Control your dreams
We tell you how to have lucid dreams
Smashwords Edition, version 1.26 (23 January 2012)
Text Copyright 2011 Tom Stafford and Cathryn Bardsley
Illustrations Copyright 2011 Harriet Cameron
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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Tom Stafford is the co-author of “Mind Hacks”, a collection of do-it-yourself experiments on the nature of our minds. Read more about it at http://mindhacks.com Tom lives on the internet at http://idiolect.org.uk
Your guides are Tom Stafford and Cathryn Bardsley:
This is a picture of us both asleep on the village field, Edale, Derbyshire, UK.
You will need: time to sleep
Your journey will take: weeks
Category: states of mind
Points available: 4 + 30
The Treasure:
A world where you are in absolute control! Bend time and space, command armies, create whole worlds! Things which are impossible in waking life are yours for the taking in the world of your dreams, if only you can become aware that you are dreaming, and so take control. Some people have these "lucid dreams" spontaneously, but anyone can learn to make them more likely.
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Before you set out:
The most fertile time for lucid dreams is the last phase of sleep, at the end of the night. This means that if you are always woken from slumber by an alarm you may not get as much opportunity for lucid dreams as someone who wakes up naturally.
The Journey
1. Remember your dreams
We all dream, even if we don't remember it when we wake up. To learn to lucid dream it helps to begin paying more attention to your dream life. Upon waking, you should try to think about what you've just been thinking about, rather than thinking forward in the day. It also helps if you don’t move, but stay in the position you woke up in. Practise this, and you'll soon be remembering your dreams, and larger and larger chunks of them. Some people find that writing each morning's dreams in a dream diary helps with this. secret life of
2. Spot dream signs secret life of
Now you need to really dwell on your dreams. Because your aim is to become aware that you are dreaming, when you are dreaming, an awareness of what your dreams are like in general is helpful. Try and spot themes, patterns and things that only happen to you when you're in a dream and not when you're awake. These will be your "dream signs", things you can notice to prompt the awareness that you are dreaming. Some people find that colours are always more vivid in their dreams, or certain places always crop up, or they see dead friends or relatives. One of us, Cat, used to recurrently dream she was about to fail her maths test. Instead of thinking when she woke up "I passed my maths test years ago", she learnt to recognise dreaming about her maths test as a dream sign.
3. Apply dream tests
Next you are at the stage to apply dream tests. These are checks you can perform in a dream to prove to yourself that you are dreaming. It can be really hard to know, even though it is so obvious when you wake up. So you need to develop a test, or perhaps tests, to use when you spot a dream sign.
One trick is to learn to ask yourself while you are awake "am I dreaming now?" and not take it for granted that you aren't. Over the course of the day get used to regularly performing dream tests, or set a trigger for asking yourself if you really are awake, such as when you open a door or when you look at your hand. You might spend a lot of time when you are awake questioning whether you are awake or not, and it might seem a bit ridiculous, but one time you will do it and find you are dreaming. You can use this method to catch yourself dreaming, even if you do not remember your dreams, but it is still helpful to remember them.
Thinking about whether you are dreaming during the day is instructive because it teaches you to notice the difference between waking life and dreaming, and this can help you with just knowing when you are dreaming.
Dream tests:
- Try light switches. In your dreams the light levels won't change.
- Try any kind of electrics or machinery. You will flick the switch or push the button, but nothing happens. Alarm clocks, or anything with a digital display, will not work properly.
- Read something, but you must read it twice (if it reads the same both times, you're probably awake).
- Look at your hands; studying your own hands can trigger awareness of dreaming in some people. What's convenient about this technique is that, although you might not be able to find any electrical equipment, or written material, you will generally always have your hands!
- Look away and look back. If it looks the same when you look back then you probably aren't dreaming.
- Attempt to levitate very gently, by making your body lift slightly off of the ground.
- Think back over the last ten minutes. How did you get to where you are? What have you just been doing? If you can't tell how, and if you don't have a continuous memory (or if your memory is outlandish, so that ten minutes ago you were at the beach and now you're at the top of the Empire State Building) then you may suspect that you are dreaming.
- Some people just know. Lucky them.
A way not to check is pinching yourself. It is actually really easy to dream that you pinch yourself so it doesn’t tell you anything about whether you are dreaming or not.
