As a teenager, when I was asleep, I flew across the Grand Canyon (which I’ve never visited in waking life), practiced basketball free throws (which studies show can be improved through lucid dreams) and had dinner with Michelangelo (he was painting with one hand while we ate). The possibilities felt endless. This was, I figured, how all people dreamed.
Most of us experience our dreams — we’re chased through our childhood school, our teeth fall out. The dream happens to us; we’re not deciding how it unfolds. Then there’s the much rarer lucid dreaming, in which the dreamer is aware that she is dreaming and can influence what happens. In a lucid dream, the dreamer can often determine how things play out.
Only about half of people will have even one lucid dream in their lifetimes. Roughly one in 10 has a lucid dream once a month or more. As I grew older, I noticed I had lucid dreams less and less frequently to the point that several years ago they stopped altogether. Over the past year, I’ve sought to get them back.
Lucid dreams most frequently occur in the second half of sleep, when REM cycles are longest and brain activity increases, lighting up the prefrontal cortex and the precuneus, which is involved in awareness of consciousness. Attention is a core difference between regular dreaming and lucid dreaming. To lucid dream, you must be closely attuned to creases in your environment in both rest and wake. For instance, I may notice only that my teeth look more crooked — and thus I am in a dream — if in both waking and sleeping life I have really considered my teeth in the mirror. One way of training yourself to lucid dream is to consistently perform reality checks throughout the day. Ask yourself if you’re dreaming and test whether you are: Try passing your hands through each other or see if text scrambles itself when you look away from it. Be mindful of a fundamental question: Which reality am I currently in?
There has only ever been one significant fMRI study of a person engaged in a lucid dream. Though not conclusive, its results point toward lucid dreaming as an engine for metacognition, or the ability to reflect on your thinking and the patterns that inform it. Regions of the brain that are typically quiet during sleep or regular dreaming — such as the precuneus, which is also involved in memory retrieval and self-reflection — activate during a lucid dream. In 2018, another fMRI study of self-described frequent lucid dreamers (who were not dreaming during the brain scans) showed greater communication across varied parts of the subjects’ brains than was found in people who don’t experience lucid dreams, particularly between brain regions associated with self-reflection and metacognition, even while awake.
To lucid dream is to become aware of the constructed nature of both dreams and reality, how we take for granted the weird ways the world works and how absolutely nothing must be as it is. To control a dream is to be able to live out otherwise far-flung possibilities, discovering unexpected desires and ways of thinking. Especially for those who are stuck in routines or whose agency has been stripped from them, lucid dreaming provides more than a temporary way out. My favorite guide to lucid dreaming, by the author Jesse Ball, is aimed at two groups lacking agency: children and the incarcerated.
Yet it’s hard not to consider how many others, who, even with their physical freedom, are unable to be truly free because they are trapped by the technological world. The smartphone, for many, seems to be a sort of failed lucid dreaming mechanism. We are compelled to look down at them whenever we have a moment to spare, but what precisely is our hope when we flick them on? Like a lucid dream, we desire to be transported out of our present reality and into somewhere more exciting — to the news, to social interaction, to the dopamine-blasted world of games, gambling or pornography. The connection so many of us have with our devices shows our desperation to escape reality. But where lucid dreaming permits us to go deep within ourselves, to pay close attention, to see the inner workings of dreams and reality, much of modern technology merely fragments our minds in a search for the new that, ultimately, dissipates like the vapor it is.
At a time when attention is at a premium, when the structures of power circumscribe our sense of possibility, we all should be lucid dreaming. To dream is to glimpse another possible world; to lucid dream is to reconsider our own.
Anyone can learn to lucid dream. There are innumerable suggestions online. Gadgetry and even an Alzheimer’s drug called galantamine are sometimes recommended. Combined with mental preparations for recognizing dreams as they happen (like reality checks and dream journaling), galantamine seems to shift the sleeping brain into a more self-aware mode; in one study, subjects taking the drug were likelier to reflect on what was happening and recognize they were dreaming while they were asleep, in that way shifting a regular dream into a lucid one.
While the subconscious is scientifically and ontologically murky, its power for revelation persists. As I’ve had more lucid dreams and stayed in them longer, it sometimes feels overwhelming to inhabit both the waking and dreaming realms. I don’t arise tired in the physical sense, but, after having a lucid dream at night and recording it in the morning, my mind is exhausted. I have already “lived” eight or so hours while sleeping — painting and playing tennis and flying and chatting with friends. It takes longer to snap into the day’s concerns — emails, meetings, ambitions. Even as my day begins, I find myself still reckoning with the world of dreams.
Then the two merge: My dreams become involved in my waking considerations; my days are shot through with reflections of my dreams. We should all be lucid dreaming. With it, reality looks different: fuller, livelier. My dreams have taught me that there is nothing dull about the bizarro world that is waking life.
Cody Delistraty is the author of “The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss” and is working on a book about a group of Spiritualists.
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