26/04/2019
Hey there, I bet you’re on withdrawal now. No worries your Weekly dose of knowledge is HERE!
Alrighty then cheesy intro aside, have you ever wondered whether or not you can control your dreams? As many of you already know it is possible to be conscious while dreaming and it is really easy too, The actual challenge lies in stability, and how to be fully conscious, and yes it makes a huge difference.. you may know that you’re dreaming but you fail to fully control your dream.
The act of dreaming while being conscious and aware that you are dreaming is called “Lucid Dreaming”, This topic will be covered over two sessions. Today we will cover the science behind it, what sleep cycles are and a brief on the scientifically proven technique with the most success rate, and next week’s session will cover the different techniques in detail and how you can greatly increase your skills by practicing them in your dreams!
Lucid Dreaming is actually scientifically proven. In 1980, Stephen LaBerge at Stanford University performed a pilot study that showed that time perception while counting during a lucid dream is about the same as during waking life. Lucid dreamers counted out ten seconds while dreaming, signaling the start and the end of the count with a pre-arranged eye signal measured with an electrooculogram recording. LaBerge's results were confirmed by German researchers later in 2004. In a further study by Stephen LaBerge, four subjects were compared either singing while dreaming or counting while dreaming. LaBerge found that the right hemisphere was more active during singing and the left hemisphere was more active during counting.
So now that we know that is possible and it is not only “in your head”(pun intended) in a figurative way... let’s talk about sleep cycles. We are not going to dive deep here because it is a very big field but in short, While sleeping you go through mainly two phases of sleep not counting their sub-divisions, REM and NREM phases which stand for “Rapid Eye Movement” and “Non-Rapid Eye Movement”, creative names.. anyways, most if not all of your dreams occur in REM phases of sleep and that’s very important to know otherwise you won’t be able to synchronize sleeping hours with the techniques I will mention in the later session. REM Phases occur many times in our sleep but they vary in duration with the longest at the 70 to 90 minutes mark after right after losing consciousness.
But how do you induce one? Well, it is tricky and requires lots of practice and tons of patience, and even if you induce one it is very hard to keep the dream stable because what usually happens is you get in, you get excited! Then you wake up… so you need to learn how to keep calm and I will also provide some techniques on stabilization.
The main technique used is called “WILD” or Wake Induced Lucid Dreams which requires you to be in a meditative state, inter sleep paralysis willingly and we will discuss that in great detail in another topic because it is just that huge… and then remain consciousness all at the same time. It is called wake induced due to the fact that this technique must be done before sleeping or after 4 to 6 hours of sleep in other words, while being awake.
That’s it for the day, hope you all learned something new! Stay tuned for the next session where we will cover the different techniques and how you can apply this knowledge in a useful way, and maybe even give a brief on the infamous sleep paralysis! To be continued in the next week 😀
By: Mohamed Yasser Science and Community officer Mkt team
