We all sleep and we all dream. These are the universal elements of human experience. It is said that we spend one third of our lifetime sleeping, which means that someone with 60 years of lifespan would spend 20 yrs in sleep! Imagine if we could utilize this time for a greater and long lasting benefit instead of just for rest and recovery. In our culture, dreams are regarded as one of the best ways to understand our true self, and also one of the most important ways to heal. For thousands of years, many great practitioners in Tibet have used dream as a means to achieve the highest goal, awakening or liberation.
What is a lucid dream?
A lucid dream is a dream in which the dreamer is conscious or aware that he/she is dreaming or in other words you are awake in your dreams and you know that it is a dream.
However, there are different levels of lucid dreaming. At the superficial level, there is a lack of stability in the lucidity and so in one instance lucidity is found and in another it is lost. Also, it is not clear and powerful enough to allow you to dictate the course of your dream experience. But on a higher level, lucid dreams are extraordinarily vivid, and the experiences appear to be even more real than the ordinary waking state. Lucidity is stable and you can have a certain amount of freedom and control over your dream. You can shape the dream environment and the dream characters, to a great extent, according to your wishes. So, you can fly, walk through walls, enlarge small objects, travel anywhere around and outside this world, visit heaven, meditate, and do whatever your mind is capable of thinking, there is no limit except the ones your mind perceives. But if you challenge and overcome the boundaries of your habitual, constricted and conditioned mind, the mind becomes flexible and it can then be applied to transform anything in your life. We believe that the mind is up to seven times more powerful in the lucid dream state.
How common are Lucid dreams?
A study revealed that around 55% of the people have had a lucid dream experience at least once in their lifetime and about 23% experienced lucid dreams one or more times in a month.
It was also found that people who had practiced meditation for a long time tended to have more lucid dreams.
Some people have regular lucid dreams spontaneously, and there are many who train themselves to lucid dream. There are several techniques that can help induce lucidity in your dream state and with regular training one can start experiencing lucid dreams with increasing frequency.
Benefits of lucid dreaming
We all know that our overall well-being depends greatly on the quality of our sleep. Sometimes a bad dream or a nightmare can influence our emotional state badly even in our waking life. But we do not have any control on the ordinary dream, even the most improbable event, characters etc seem to be absolutely real to us. There is a lack of critical thinking and the awareness of our state, and we get carried away by the force of the dream events.
However, in a lucid dream the dreamer is fully conscious that he/she is dreaming, so the dream loses its grip on the person. That itself is liberating since we do not have to suffer and react impulsively to all the negative events that occur in our dreams anymore, instead we can take our power back and act from a place of awareness and even transform the nightmare into something positive and healing.
The benefits of lucid dreaming are innumerable ranging from spiritual development to everything related to the worldly matters. It is an endless source of creativity, psychological, emotional and physical healing, problem solving, honing skills, and so on.
It is scientifically proven that lucid dreams activate the prefrontal cortex and other areas of brain related to higher cognitive functions, including attention, working memory, planning, and self-consciousness, and induces neuroplasticity.
So, if you are not very familiar with all this, I encourage you to do more research on this topic.
In the next post we will discuss the various techniques that can be used to induce lucid dreaming.
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