Question: Is lucid dreaming a real thing, and if so how does it work?

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  1. Great question!,

    They say that Lucid Dreaming is the ability to become aware while you’re dreaming – to consciously “wake up” inside the dream world and control your dreams.

    Many people are quite good at remembering their regular dreams. These provide memories of rich inner worlds that tell us much about the subconscious mind.

    But lucid dreams take one giant leap further – to a fantasy realm where everything you see, feel, taste, hear and smell can be as authentic as your waking reality.

    I read lots of different things bout lucid dreaming, but many of them suggested the use of drugs, which is probably not a good idea.
    I’m kinda of the opinion it’s mre like meditation, but im not an expert!

    Maybe one of the others has an idea?

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  2. I’m a lucid dreamer. I have been since I was a child. It’s pretty handy when you’re having a nightmare….

    How it works for me is that I’m aware that I’m dreaming and that I’m in a dream. So if something happens that I don’t like, I just change it. Like reaching out and changing the TV channel. The downside is that my dreams are very vivid and I can have a hard time adjusting to reality when I wake up. I’ve been known to be really angry at people for things that they did in my dreams…as far as I’m concerned, dream reality is just as real as normal reality!

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  3. This is very interesting, but hurts my head thinking about it 🙁
    And does this mean that people can actually hurt/ die in their dreams as a result of “lucid” dreaming?!?!

    I’ve never experienced anything like this… so I wouldn’t know.

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  4. Whether we’re falling or flying, dancing or driving, moving in our dreams feels very real to us at the time. And our brains, it seems, agree. Researchers who managed to image the brains of sleeping subjects while in a lucid dream, have found that when they moved, their brains fired in the same pattern as when they moved in the real world.

    They asked their subjects to sleep in an MRI scanner and then to dream that they were clenching their jaw. Apparently you can train yourself to lucid dream by writing down your dreams and recognising common themes, is this true Carina?

    The subjects show the same brain activity when they dreamt they clenched their jaw as when they actually did it awake. The problem with this study is that a lot of the people they tried to scan couldn’t actually get to sleep in the scanner — its really loud and clunky. The sample size of the study was really low and so needs to be repeated. Still, pretty cool idea to do this in the first place.

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Comments

  1. Hey Emma…I don’t know. I’ve always done it naturally. I had terrible nightmares as a young child, and I just remember deciding one day that I could alter them. So I did. I suspect that most people could do it…but maybe that’s just because it’s easy for me! And I wouldn’t mind trading in the vividness occasionally….

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