You Can Control Your Dreams: Understand Lucid Dreaming And How To Have One
Have you ever wanted to fly, to have superpowers, to create places according to your imagination, to meet people who have passed away or to experience other situations that would be impossible in reality? This is normal in films like lucid dreaming and Daydreaming, where the characters choose the dreams they want to have check here. But anyone who thinks that having control over dream plots is a sci-fi exclusivity is wrong. Instead. These films reproduce a phenomenon explained by science: the lucid dream.
It looks like magic, but it isn't. Lucid dreaming happens when there is an awareness of dreaming during the dream. That is, there is no need to wake up to know that the adventures lived at night occurred in your mind. If the person is very lucid, he gets an even more incredible feat: he can control the direction of the stories he lives after sleeping in any way he wants.
"When people see something that is impossible to happen, like flying, they wonder why it is happening and are aware that they are dreaming. This self-awareness, or metacognition, is like the beginning of lucidity", says Sérgio Arthuro Mota-Rolim, neuroscientist and researcher at the Brain Institute at UFRN (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte).
But it is not so easy to have lucid dreams. In his doctoral thesis, Mota-Rolim found that about 75% of Brazilians have had at least one lucid dream. Within the universe researched, most had, at most, ten throughout their lives. The conclusion is that although this type of dream is common, it is infrequent, although some people always manage to have it.
Although there have been reports of lucid dreaming since Aristotle's time, research on lucid dreaming is recent. It is known, for example, that it is during REM sleep (acronym for Rapid Eye Movement) that lucid dreams usually happen. Stanford University psychologist Stephen LaBerge found that our perception of time is different in the two types of dreams. Who has never had the feeling that they dreamed for hours in a nap of just five minutes? This happens in ordinary dreams. But in lucid minds, we perceive time in the same way as when we are awake. To reach this conclusion, LaBerge resorted to a polysomnography (an examination that records physiological variations during sleep).
- Set the alarm clock to wake you up half or an hour before your usual time. The idea is to wake up in the REM phase of sleep without making sudden movements or opening your eyes. So you will remember the dream. Stay focused on it until you fall asleep, so that you have it again. When this happens, you are more likely to be lucid. If it doesn't work out, at least you'll have a chance to continue a good dream.
What happens in the dreamer's brain To better understand the phenomenon, the brain of lucid dreamers was studied. "We saw that these people had a reaction in the frontal region of the brain, which is related to higher cognitive functions, self-awareness, working memory, language and decision-making", reports the researcher. That is, compared to non-lucid dreamers, lucids had greater activity in the frontal region of the brain. The research also identified an increase in potency in the occipital region - which is behind the brain - and is mainly responsible for processing visual information. And it is also activated when the person is awake and with eyes closed.