Lucid Dreaming Create Your Own Dreamscape

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WORDS Laurence Riesselmann

Everyone has dreams and desires, but what if it were possible to experience our aspirations through our dreams? With the knowledge that we spend more than a third of our lives sleeping, wouldn’t it be beneficial to design a sleep habit that maximises this oneiric world? In fact, if someone told you that your dream state could potentially offer breakthroughs in all kinds of creative endeavours, would you be more interested then? If so, then welcome to the world of lucid dreaming.

Being able to recall your dream is the first step towards lucid dreaming. Keep a dream journal by your bed and record your dreams as you wake in the night or first thing in the morning. Photo: Jordan McQueen/unsplash.com

Dreaming has long been linked with creativity. But what lucid dreaming does is offer a way to harness this conscious process of creation for all kinds of personal development. In a lucid dream, you are conscious that you are dreaming but you are able to continue dreaming and guide the visuals as you would like. This adds a level of reality and power to your perception which means your dreams become a tool for internal (and external) teaching and transformation.

Popular films like Inception have broached the topic of virtual dream realities (Chris Nolan the director is himself a lucid dreamer), but how do you craft a dream and why would you want to? Lucid dreamers argue that if we spend so much of our lifetime asleep why not use this time for a specific project, like learning a new skill or composing music. Throughout the course of history, dreams have been credited with breakthroughs – Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity during a dream and Mary Shelley’s classic horror story Frankenstein was inspired by a dream – so both scientific and artistic projects have been birthed in the world of slumber.

Dream purpose

Dreaming has been researched and documented for centuries, but even today there is much debate and controversy around its purpose. Early tribes and hunter-gatherers used dreams to connect and interpret their spiritual lives and actively encouraged conscious dreaming. Today, scientists continue to discuss theories for dreaming but the question is extremely complex with researchers failing to reach a consensus. Some of the main theories over the years include:

Pyschoanalytic theory of dreams – this theory (pioneered by Sigmund Freud) suggests our unconscious, repressed thoughts are revealed through our dreams.

Interestingly, Hobson revised his early theory, which was received badly, because it implied dreams had little meaning.

Sleep researchers are discovering more and more about brain activity while dreaming. A study done at the Neurological Clinic in Frankfurt suggests that lucid dreaming constitutes a hybrid state of consciousness with definable and measurable differences from waking and from REM sleep, particularly in frontal areas.

Verifying a lucid dream

So how does a lucid dream differ from a normal dream and how on earth are you able to prove it? In 1975, British psychologist Dr Keith Hearne was able to perform an experiment that enabled the dreamer to signal from within the dream. This test provided the first evidence that lucid dreaming exists and it was featured in Hearne’s PhD ‘Lucid dreams: An electro-physiological and psychological study’. During this experiment, Hearne recorded coded eye movements on a lucid dreamer during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) using an electro-oculogram or EOG. This demonstrated that in a lucid dream, the dreamer is conscious that he is dreaming, but rather than wake up, he is able to stay in the oneiric world and guide his story.

Some people are natural lucid dreamers, while others take practice to experience this rich and creative dream world. Photo: Alexandria LaNier

Rebecca Turner, teacher of lucid dreaming, describes, ‘A fully lucid dream can be perfectly tangible, rich and visually detailed. When probed, it can generate seemingly impossible levels of self-awareness – such as 360-degree vision, multiple simultaneous dreams, and even visual representations of the fifth dimension. Because all of this takes place in your mind, the dream world is infinite. No laws. No boundaries. No limitations. Anything you can conceive of comes true.’ From this summary, it’s clear the conscious dream is more magical and exploratory than a normal dream.

A few years after Hearne’s discovery, sleep scientist Stephen LaBerge, director of research at the Lucidity Institute and author of Lucid Dreaming, performed a similar test and his results garnered more public attention. LaBerge describes the phenomenon as a state between sleeping and being awake so by this he means that lucid dreaming takes place when the body is sleeping but a part of the mind is awake. This kind of conscious dreaming occurs mostly during REM sleep because during this phase, the brain is hyperactive.