Some people experience the "beginner's luck" dream, where after learning about lucid dreams for the first time, have one that very night, without any particular effort.
4. First stop: achieve lucidity
If you have realised that you are dreaming, through whatever means, you are at Level 1 Lucidity. Congratulations! However, you may realise you are dreaming but nothing more. This can be frustrating. You might remain caught up in the activity or emotions of the dream, even though you know, to some small extent, that it is "just a dream". For example, you may try to escape a monster by flying when you realise you are dreaming. In retrospect, when you wake, you may see that you should have just stopped trying to escape because a dream-monster couldn't hurt you. You could have fought and defeated it, or asked it what it wants.
5. Second stop: extend and flex your lucidity
Now you want to extend this awareness and become more powerful within it. You have to walk a narrow path between too much awareness and too little. If you become too excited about your awareness of the dream you may wake up, but if you become too absorbed in the detail of the dream you may lose your awareness, and you just go back to dreaming again.
Good things to do to cement yourself in awareness of your dreaming:
- Stay calm. If you get too excited by this success of lucid dreaming, you might wake up. A few deep breaths should help.
- Move. Movement, for some reason, seems to keep things going. If you sit around and stare at stuff you just go back to dreaming again. Running, flying, spinning, any kind of moving your body can help to keep your lucidity.
- As you are moving, or start to stop moving, take note of your surroundings – where are you, what’s happening?
- Think about your dream goal (see below) as this will help to focus you on the dream.
6. Dream goals
You've arrived: a stable, powerful lucidity. Now, you should attempt one of your dream goals. It is good to have dream goals, things you resolve to try out when you next achieve lucidity.
Popular dream goals are
- Flying. Always good.
- Sex. Popular. And Consequence free.
- Experiencing texture, or taste, or perhaps another sense that you don't typically focus on when dreaming.
- Practice a physical activity, like judo, swimming or archery - anything that you are trying to master in waking life. Good practice in your dreams will have a benefit for you when you try that thing again when you are awake.
- Consider problems from your life: banal things like how to rearrange the furniture in your living room, or more cerebral things like your physics homework. You can get a different perspective on these things in your dreams. You can take decisions in dreams!
- Vanquish foes or face conflict situations. This might be a particular dream monster that comes to you - you can ask it what it wants, or who it is, to try and get some insight into what your dream is presenting to you. Or, you could try and do some conflict resolution on a real life situation. So if you're having a hard time with your dad you could play out the argument in your dream, and see if that helps you get a different understanding.
- Visit dead friends and relatives, or the famous dead. Just to say hi, or ask them how they are doing. The feeling that you've really shared that time with them can be helpful, or nice. You can say the thing you've always wanted to say but never got to say, or you can tell a missed loved one about what’s been happening in your life.
- Some people try dream analysis on their dreams while they are having them, which they report as producing more insights than analysing dreams while awake.
- Revel in the reality of the dream, the detail! the colours! the textures! how real it seems! Which is (of course) why it is so hard to spot that you are dreaming in the first place. When you think about your dreams when you are awake you are doing it knowing that it is just a dream, so the dreams seems ridiculous and clownish. But when you are dreaming and you realise you are dreaming it is astonishing how like waking it seems. Which in a sense, as far as you brain is concerned, it is.
- Resolve nightmares. Recurrent nightmares are a gift for lucid dreaming because they present the opportunity for noticing that something only happens in your nightmare. If you become lucid in a nightmare you may want to take control and overpower your pursuer or enquire of them what they want (it depends on the nature of the nightmare and of why it is troubling you). Or you may simply wish to remove yourself from the unpleasant situation.
Dangers and distractions
Beware of the ‘false awakening’. Imagine the scene – you have just been trying to turn on some lights, but none of them work properly. This has happened to you before, and would always stress you out, but now you know to recognise it as a dream sign, and hey presto, you are lucid dreaming! You look around at the room you are in, and kind of ‘fall’ to the floor, and land with a bump back in your bed. Rats, you think to yourself, I’ve woken up. But have you? It is possible to dream all this, so it can be worth checking that you are really awake before you give up on the lucid dream. Even experienced lucid dreamers can fall into this trap!
For the win: points
+ 1 point: Reach lucidity
+ 1 point: Achieve a dream goal.
+ 2 points: find something that you can do when you're awake but that you can't do in a dream.
