Dreams provide a world in which we escape from reality into the mind. But what if you could know you were dreaming, and subsequently control the dream? Lucid dreaming is more like playing a video game than watching a movie. The term lucid dreaming was coined by Van Eden way back in 1913. Although people were writing about this kind of experience as far back as the 1800s It is simply the act of knowing that you’re dreaming and some can actually control the direction of their dreams. This might seem a little superstitious to you, well this superstition has become a scientific fact.
EXPERIMENT ON LUCID DREAMING
In 2012 at the Max Planck Institute in Germany they were able to show once and for all that lucid dreaming is testable, reproducible and it is real. Here’s how they did it. They took a person who was about to go to sleep and asked them to dream about clenching your right fist and then your left fist. Later the doctors asked the person to clench his fist while he was awake and took an MRI scan of his brain while he was clenching his fist.
When you dream you are paralyzed. Otherwise we would be able to carry out all sorts of horrible things and destroy ourselves. But when the person went into its dream state, doctor observed similar patterns of MRI scan of his brain which they observed earlier. So, you can clearly see that the brain-initiated orders and he was able to clench his right fist and then left fist in his dream. In other words, he was conscious while he was dreaming. Hence this is how it was proved that lucid dreaming is possible.
CONCLUSION
It is thought that lucid dreaming arises from a state that combines both consciousness and REM sleep. When you are in such a state, you can often control the contents of your dream. At least 50% of people remember having a lucid dream at least once in their life. With practice some people can have lucid dream over and over again.
People actually think of lucid dreaming more in the sense off actually beginning to control what you are dreaming, so you gain volution control and you can decide what’s going to happen during your dream. Frequent lucid dreamers claim that they can control many parts of the dream such as teleporting themselves to another location, learning to improve real life skills or even eating fire. Lucid dreamers have also reported frightening reports that they have trouble distinguishing reality from the dream. In some cases, this can be a sign of mental illness and should be taken seriously. Do you believe in the thought that dreams can predict future ? if you wanna know the answer then check this out Dreams – Commonly asked questions
FINAL THOUGHTS ON LUCID DREAMING
Lucid dreaming comes naturally to some but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. With practice people can actually become capable of it. Now the question is why do only some people have the ability of lucid dreaming and not everyone? what is happening to our subconscious that triggers this experience? there’s still a lot to learn about the causes and effects of lucid dreaming.
It seems only around 20 to 30% of the population are actually natural lucid dreamers. Perhaps if it was so beneficial, Mother Nature would have had all of us being capable of lucid dreaming and the fact that we’re not, means that it’s not necessarily beneficial. Maybe those 20 to 30% of people who do lucid dreaming are at the forefront of hominid evolution and they are going to be the next species of preference. These are just few ideas and much researches are yet to be done.
If you are interested in knowing how do we get get dreams then do read DREAM – Physiology
If you wanna know more about lucid dreaming then do let me know in the comments. For more such article do checkout the website medicoved.com
Author : Dr. Easminara Shaikh
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