LaBerge explains that Freud’s dream theories attributed dream activity to the unconscious mind, which detracted from the fact that dreams can be conscious experiences. He emphasises, ‘From that [Freud] they seemed to develop the mistaken idea that dreams are themselves unconscious somehow, but they’re not, they’re conscious experiences, otherwise you couldn’t report them. It’s true that the source of dreams is largely unconscious and we don’t know why things happen in the typical dream. In that sense much of the dream content is unconsciously determined but that doesn’t mean that the experience is unconscious.’

Reasons for lucid dreaming

Imagine for a second that you are expected to give a speech in front of hundreds of people, would you be afraid? For many the answer is yes, but numerous lucid dreamers are confident that lucid dreams can help you manage fearful and unpleasant situations. Dreaming about making a great speech boosts your self-confidence, which in turn diminishes fear. It’s the same rationale for using conscious dreaming to overcome nightmares.

Lucid dreaming is also known as conscious dreaming. The body is asleep, but the brain is awake. The dreamer is aware that they are dreaming and this enables the mind to create its own dreamscapes that are tangible and magical.
Photo: Daniela Cuevas/unsplash.com

Daniel Love, British lucid dreaming expert and oneirologist and author of Are You Dreaming?, suffered from vivid nightmares from an early age. ‘My journey as a lucid dreamer started very young; roughly the age of five years old. It was around this time that I suffered from terrible recurring nightmares as well as other parasomnias, such as sleepwalking. As a method to deal with these nightly terrors I devised a crude method in which I’d attempt to “catch the moment I fell asleep”, to cut a long story short, this practice eventually resulted in my own early personal discovery of lucid dreaming.’ Love claims that through lucid dreaming, he was able to transform his bedtime habits into a world of wondrous adventure, not the haunting darkness of his nightmares.

Deirdre Barrett clinical psychologist and dream researcher from Harvard University goes even further. She is confident that dreams can help to solve creative problems. ‘It is possible to influence your dreams by a technique psychologists call “dream incubation”. Breakthrough dreams – where a writer dreams the plot of a novel or a scientist dreams a formula or someone just has a major insight about their personal life – these can happen spontaneously, but you greatly increase their probability by specific requests of your dreaming mind.’ But that’s not all, some scientists believe in body memory during lucid dreaming.

Body memory during this kind of conscious dreaming allows the sleeper to memorise movements. When you learn how to play golf, it takes practice for you to get the ball into the hole with minimal strokes. The reason for this is that your body needs to memorise and coordinate your body movements. But does dreaming of playing golf make you a better golfer? Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry from Harvard University is confident that people are able to consolidate memories while they sleep and he categorises two kinds of learning during slumber: procedural memories and declarative memories. It is the procedural memories that teach us motor and perceptual skills, like playing golf. Stickgold claims, ‘In our dreams we try to figure out what is important about what happened to us. The most brilliant thing that the brain can do is that kind of extraction and meaning-making.’ Stickgold admits there’s a lot more research to uncover but, in his opinion, the brain is preparing its self for waking life situations, so it examines experiences then re-plays and teaches while sleeping.

Lucid dreaming enables the mind to experience an exhilarating freedom. No laws of physics or society can constrain your experience. LaBerge describes, ‘By cultivating awareness in your dreams, you can add more consciousness, more life, to your life. In the process, you will increase your enjoyment of your nightly dream journeys and deepen your understanding of yourself. By waking in your dreams, you can waken to life.’

It’s important to remember that if you are embarking on becoming a lucid dreamer, any technique will take time to master. Many lucid dreamers express frustration at waking too early, so they manage to access lucidity but then they are unable to prolong it. Again, researchers offer guidance to overcome this problem, but it takes time and patience. There are also online courses and mobile apps available to help you develop your skills as well as herbal supplements.

If you can overcome a few hiccups and persevere, the rewards of lucid dreaming are multifarious. Not only can the dream world be used to overcome trauma and nightmares, it can be used to consciously create and develop personal ideas and projects. ‘Lucid dreaming is a powerful psychological tool and an enriching conscious experience,’ says Rachel Turner, teacher of lucid dreaming. The healing power of such deep sleep is an area that is gaining in interest and experience. In the words of Albert Einstein, ‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.’ Perhaps our lucid dreams are the answer to tapping into a higher intelligence.

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