Lucid dreaming is a new hobby for townspeople
People of various professions and ages, having tried at least once to "become aware", can no longer stop. Traveling in a dream across other worlds is breathtaking, and an ordinary night rest turns into an unreal extreme. To visit Paris, to become a billionaire, a famous artist, or simply to fulfill all your sexual fantasies - in lucid dreams you can do anything.
What is it, ordinary hallucinations and self-hypnosis or something else, the correspondent of "Number One" tried to figure out.
School of out-of-body travel
An ordinary Ulan-Ude two-room apartment. The kitchen, entrance hall, corridor and one of the rooms look casual, nothing special. But the situation in the hall is a little strange: there is no furniture here, there are some kind of rugs and mattresses on the floor in rows. Near the window, curtained with blackout curtains, is an armchair with a rug. As it turns out, it was here that some of the Ulan-Ude people first tried what a waking dream is.
“We are not a sect, not drug addicts or psychos,” smiles Dmitry Kukshinov, one of the practitioners of lucid sleep. - Here I sometimes give lessons to those who want to understand. I myself have been doing this for a little over a year. So I'm just learning myself. And in general, I was not going to become a teacher. He taught this to his friend, he told someone else, and that's how word of mouth got to me. People call, ask to tell, show - you have to help. Completely free, it's just very interesting to me myself.
The essence of this practice is simple. We are all accustomed to having dreams at night. At the same time, it is as if someone is showing us a movie, without asking whether we want or don’t want to see this particular film now. People who practice lucid dreaming dictate the rules themselves. They dream about what they want. And they can do in a dream whatever they wanted the day before, going to bed. The main thing is to learn the basic things: to be able to enter a special dream correctly, to be able to identify and be aware in a dream that you are sleeping now, and so on.
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Dmitry remembered his first lucid dream in detail. He had never experienced such vivid sensations.
- Awesome feeling! Very bright and unlike anything else. Realizing that you are in a dream, you realize that you can do whatever you want. And it's real. Of course, the first thing I decided to try was flying. Probably many people have such a dream since childhood. And I did it! All sensations, pictures, emotions - everything was for real.
After the first successful experiment, Dmitry did not find a place for himself. All the time I wanted to go to bed as quickly as possible. But, as it turned out, not everything is so simple. The next time it didn't work. And then miss again and again. Then I had to take up books, the Internet, to study the experience of other people, to understand my mistakes. It got better. But until now, "realizing" is not obtained every night. But Dmitry is not going to give up.
5 minutes is like a lifetime
Natalya Alekseeva also knows how to see lucid dreams. She did not learn this from anyone, she independently collected information on the web bit by bit.
- I did it on the first try. But the first time it throws out very quickly. Literally in moments. You don't have time to really do anything. And so several times a night - I was thrown out, and I got there again. Gradually, the time in lucid sleep began to increase, emissions back became less frequent. By the way, in a dream, time seems to stretch. You sleep for only five minutes, and in a dream you get the feeling that you are there for a long, long time. It always happens in different ways: sometimes you spend several hours there, sometimes months, and sometimes it is as if you live a whole life,”assures Natalya.
Like Dmitry, Natalia started with flying. Then she switched to travel. Like many other women, she has always dreamed of visiting Paris. Now such an opportunity presented itself to her.
- I wandered through the Parisian streets, saw people around, looked at the sights, it was interesting, - Natalya recalls.
After exotic desires, the woman decided to remember about earthly affairs. She suddenly wanted to see people dear to her heart, whom she had not seen for a long time and who live in other cities and countries. It was after these dreams that something happened that she had never expected. Dream and reality were linked.
- Once again, I realized and decided to visit my old friend Vadim, whom I had not seen for a long time. He lives in Novosibirsk. I have already seen from the photo on social networks how he looks. And in the dream he was the same. We chatted, laughed, I wandered around his apartment, watched how he lived. Waking up the next day, I decided to contact him.
Vadim laughed for a long time, learning that an hour ago, it turns out, he was talking to Natasha. Neither in his dreams nor in reality he felt anything like that. The playful mood vanished at the moment when Natasha began to tell a friend about what she saw in his apartment, what kind of furniture was there and where what was. With rare exceptions, all descriptions coincided with reality.
