What’s Lucid Dreaming All About?
We often ‘day dream’ as we fall off to sleep. Lucid dreaming is different – it takes place when we are actually asleep. At some time, during your 90-minute sleep cycle most of us, will almost always begin dreaming. In an 8-hour night sleep, you’ll have 40 to 50 minutes of dreaming in each 90 minute cycle so it gets quite large, this window opening up to the innerness of yourself.
Lucid dreaming happens inside that formal dream state, and either naturally or by training, we can switch on our awareness, and we can affect, or act in, direct and produce what’s happening in that dream. We can set up stages for learning, for recreation, we can set up chances to meet the people we might never get a chance to meet in everyday life and we can train ourselves to stay there for longer and longer periods of time. It takes work but then the dream becomes a workshop for who you want to be because you can run scenarios, scripts, and scenes, and try them out. Lucid dreaming is essentially becoming aware of your dreams and taking that extra step of acting to change your dream when you’re actually in the dream state.
Some of us are natural lucid dreamers and it comes quite easy for us. For others, it’s quite difficult to learn how to do but there’s very good quantitative and qualitative research, that lucid dreaming is a fact of the human organism. To learn it like any type of transformative practice or discovery system takes time, work and dedication. It’s within the reach of any of us, but it takes practice. Just like you would go to university for four years and do 1000 or 1500 hours of training or learning, if we were willing to spend a few hundred hours practicing with the proven techniques and exercising of lucid dreaming, most of us, probably all of us, would begin to lucid dream. And then from there we could take it and master it to whatever level we wished if you have the commitment and desire to.
Lucid dreaming won’t happen on a steady basis. Very often, during your 8 hours of sleep, in the five cycles you have, the other aspects of dreams that spontaneously and naturally happen will continue to take place. These dreams are typically for sorting out the garbage of the day, for consolidating memory, for working through emotionally charged concerns and issues with your life and relationships, or in your work, or in your own disappointments, and they will always remain. You cannot replace those dreams with lucid dreams. The unconscious, as it’s known in psychology, is a huge force in each of us and we cannot replace it with our will. Lucid dreaming will hardly touch that enormous creative force, that generative force, that’s in the universe and in human beings, but with practice, we can learn to lucid dream, collect them and learn how to master and manipulate them beside our other, unconscious, creative, dreams.