who have not, practice techniques to induce lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming posses the allure of being a completely free and safe hallucinogenic experience, as well as a momentary escape from reality. Techniques for inducing lucid dreams are also sometimes offered to those who suffer from habitual nightmares as a way of controlling their bad dreams. As with other common sleep disorders, such as sleep paralysis, there are those who believe that lucid dreams are spiritual in essence.

Why people are not naturally lucid in dreams is as mysterious as the cause of lucid dreams. Some speculate that people would sleep their lives away if they were always lucidly dreaming or had the ability to do so at will, and therefore our bodies naturally prevent this from occurring. Another theory suggest that our minds simply believe what they see, thus accepting whatever we dream to be real, the same way a person experiencing a drug induced visual and/or auditory hallucination might believe that what they are seeing and/or hearing is real. One other similar theory postulates that our brains, during childhood, do not have a clear understanding and perception of what reality is, so the preposterous things that occur in our dreams as children set the precursor for what we will accept in our dreams as adults (i.e., our mind has its' own set of rules and guidelines for what it will accept in our dreams, which may be completely different from those in our waking life.)