What is Lucid Dreaming

When it comes to the history of lucid dreaming, it was all the rage in the middle of the twentieth century, but then just kind of faded out. Generation X missed the lucid dreaming debates of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. After that, the debates faded out and lucid dreaming became the geeky subject matter of a few liberal intellectuals hardly anyone had heard of. Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception, perhaps misleadingly, brought the concept back into the core of the minds of the masses.

Lucid dreaming is your chance to play around with the extraordinary abilities buried in unused parts of your brain. Regardless of whether your are superhuman in real life or not, lucid dreaming is a way for you to put the deepest areas of your brain to good use while you’re sleeping. You can be a John Doe while awake and superman while sleeping. All the obstacles of reality can be set aside, as you make trips to the sun or the interior of the earth or test your craziest science experiments on your worst enemies.

Lucid dream researcher Beverly D'Urso knows everything about lucid dreaming: She has been a lucid dreamer since she was seven years old. She has worked with psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge, the founder of the Lucidity Institute. She was the first person to have a recorded orgasm during a dream. During her lucid dreams, she has tasted fire, visited the sun and overcome a writer's block. She has done it all. These are her thoughts on lucid dreaming and what it means to her.

What does "lucid dreaming" mean?

Even though the term "lucid" means clear, lucid dreaming is more than just having a clear dream. To have a lucid dream you must know that it’s a dream while you’re dreaming. That's it. It doesn't require that you can control anything in your dream, though control is what beginning lucid dreamers often aim at. People get attracted to lucid dreaming because they want to be able to do things they could never do in waking reality, for example, taste fire or fly to the sun. More and more experienced lucid dreamers are realizing the benefits of lucid dreaming. You can use it to explore the boundaries of your own agency and the limits of the universe.

What's the best technique for becoming lucid in dreams?

The best technique for becoming lucid is to actually become more aware and look and listen and pay attention to details, because when you see things that don’t fit, that’s a clue that you’re dreaming. To facilitate the process you can form the habit of examining the environment or your state of awareness during the day. Mental habits you practice during the day tend to continue in dreams. So you examine your environment during the day, you examine your awareness, and then you may notice that something is different once you start dreaming. Someone who has become lucid has much higher levels of awareness—and obviously, I think that’s one of the biggest benefits of lucid dreaming.

What is the phenomenology of lucidity?

Here is an example from dream expert Beverly D'Urso: "I was playing around in a lucid dream and happened to be at a campsite. Since I knew I was dreaming, I thought I might as well jump into the camp fire. I didn't get burned. I was kind of playing around with the flames. I then decided to eat the flames. I actually put them in my mouth. And I remember having the sensation of them being salty! I was already pushing limits. So I decided to fly to the sun. I started to fly sort of superman style—faster and faster and faster, almost exponentially faster. As I got closer and closer to the sun I couldn't really see anything. I couldn't really feel my body either. But I noticed a sense of vibration and sound and light. Obviously, there was a lot of light coming from the sun, and I kind of stayed in this state which I can’t really describe. So the phenomenology of lucid dreaming really is very different from the phenomenology of regular experiences."

What are the spiritual benefits of lucid dreaming?

Well, it certainly makes you a more enlightened person. You learn to be in the present moment and to notice your surroundings and take in things without being sidetracked by random thoughts or the past or the future. That’s what all big spiritual teachers teach you now: The importance of being in the present moment. That’s what lucid dreamer have been doing all along. They are aware of the present moment with more than just their physical body, because their agency is expanded to include a higher self.

Could lucid dreaming be dangerous?

This is a common question when it comes to lucid dreaming. Whether or not some dreamers have trouble differentiating their dreams from reality, and it's not a potential problem for lucid dreamers. By definition, lucid dreamers know they are dreaming, so they are not confused about when they dream and when they are awake. However, non-lucid dreamers that could become confused between dreaming and being awake. People who are just starting out might want to take it easy and not stuff fire in their mouth or jump out from a cliff to see what happens. I don’t think an experienced lucid dreamer would ever jump off a cliff without first testing whether they could float in the air.

Have any of you experienced a lucid dream in your life? I think I have once, but it was a long time ago. Let me know if you have and what you did.

See you all tomorrow.

Buh-bye.