Lucid dreaming is a dream in which a person is aware that he is asleep and can consciously act in a dream. People can learn to dream like this through a variety of techniques. Some psychologists use lucid dreaming to treat trauma patients, such as veterans, who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
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Psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge, who holds a Ph. D. from Stanford University, says the study of lucid dreaming can be of great help to us in better understanding the phenomenon of sleep; vague memories of a dream have always been an obstacle to studying it, but those who have lucid dreams can remember their dreams very clearly. These people can also perform actions in a dream on the instructions of the researchers.
Trauma treatment
Psychologist J. Timothy Greene was treating a Vietnam war veteran who had recurring nightmares about his best friend being killed in action.
The nightmares were always the same: a friend fell, blood was flowing from his neck, then he died.
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“Since the patient's dream was repeating all the time, I suggested that he choose one specific moment in the dream and every night before going to bed, mentally return to that moment and remind himself that he was sleeping. As a signal that this is a dream, the veteran chose the moment when he realized that his friend was dead,”Green wrote in an article on Therapist-Psychologist.com.
The veteran followed Green's advice and was able to realize he was asleep when he saw his friend. Then he managed to change the dream. He told a friend that the war was over and they were returning home. This time, the friend did not die, but instead got up with a smile and left. The nightmare that had haunted this man for three decades never returned.
Green suggests that nightmares are either subconscious attempts to let a person know about something, or they are "a psychological attempt to get out of a complex, even frightening, event in a less traumatic way."
“During lucid dreaming, a person is able to face frightening pictures and make the dream end in a more favorable and less traumatic way,” Green wrote.
Neuroscientist and author Bill Skaggs notes that people who dream more often also quite possibly suffer from depression.
“People who are severely depressed often spend longer in REM sleep, which is where dreams occur,” he wrote on Quora.com. "Reducing REM sleep is an effective way to reduce depression, at least temporarily." While reducing REM sleep, that is, eliminating dreams, is a temporary solution, Green helps patients change dreams, which has a longer lasting effect.
Lucid Dreaming and Sleep Study
LaBerge began studying lucid dreaming over 40 years ago for a Ph. D. job at Stanford. At that time, many did not attach importance to lucid dreams, considering them a temporary awakening from sleep. However, experiments by LaBerge and others have found the physical effects of lucid dreaming on the brain, eye movements and muscles.
In terms of the effect on the brain, lucid dreams differ from wakefulness and from imagination. When a person in a lucid dream performs some action, for example, sings, the brain activity differs from the brain activity of the same person when he sings in reality or imagines that he is singing.
Such experiments can only be done with people experiencing lucid dreaming. Laberge instructed the subject to signal to the investigator using predetermined eye movements when he was asleep. When the subject was conscious of himself in a dream, he made eye movements, which caused his physical eyes to move as well. Then he began to sing. When he finished singing, he again made movements with his eyes.
In this way, LaBerge could know when the chanting began and ended, and at that very moment he could measure the activity of the brain to see how it relates to the action.
“The fact that lucid dreaming is more complete than normal memory is another argument for using lucid dreaming subjects as test subjects,” Laberge wrote in Lucid Dreaming: Facts and research methodology . “Not only can they perform certain experiments in their dreams, they are also more likely to describe them accurately. The fact that our knowledge of the phenomenology of dreams is very much limited by the ability to remember is not always sufficiently taken into account.
How to know that you are sleeping
Green taught the patient to imagine a certain scene before falling asleep, and also to be aware that this scene was happening in a dream. This is one of the methods of training lucid dreaming.
Some suggest to those who wish to learn lucid dreaming to develop the habit of asking themselves, while awake, "Am I dreaming?" If this becomes a habit, then the likelihood increases that in a dream you will ask yourself this question and realize that you are actually in a dream.
A predefined signal can also help. For example, the protagonist in the lucid dreaming film "The Awakening of Life" knows that if he flips a switch and the light does not change, then he is in a dream. Many people who have lucid dreams say that creating these signals for themselves helps.
The Wiki How offers several other techniques, including writing a letter in the palm of your hand as a reminder to ask yourself if you are sleeping.
LaBerge wrote: “As long as we regard wakefulness and sleep as a simple dichotomy, we will be in a“Procrustean bed,”which is sometimes very uncomfortable. There must be different degrees of wakefulness, just as there are degrees of sleep (for example, conventional sleep stages). Before we get out of this confusion, we may need to describe a wider range of states of consciousness than those that we currently distinguish (dreaming, sleeping, waking, etc.)."