Have you ever experienced super powers? Fallen down a great height and then suddenly discovered yourself flying? This is in fact possible with lucid dreaming — the ability to become conscious mid-dream and thus, control your dream world. It is the most surreal feeling ever. And I recently became obsessed with lucid dreams after I had my first one shortly after I subjected myself to a mini experiment.
I got the inspiration for the experiment from an article on Slate Magazine about how to turn a “night owl” into a morning person. Perfect! I thought. This could potentially be the solution to my continual tardiness in attending 8am classes taught by professors with monotone voices that just didn’t seem worth the effort. So I started by forcing myself to take a 20-minute walk in the morning as soon as I woke up so that the bright sunlight could activate the part of my hypothalamus that regulates circadian rhythms. At night I would do the opposite: avoid bright light before bedtime. But since my dorm room lights didn’t come with fancy dimmer switches, I would always be found wearing sunglasses after 7pm. Then I progressed to the next stage: popping melatonin pills every night that would enhance the effect of the natural hormone, making me drowsy faster. It was soon after this that I started having much more vivid dreams at night.
However, since melatonin only amplifies normal sleep patterns, I would wake up at night sometimes after completing a REM cycle and then go back to sleep and start dreaming again. Without realizing it, I was using a method that is commonly used to induce lucid dreaming, called Wake Then Back To Bed (WBTB). As a result, when I would go to sleep after being disturbed in the middle of the night, I would almost immediately recognize that what I was experiencing was actually part of a dream!
This led me to do some research about lucid dreaming, which is quickly becoming a hot topic in neuroscience and cognitive psychology because it promises to isolate one of the hardest-to-pin-down objects of all time: consciousness itself. I found that not only have scientists demonstrated that it is possible to be self-aware in the REM sleep state (Stanford, Hearne, Ogilvie, etc.) but even new EEG technology has found a unique brain signature in support of this research: a 40Hz spike in brain activity in the frontal lobe during lucid dreams.
What makes this 40Hz finding so intriguing is that it has previously been correlated with waking consciousness — as well as meditation and hypnosis. Waking consciousness is not just one state, either, but continuously shifts around between linguistic and emotional thinking, day dreaming, focused attention, and creative mental states that are almost dream-like in their own right. Therefore, the implications of further studying and analyzing lucid dreams are not only philosophical but also address psychiatry’s aims to heal mental illness, overcome fears and enhance your abilities.
I, for one, highly recommend trying out lucid dreaming. You don’t even know the half of it till you experience it!
Want to learn more before you have a go at it? Check out some of my recommended readings and techniques for lucid dreaming.
Hello Knvul,
ReplyDeleteThe lucid dreaming seems to be a fun experiment! Besides of using this method to heal patients with psychological problems, the research for consciousness and REM sleep are some interesting scientific factors to learn. This reminds me of the introduction to Psychology class in community college and further proves how amazing human brain is!
Stephanie