- Then I first encountered something fantastic. It was scary, but still interesting. Since then, there have been other moments that also amazed me and sunk into my soul. My friends, who are engaged in such things, also told me about their experience of a similar "clairvoyance", - says Natalya.
According to Natasha, the experiment is as follows. Before going to bed, a person without looking opens any book and puts it on the table next to him. The main thing is to never look at the numbers of the pages that have opened. Then the person falls asleep, is recognized in a dream. He leaves his body and approaches the book. Remembers the page number. Waking up, he checks the numbers. As a rule, the number - the number of the opened page, seen in a dream, always coincides with the one in reality.
Endless possibilities
But all these little miracles are nothing compared to what lucid dreams can actually give. Natalia is sure that during such a dream a person connects to the information field of the Earth's biosphere, and therefore at this moment he can ask any questions and receive comprehensive answers to them. By the way, unlike Natalia, other "dream hackers" explain the prophecy of dreams with clues from the subconscious, which, as you know, knows everything about everything.
One way or another, but dream crackers are sure that in a dream you can not only find out the truth about your life, any person or make the right decision in a vital issue, but also learn something useful.
- On the one hand, this is entertainment. But there is also another side. This can be an unusual form of learning. If there is a desire to learn something and become stronger in something, then welcome to sleep, - laughs Natasha. - Here you can learn any business or master some skills: driving, swimming, ice skating - it can be anything. You can also work with your fears and complexes.
Most lucid dreaming practitioners do not think about what or where it comes from. They just get an unreal thrill from what is happening. But is there some kind of trap here? After all, penetrating the laws of nature, as you know, is always fraught with consequences.
Scientifically proven, but not tested
Interestingly, the church is condescending to such an experience. In the practice of lucid dreams, they did not see any obscurantism or introduction into the forbidden in the Ulan-Ude diocese.
“I don’t see how this relates to us. Most likely, we are talking about the connection with the unconscious - what Freud and Jung did. All this is very close to the field of psychology. By the way, Salvador Dali painted his paintings based on images taken from dreams. And there are a lot of such examples, starting with Mendeleev and ending with Freud, - says Aleksey Shevtsov, head of the department for relations between the church, society and the media.
Nevertheless, the church has its own view of dreams.
- During sleep, a person does not belong to himself. Therefore, having seen some kind of "prophetic" dream or seeing the saints, he can believe what he was told in the dream. But after all, from which side this dream came, no one knows. Therefore, we say that we should not believe and be guided by dreams in everyday life and, moreover, decipher our dreams, look into different dream books.
According to Father Alexei, perhaps such practices are entertaining. But nothing more interesting than life itself has not yet been invented.
- Life is much more interesting. And she's too limited in time to devote to things like computer games, virtual reality, or dreamy things like dreams. Moreover, there is a danger of getting too carried away. The same Jung took it far, and then he went headlong into esotericism and the occult. A person opens a hole in the soul through these exercises, which will then penetrate there - he will no longer be able to control.
Psychologist Oksana Simonova considers the phenomenon of lucid dreaming to be a scientifically proven phenomenon. However, at the same time, this area has not been sufficiently studied by scientists, which means it may have pitfalls. After all, all people are different, for one such activities will be safe, while for others they can turn into psychological or even mental problems: the appearance of prolonged depression, the development of schizophrenia, or even a split personality.
- Imagine a man lives in the world. He once had many ambitions, plans, but life turned out differently: he didn’t make wealth, he didn’t have his apartment. On the personal front, too, a complete fiasco. And then he took up lucid dreams. And at least in a dream he became the almighty God. There he is a lucky one, kissed by fate. A lot of money, the attention of women, power, the ability to fulfill any desires. Every time he wakes up, he will regret that it was only a dream. The difference between the two worlds is so striking that a person can withdraw into himself, fall into depression. And there it is close to more serious problems, - says Oksana Simonova.
According to the psychologist, the inadequacy of the perception of the real world can appear if a person has mental abnormalities, the presence of phobias or a predisposition to them, as well as if there are diseases or health conditions in which vivid emotional impressions and experiences are undesirable.
- But in general, if there are no above contraindications, I have nothing against such activities. The main thing is to understand for yourself why you need it. If to broaden your horizons is one thing. But if you resort to the practice of managing sleep in order to escape from reality, then you should think about whether your life brings you satisfaction and from what problems you are hiding in the world of dreams, sums up Oksana Simonova.
Artem Samsonov, "Number One"