+ 2 points: find something that you can imagine doing, but seems impossible in a dream (can you walk through walls? Give yourself a third arm? Speak a forgotten language?)
+ 10 points: Agree a common task with a friend, which you will both complete in a lucid dream and compare notes, for example you will both visit the temple of Angkor Wat and collect the most precious piece of treasure from below the central shrine. What do you bring back?
+ 20 points: Communicate with someone outside the dream by making eyeball movements. Your eyeballs are the only muscles you can move in a dream that also move in your sleeping body. Even through it feels like you are moving your arms in your dream, your sleeping arms do not move. This needs a dedicated friend to watch you, since they might have to watch you for eight hours until the end of the night, the most likely time to have a dream. If you’d like to read about the researchers who pioneered this method, and the details of how to do it, see Jeff Warren's book, or the LaBerge (2000) article, both mentioned below.
Travellers' tales
So you're here- at the frontier of consciousness. Lucid dreams are a challenge to the idea that we're unconscious when we're asleep, and they show something of the multifaceted nature of our minds - awareness, control and experience all disassociate here.
Lucid dreaming hasn't made much of an impact on the peer reviewed scientific literature. Perhaps this is because of all the rigmarole involved, or perhaps because results can be inconsistent across dreams and across dreamers.
But for you, this is just an opportunity. Here you are at the frontier of YOUR consciousness. How does your mind work, what are the themes, the quirks and the possibilities? Lucid dreaming gives you a playground to explore your mind without the constraints of everyday material reality. You can find out the operating rules of your consciousness, explore both your mental habits, and how to respond differently to them.
Some dream researchers have claimed that lucid dreams challenge the idea that dreaming is a lesser, "nonconscious", state. Related to this, they argue that dreaming (lucid and non-lucid) can be used to tell us about normal waking consciousness (Kahan and LaBerge, 1994). Although the content of dreams is pretty weird, the cognitive processes that go on are essentially the same as in waking life (Kahan and LaBerge, 2011). Not everyone agrees (Windt and Noreika, forthcoming). For a non-scientific take on this topic, read The Unconsoled, which draws much of its power as a novel from the disconcerting and dream-like quality of the events it describes.
You can read about communicating outside of dreams in Jeff Warren’s book, pp 121 – 124. You can read the wisdom of a guru of research into lucid dreams, Stephen LaBerge, in his books or the article LaBerge (2000) which contain a good basic description of exactly how people in lucid dreams communicate with the waking world. A potentially important recent result suggests that we may be on track to identify particular brain regions that are responsible for achieving lucidity - Neider et al (2011) found that individuals who do better at a task which is associated with the workings of a brain region called the vmPFC have more lucid dreams
Richard Linklater's film Waking Life has lots of material about dreams and consciousness, including parts on how to spot if you are having a lucid dream.
Endnotes
Cat did more of the thinking and the dreaming, Tom wrote down what Cat said. Harry drew the illustrations. Thanks for Vaughan Bell for reading a draft.
Kahan, T. L., & LaBerge, S. (1994). Lucid Dreaming as Metacognition: Implications for Cognitive Science. Consciousness and Cognition, 3(2), 246-264. doi:06/ccog.1994.1014
Kahan, T. L., & LaBerge, S. P. (2011). Dreaming and waking: Similarities and differences revisited. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(3), 494-514. doi:16/j.concog.2010.09.002
LaBerge, S., Rheingold, H. (1990). Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming.
LaBerge, S. (2004). Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life.
LaBerge, S. (2000). Lucid dreaming: Evidence and methodology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23(6), 962-3. Commentary on target articles by J.A. Hobson et al. and by M. Solms in a special issue on dreaming. Online at http://www.lucidity.com/slbbs/index.html
Neider, M., Pace-Schott, E. F., Forselius, E., Pittman, B., & Morgan, P. T. (2011). Lucid dreaming and ventromedial versus dorsolateral prefrontal task performance. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(2), 234-244. doi:16/j.concog.2010.08.001
Warren, J. (2008). The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness. Oneworld, Oxford.
Windt, J. M., & Noreika, V. (n.d.). How to integrate dreaming into a general theory of consciousness--A critical review of existing positions and suggestions for future research. Consciousness and Cognition, In Press, Corrected Proof. doi:16/j.concog.2010.09.010