Michael Grothaus from Fast Company writes how lucid dreaming can improve your waking life.
My initial urge is to believe everyone in this room is insane. Or at least willfully delusional.
I’m sitting in circle with about 20 people; men, women, some young, some old. Some look like hippies, some look like middle managers at accounting firms. We’re in a rented studio in the Kennington area in south London. I’m listening to a guy in his late 20s telling us how he can control things. He can walk through walls. He can fly. He can create worlds. And everyone around me in this studio is acting like what this guy is saying is just totally normal; like this is in no way crazy. At all. Maybe that’s because many of the people in this room claim to have similar powers.
But the thing is: All these people in this room—even the guy who’s saying he has god-like abilities—they actually can do all this stuff. There’s 30 years of scientific data that proves they can. That’s because the people in this room are lucid dreamers and this is a workshop being run by Charlie Morley, a European expert, author, and teacher of dream lucidity.
“Lucid dreaming is the art of becoming conscious within your dreams,” says Morley, whose latest book Lucid Dreaming: A Beginners Guide is a quick-start guide to lucid dreaming. “A lucid dream is one in which you realize, ‘Aha! I’m dreaming!’ while you’re still asleep. Once you become conscious within a dream, you can interact with and direct it at will, choosing to fly through the sky or more interestingly, interact with personifications of your own mind.”
Researchers still aren’t sure precisely what is going on in the mind during lucid dreaming, but it appears to be a hybrid state between REM sleep (the stage of sleep where we have the most vivid dreams) and being awake.