It has been vastly popularized by the 2010 Inception movie by Christopher Nolan and is a very real phenomena. Lucid dreams can be very vivid and realistic, to the extent that some lucid dreamers describe those experiences as being more real than
Lucid dreams are when you know that you're dreaming while you're asleep. You're aware that the events flashing through your brain aren't really happening. But the dream feels vivid and real. You may even be able to control how the action unfolds, as if you're directing a movie in your sleep.
What Causes Lucid Dreams. Though it may not be possible to understand exactly why lucid dreams occur, some research reveals that dreams of this type may be associated with times of stress and anxiety. Psychopathologies, such as depression and OCD, may also play a role.
Generally, lucid dreaming is quite rare. Only one half of the general population know the phenomenon from personal experience, approximately 20% have lucid dreams on a monthly basis, and only a minority of approximately 1% have lucid dreams several times a week.
Although not all studies on the topic have replicated this finding, others have found lucid dreaming can reduce anxiety and depression. View Source in people who have both PTSD and nightmares. However, lucid dreaming might pose a risk to people who experience psychosis.
Lucid dreaming can disrupt sleeping patterns and negatively affect mental health. It can make psychosis worse for some individuals and exhibits no benefits for anyone with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Sleep quality is important.
Lucid Dreams
These are the rarest type of dreams where the person is aware that they're dreaming, while dreaming. Not just that, people actually feel like they're in complete control of their dream. Because of the awareness that you have, you can easily interpret your own lucid dreams.
Some research has suggested that lucid dreaming and certain personality traits may be connected in some way. One study found that lucid dreamers tend to have a greater internal locus of control. They also score higher on measures of a need for cognition and creativity.
It's thought that around 51% of people have experienced a lucid dream at least once – but until now, scientists haven't been sure whether it's possible to train yourself to control your dreams in this way. However, new research suggests that it is possible to teach yourself to lucid dream.
Overall, the findings suggest that lucid dreaming is associated with higher levels of brain activity, particularly in regions responsible for higher-level thinking, self-awareness, and visuospatial processing. Lucid dreaming may be a valuable tool for improving sleep quality and cognitive functioning.
A typical lucid dreamer can expect lucid dreams lasting anywhere between a few minutes to 45 minutes. In reality, most lucid dreams will be somewhere between 5-15 minutes long. As already noted, there can be exceptions. In rare cases, a phenomenon known as REM Rebound may occur.
Some people, like Laura, spontaneously lucid dream without trying, while others may go their entire life never having one. Dr Aspy says this is due to natural variations in the human brain that we don't fully understand. But there can be some factors that predispose a person to lucid dreaming.
"Since the '80s, we've known that lucid dreamers can communicate out of dreams by using these signals," says Karen Konkoly, a Ph. D. student at Northwestern University who is the first author on the study published this month in Current Biology.
Lucid dreams are very memorable and vivid, but vivid dreams are not always lucid. If you remember your dream very clearly when you wake up, but were not aware that you were having a dream while you were asleep, you had a vivid dream, not a lucid dream.
Conclusions: There is a connection between lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis. However, research is still very limited and diverse in the methodologies used. Future research should build standardized methods for examining the two phenomena.
There Are Many Reasons Lucid Dreaming is Difficult
One of the biggest reasons is that we're working with subtle levels of consciousness in the dream world, dimensions of mind that are really “quiet.” Yet we spend most of our lives in a very noisy world, swept away in “loud” levels of mind.
1. Falling. The most frequent in the common dream family, researchers say that the average human will dream about falling to his or her death more than five times in their lives (yikes).
One of the earliest and most influential studies of color in dreams was performed by W.C. Middleton in 1943 — of the 277 college students tested, 70.7% reported “rarely” or “never” seeing colors in their dreams, whereas only 10% reported “frequently” or “very frequently”.
While every human being so far as we know exhibits REM sleep, not every human being reports dreams. It appears you can have REM sleep with very low dream recall or possibly without dreams entirely. There may even be groups of individuals who never recall their dreams or who do not dream.
It is possible to get the sensation that you are stuck in a lucid dream, if you have many dreams back-to-back, or try to go back to your body and keep waking up into a new dream. However, you will always wake up, so you are never actually stuck.
Such sleep paralysis was widely considered the work of demons, and more specifically incubi, which were thought to sit on the chests of sleepers. In Old English the name for these beings was mare or mære (from a proto-Germanic *marōn, cf.