What it is
Lucid dreaming is an experience that may have interested many people, it is estimated that at least 20% of the western population becomes the protagonist of this type of dream events. In fact, in Eastern countries, this practice is much more widespread, because it is part of the tradition especially linked to Buddhist thought but also Taoist and it receives a great deal of attention especially in the context of Shamanism .
The combination of the word ” dream ” with the attribute ” lucid ” occurred for the first time in 1923 by the psychiatrist and writer Frederik Van Eeden. The latter defines oneironaut as the lucid dreamer , that is, one who has the experience of being aware of his own dream. The oneironaut is the one who knows he is dreaming. Precisely this statement: dreaming of being dreaming can almost seem like a paradox. Instead, this awareness inevitably becomes very fascinating to study, as it implies that the subject is allowed to manipulate his own reality, obviously on a dream level. Throughout your life, you sleep for about a third of your time, and on average you can dream up to two hours a night. The multisensory experiences of which a person becomes the protagonist during sleep can therefore be truly manifold.What and how to analyze a lucid dream
In our waking life, we share with others the sphere of the world linked to phenomenology, which therefore has proven rules that are part of shared scientific disciplines. On the other hand, in the dream world, phenomena lose their linearity and thus the perceptions related to the events can be much less predictable and regular.
A fundamental requirement, to be able to analyze this type of dreams and verify that the dream experience can be recognized as such, and that the dream itself is rememberedfrom the subject. The possibility of being able to move in a dream is very interesting, also to go and dissect further capacities of our mind and brain. For example, the creative capacity of the mind is expressed precisely in the dream, the activity of the right part of the brain is increased while we sleep and dream. When you are aware that you are dreaming, you no longer passively undergo what happens in the dream but it can be modeled at will, interacting in it creatively. You can eliminate characters or situations that are scary, for example.
In lucid dreamingthere are also incongruous elements that do not belong to the waking life, one can in fact meet imaginative, deceased, fearful characters. For example, the paradox of meeting someone who is no longer alive becomes extremely exciting and interesting, as the brain allows you to ask for things and talk to the people you meet, thus favoring the resolution of situations that have remained alive as suspended. Or you are faced with a danger, an enemy and you have the possibility of neutralizing such unpleasant or paralyzing situations. All this then has a great impact on life during wakefulness as it gives the possibility to react to situations, instill more strength, and as if the dream experience can turn into a gym in which to train to review situations,The lucid dream allows us to educate the mind to unusual mental passages, avoiding always and only considering it in an objective way but placing ourselves in front of it in a subjective way and therefore with the awareness of being able to change it. Lucid Dreams Can Be Studied Lucid
dreams occur during REM sleep. In order to study the phenomenon, the psychophysiologists worked with expert subjects who had refined the ability to get closer to their dream world, immediately noting the numerous lucid dreams that they used to have during the phases of sleep. Keep your personal dream journal, and a very common practice among lucid dreamers, in order to train themselves to remember when they wake up, to prevent the whole dream from disappearing. There are also different techniques of induction to lucid dreaming , some act directly to maintain the conscious waking state before entering the REM phase, others instead help the dreamer to reach an awareness of being dreaming while the dream is already started. However, these techniques require time and a particular inclination on the part of the subject. To have the awareness that you are dreaming then you can carry out the so-called reality tests during the dream. In this way it is possible to identify in the dream those elements that serve to characterize the dream world and not the real one. For some scholars, lucid dreams , allowing their internal manipulation by the subject who performs them, are able to obtain significant therapeutic effects , in light of the fact that the dream becomes a very powerful mental image.
One of the leading scholars of lucid dreams is LaBerge, who reports numerous cases in which the state of anxiety is reduced precisely when the subject is able to live the anxiety-provoking experience first in the lucid dream, so that it can then be controlled in real life, following the gradual exposure to phobic stimulus occurred during the dream. The basic idea is that the ability to react to fear can then gradually extend to real life as well. However, the studies on lucid dreams still have great margins for in-depth study , even if their interest is spreading very widely and also involves numerous fields, from psychology to art, to literature.but it is still a question of exploring many of the consequences both on a psychological level and for a therapeutic-clinical purpose.
