What is Lucid Dreaming?
Lucid dreaming refers to the ability to be consciously aware in your dreams.
Normally in dreams you just react to whatever happens.
When you become lucid during dreams you are aware that what you are experiencing is a dream and that there are no restrictions to where you can go, what you can see or what you can achieve.
Once you attain this level of awareness you are able to consciously create what you see and what you do within your dreams.
For instance, imagine that you are having issues with somebody in your waking life. If you can have lucid dreams you can ask this person into your dream and have discussions with them that would not be likely to occur outside the dream state.
Because you are working in your unconscious mind, your waking life rationality is not there and this allows you to perceive things, differently, in a potentially “out of the box” way, opening up new ideas and ways to view your issue.
Think about it.
One of the reasons that issues persist as long as they do is because we are always perceiving them a certain way. The same way.
Lucid dreaming has the ability to open up new insights and enable us to get a new take on things.
In other words, we stop banging our heads against the same brick wall and allow ourselves to find potential solutions to our problems.
You may be saying here, hang on….we create the people in our dreams anyway, so what they say to us is not necessarily how they would go in waking life?
Correct, as everything is controlled by your own mind you are guessing as to how others will react in your dream.
Your image of people WILL be created from your memories and feelings about them. Please understand that you do not want to “replace” a waking life conversation. View it more as the ability to release some frustration in your dreams, or rehearse a conversation perhaps prior to the real waking life one.
There are many wonderful practical applications for the skill of lucid dreaming. One of the most beneficial is its ability to turn nightmares from fearful experiences to ones of happiness and excitement.
Although for most of us sleeping and dreaming is a relatively normal and relaxing experience, for some people who experience recurring nightmares, nighttime can be anything but a restful experience.
Achieving lucidity has the ability to conquer the concept of fear in your dreams. By realizing you are dreaming the irrational fear that you associate with certain images or scenarios is dissolved. This can allow you to face the fears rather than run away. You deal with issues up front, rather than letting them linger on and on.
Many people have found it helps to deal with nightmares. If you have the ability to determine the outcome of events in your dream then you can logically assume that no monster or bad guy can harm you in any way.
So many people have used a form of lucidity to turn around to their attacker and ask them why they are attacking them.
Or they are able to positively influence their dream imagery in some way that enables them to escape the scary situation.
A perfect example is a dream from Martin Lowenthal PhD had.
“ I was in Utah, when I had a lucid dream about falling. To turn this dream from scary free falling, I decided since I was falling, I might as well fly. First I flew through London. Then I realized I’d like to be at the canyon, and I was. After waking in the morning, I hiked out to the canyon rim, it exactly matched what I’d already seen in my dream”.
Amazing.
Why Would You Want to Lucid Dream?
Aside from the ability to aid in healing fear and anxiety in nightmares there are several other wonderful practical applications.
Dreams are a wonderful experience in and of themselves…but imagine not being restricted in what you experience or where you go or whom you see!
People find lucid dreaming appealing for a vast array of reasons but we are going to give you the top two reasons.
1. Ability to experience exhilarating adventures
During the state of lucidity there are no rules or restrictions that apply in your waking life so you can literally go anywhere achieve anything and have some amazing adventures.
You don’t have to wait to save up enough money to trek in the Amazon…you could do it tonight!
It does take skill and practice to achieve things in your dreams but it is possible.
2. Practicing feared experiences
Yes. Believe it or not but lucid dreaming can help facilitate getting over feared experiences in waking life.
Because lucid dreaming is an incredibly vivid form of mental imagery, neuronal patterns required for acquiring new skills like public speaking for example, can be established in the dream state in preparation for waking life.
So you can rehearse for certain situations in your dreams and learn how to do things better than you expect you ever can. This real like imagery can also be useful in overcoming phobias such as social anxieties, physical pain and dealing with the death of loved ones.
So this form of dreaming can facilitate positive changes in your waking life and can make your life more exciting and enjoyable.
If you would like to learn more about Lucid Dreaming visit www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com
a comprehensive site on everything you wanted to know about controlling your dreams!
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