Lucid Dreaming: creating worlds in your sleep

pic by curlytops

I’ve had lucid dreams ever since I was a kid and didn’t know they were weird till I started talking about them and people lol’d at my fantastical tales. I googled it and found I wasn’t alone though.  

Lucid dreaming is when you realize, within a dream, that you are dreaming – and you can control events and create matter within the dream.

Did you watch Inception? It gives you a visual of what a Lucid Dream is like.. except for the Leo Di Caprio stealing your thoughts part.

Oh yeah, that was a spoiler. But serves you right for not having downloaded the damn thing already.

Anyway. In a normal dream, you watch yourself in a movie or you experience things as if they were real. In a LD, everything still feels real, but there’s a realization that, omg this isn’t real.

At this realization, most people snap awake, or experience fuzziness of vision in the dream. This is because your mind is prone to reality, and when it realizes something isn’t real, it tends to destroy the illusion. But with practise, you can maintain calmness when the realization hits and control your mind into taking advantage of the illusions.

Meaning, in my lucid dream, I’ll conjure up a piece of cake. It’s an illusion. But my mind takes experiencial memories of what a cake feels like, smells like, and tastes like – and feeds it into the dream, making the cake in the dream, in a sense, real.   

If you’re not familiar with the idea, you’re probably wondering what the hell I’ve been smoking. But believe me, it is epic. Let me just take you through a lucid dream I had this week to introduce you to the awesomeness.

I wake up in my house as usual. And I become lucid – I know I’m dreaming. But everything still feels real, the wall on my fingers, grass on my feet, water on my skin, the smell of the beach, everything that is to come. 

So I open the door and step outside. I push the garden wall expecting a secret door to open into a place with a pool, so it does. The floor is half marbelled and half sandy, with a giant pool in the center. I dive in telling myself that I can breathe underwater and that the pool opens into a mysterious deep ocean world (O_o) so I see these totally epic plants and creatures and I hear psychedelic music and it is trippay. I swim out through another opening and climb into another landscape. Then I flap my arms and I fly, and I swim up through the sky. The sky is that rainyday-white and I reach its ‘surface’ in a few laps, and stick my fingers through it and rip it open, and climb in. And on the other side is this luscious grassy green field with sun and wind. And I frolic around going lalala!

The end.

Oh yeah. The whole thing feels like two hours though I’ve been asleep for half. Now it’s so hard to explain this to someone who’s never heard of the likes of lucid dreaming, because they think I’m a big loon who takes the lets-play-pretend game too far. For such noobs, I recommend you check out Wiki and visit the lucid dreaming FAQ page.

Why lucid dream? 1. Because it’s friggin AWESOME! Imagine a world completely under your control, where you can turn stuff into cake and walk on water and fly with the Superman music in the background! 2. It’s therapeutic. After that dream I just described to you, completely orchestrated by the whims and fancies of my mind, I woke up feeling like a million bucks, like I’d actually been prancing in a meadow with the wind on my face.

Tips for LDing:

1. Reality checks – Look at your hands, look around and check out your surroundings. Chances are, in a dream, something will be off and you’ll instantly realize you’re dreaming.

2. Practise – The more you practise recognizing if you’re in dream state or not, the clearer your lucid dreams will be and the more control you’ll be able to exert on the dream.

3. Start small and start it out of something. Start with a small object, appearing behind a cupboard. Conjuring things out of nothing is difficult – your mind is all, this is ridiculously unreal! and it’ll snap you awake. But opening a cupboard, and finding a jar of nutella in it, isn’t so unreal. Move up to conjuring up people – you open a door, and omg, it’s Al Pacino. Whadup, bro.

4. Watch cartoons and movies and get creative. I watched Street Fighters and Avatar The Last Airbender and taught myself in lucid dreams to create energyballs between my palms. And then like, throw the energyball at something and set it on fire. MWUHAHAHA.

I find it fascinating how the mind is constantly working, and on its own accord, even in your sleep. Even lucid dreams are never completely predictable though within your control – I saw a horse with a cat’s head and unicorn-esque horns, in one LD, and I’m sure I didn’t consciously conjure that crazyass mofo up. What really happens when you close your eyes?

Do you delve into your own self? My bro, who can also lucid dream, said, in an LD just open the door and start walking, or flying around: you’ll see things that will show you what’s going on in your mind, things you aren’t aware of, it’s self discovery. Does the soul go somewhere when you dream? Or is it all just happening inside your brain? What if the dream is real and reality is the dream? O_O  

I like how there’s no way to say for sure.