Lucid Dreams | Travel within your Soul

” Let your dreams lead you to where your soul knows it belongs “

What is a Lucid Dreams?

Imagine going to sleep one night, normally, just like you do always. Imagine having a dream, about anything. And then, imagine being Awake in that dream. Imagine that amidst the dream, you suddenly realize that you are actually in a dream. You are awake. You are lucid. That is a Lucid Dream.

Being Lucid means you can see clearly, in this case, that you are dreaming. You become fully aware of the dream. And with some practice and a lot of meditation, you can control them too.

You can basically, quite easily say, that you travel within your own mind when dreaming lucid.

You will recognize the meaning of Lucid Dreams if you have ever seen Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Yes, an incredible movie talking about the concepts of Lucid Dreams and the world we have inside of us.

People talk about travelling throughout the world, from one place to another and another after that. But have you met anyone who wants to travel inside their own minds? Not really, right. And why do you think that is? Maybe because we don’t think their can be anything to travel inside and because we don’t know if their is. Or maybe, just maybe, we are afraid of it.

Well, today, you and I will together come to a conclusion that our head, our mind, has a massive world of its own, ready to be explored. 

How to Experience a Lucid Dream

To experience a Lucid Dream, what we need is two major things: a relaxed mind and a trigger. 

A relaxed mind is basically achieved by healthy activities. You don’t need to be stressed, you need to sleep better, to even have a sleeping schedule, maybe. 

A trigger can be anything- a memory, a moment of extreme happiness or sadness hidden in the depths of our subconsciousness, or anything else which triggers a dream, and somehow, you just realize you are in a dream. 

Best given way for triggering a lucid dream is having a tight schedule for sleeping, having a healthy way of living and being relaxed when you sleep.

Time to get a little technical, stay with me, aight. 

Alright, so when we sleep, our brain tends to cycle through two kinds of sleep : REM and Non-REM cycles.

REM is basically Rapid eye movement sleep. What happens in there is when you sleep, your brain remains active. It keeps doing what it does, sending signals and thus increasing your heart rate and your eye movements too.

Non-REM sleep is basically the opposite of an REM sleep cycle. In here, your brain sleeps with you, thus gradually slowing down your heartbeats and your eye movements. No, it doesn’t kill you. It just slows down all the functions of your body so you can just relax.

All dreams happen during the REM cycle. According to scientists and researchers, an REM cycle occurs after around 90 minutes of you sleeping and repeats every 90 minutes.

Okay, you can take off your “education caps” now. 

Reality Checks

Dreams, up to some extent, can look and even feel real sometimes. But with an amount of practice and meditation, one can easily search the surrounding and distinguish between the two. How to do it? Let’s find out.

There are a few methods to do so, some of them can be:

Mirrors 

In the dream state or the world of dreams, let’s call it Limbo, your reflection will not look normal. It could be mildly blurry, but it will be different. One can figure out from that if it’s a dream or real.

Pinch Your Nose

You will be able to breathe even after pressing or pinching and blocking your nose. A very helpful technique to differentiate between the two world.

Time Check

It is researched and stated that in the dreams, the laws of time and space barrier of the real world does not work the same. “When in doubt, check the time out.” Check for clocks and you’ll find that time will be stuck at whatever O’ clock it was when you entered as well as when you exit.

The Dark Side of Lucid Dreams

As the concept of Lucid Dreams go, you can be awake in your dreams, right. So that will include all your dreams, even the nightmares. You can be having a nightmare and would wake up in there. And if you don’t know how to control the dream, it could lead to a very disastrous time stuck inside your own head. 

There are thousands of cases and forums on the internet connected to this. People have seen and experienced horrors they can’t fully speak off while in a lucid dream. 

Many suggest, when we experience a sleep paralysis, it could be something negative or an evil force pressing your chest or sitting on top of your body. Now that is messed up. 

Also, some researches show that people who go in the state of coma, experience a dream state while their body looks asleep. They follow a path inside their own heads towards the depths of the dream world. Their subconsciousness creates a world, very similar to ours. With places we know, people we’ve met, and everything. It is said, that people in their comatose state take so much time to return back, because they accept the dream to be a reality. They fall in too deep and couldn’t return. 

The concept of the darker lucid dreams can be connected to another experience called the astral projection. Read more about it by clicking over it.

Hence, if you want to have a lucid experience, I would recommend you first need to hone up your concentration powers by meditating and keep practicing your reality checks. So that when you ever enter a lucid state while dreaming, you’ll know that it is a dream and not the reality.