Life does not always go the way you want, but, somehow, dream does. There was one time that I was able to freely remember what situation is in really life while dreaming. Therefore, I started to thinking about if people can control their dreams. In this case, there are a lots of anecdotes influences our perception about dreaming. For example, the blockbuster movie, Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio and his companies are able to get into others’ dreams with consciousness. Although the scientific proofs are far-fetched, the movie, misleadingly, brought the concept back into our sight.
Can we actually do things in Inception in real life…?
Lucid Dream is the term to define the situation that you are fully aware of the fact you are dreaming while having consciousness. Backing to the old time when the lucid dreaming was still in debate, A study done by Snyder and Gackenbach in 1958 indicates from a sample size of 486 people, 89 percent of people report having had a lucid dream at least once in their lives, included about twenty percent of participants report having lucid dream about once a month. According to the data, the result of this study fail to reject the null hypothesis that most people dream with consciousness once in their live time. Although there are a large amount of people reported they have experienced lucid dream, in 1959, some opponents (eg. Malcolm 1959) noted lucid dream were absurd due to absence of empirical evidence. Empirical evidence is where the difficulty happens. When cognitive scientists try to study experience of behavior, they usually ask for a subjective report which simply describe about participants’ experience. However, this happens to be hard to prove in dreamers, since no one would tell you much when he wakes up.
As I delve more into the topic, I find the empirical evidence came followed the discovery of the stage of sleep. Based on standard recording of two subjects dreaming three times during REM period, researcher concluded that lucid dream may start in REM. However, the study did not suggest when the lucid in fact started. In order to checked out, I find the study done by LaBerge, Nagel, Dement & Zarcone (1981). Under the help of polygraph, they successfully detected the eye movement to signal the onset of lucid dreams. In the cases of 35 nights of study, 35 lucid dreams were reported: 32 times happened in REM period, and 3 times happened out of REM period. Thus the evidence is clear: lucid dreaming is physiologically real, and it happened in REM period.
Now you know it is possible to control you dream. What’s fascinating about lucid dream is that dreaming awareness allows a control in which dreamer can intentionally drive any elements of the dream to the direction you want, and this is also why many people are attracted to lucid dreaming. It is a free risk adventure with many benefits. Check the link to learn how to lucid dream…
At last, here is a video teach you how to lucid dream
Works cited
http://www.spiritwatch.ca/pdfs/Individual%20differences%20associated%20with%20lucid%20dreaming.pdf
http://www.lucidity.com/SleepAndCognition.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-control-dreams/
http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/12/loughner.lucid.dreaming.arizona/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201212/lucid-dreaming-and-self-realization
http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/science/article/pii/S1053810010001492
http://www.asdreams.org/idxjournal.htm