What is Lucid Dreaming?

Blog Post by TellMeMyDream.com

A lucid dream is a type of dream where the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming.

Lucid dreaming can occur during REM sleep (rapid eye movement cycle), and people who spend more time in REM sleep are more likely to have lucid dreams. During REM sleep, people who experience lucid dreams maintain the same brain activity without the muscle paralysis that is a hallmark of REM sleep. People with Nauralcolepsy, a sleep disorder characterized by excessive sleepiness and irresistible sleep attacks, are less likely to experience lucid dreams.

One study found that people experiencing lucid dreams display brain activity that appears to be a mixture of REM sleep and wakefulness. Other studies have shown that certain areas of the prefrontal cortex display increased activity in lucid dreaming compared to normal REM sleep. During lucid dreaming, some areas of the frontal cortex (PFC), a region responsible for complex cognitive behavior, personality expression and decision-making, showed increased activity compared to normal REM sleep (Dreslet et al., 2012 ).

This can be partly attributed to low cortical activity. Some studies have linked this trait to increased cortical activity (e.g. Although lucid dreaming is a clearly defined phenomenon in which the dreaming sleeper exercises control over various aspects of the sleeping environment, studies have shown that this is not always the case and that some people are more prone to clear dreaming and control than others.

Various people are in fact able to experience so-called lucid dreaming, in which they are actually able to control certain elements of their dreams. A clear dream is a dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that he is dreaming, says Dr. Abhinav Singh, Sleep Physician, Director of the Indiana Sleep Center and Medical Advisor at SleepFoundation.org. Other types of dreams are daydreams — streams of consciousness that decouple from the current task so that our attention turns inwards — false awakenings (vivid and convincing dreams that awaken in sleep — ) and dreamers who sleep through nightmares or dreams that are frightening or grotesque (Lucid Dreaming, Chinsami, 2020 ).

While normal dreams occur at various stages of the sleep cycle, studies have shown that lucid dreaming occurs during sleep with rapid eye movements (REM). Research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s led to the discovery that lucid dreams are associated with REM sleep and to the creation of the electrooculogram (EOG) which can detect a predetermined number of eye movements to signal consciousness. Laberge and others demonstrated using electroencephalography (EEG) and other polysomnographic measurements that lucid dream starts during the REM sleep stage.

In combination with a mild approach, this approach involves a certain amount of sleep disturbance. After the person has slept for a while, he wakes up, stays awake for a certain time and then falls asleep again. This is because your body is able to go through the four stages of sleep, which increases the amount of time you spend in the REM stage of sleep and goes through the stages we experience in this kind of dream.

When a person dreams and is able to guide the dream without being aware of what is going on, it is natural to wonder how this affects the quality of sleep. When people are able to control their dreams in their sleep and control the course of their dream through their own actions, they are more alert. Being unable to have a clear dream before going to bed or to plan and control dreams during the night can have a negative impact on sleep and can make it harder to fall asleep, fall asleep, wake up and feel well rested.

In order to become clear in REM sleep, dreaming requires accurate metacognitive judgments about the state of consciousness, i.e. One recognizes the correct explanation for the anomalies in the dream while dreaming.

A central feature is that the person experiencing is able to signal a clear state during the dream time by pre-arranged eye movement signals (Laberge, 1980; Laberge and al., 2018). In conjunction with retrospective reports confirming that clarity is achieved through a sequence of voluntary eye movements, the execution of these movements can be used as a behavioral indicator of clarity in sleeping dream persons, as shown by EEG and EMG tracking during sleep. Such signals can be verified as lucid dreams if the dreamers do not realize that they are dreaming but are able to control their own behavior, enabling them to signal clarity by making prefabricated patterns of eye movements that represent a lucid, controlled dream.

One advantage of lucid dreaming as a mental practice is that lucid dreaming in modern virtual reality simulators offers the potential to practice the kinematic sensations of the dream body and the dream environment and to experience much of the vibrancy and realism that is found in waking experience. Moreover, the lucid dreamer is limited only by his imagination and attention stability, and thus has greater potential to control his own body, actions, and environment through mental rehearsals in virtual reality than in awake life. Spontaneous and frequent lucid dreamers must activate pre-sleep intentions, use prospective memories to remember and recognize in dreams, and, since their lucid dreams tend to occur spontaneously, use specific methods to induce them.

Since the dreamer has a degree of control over the characters, scenery and events of the dream, clear dreaming is a way to experience and explore things that would not be possible to a person in everyday life. Several experimental studies suggest that REM sleep dreams improve creativity in response to waking states (Cai, Mednick, Harrison, Kanady and Mednick 2009; Dresler 2012). Anecdotal reports and scientific discoveries about inventive originality and artistic productivity suggest that creativity can be triggered or amplified by dreams.

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