Lucid Dreaming: Take Conscious Control of Your Dreams

His disciple, Aristotle, describes dreams as a continuation of perception, a consequence of our experiences and impressions during the day that are processed by our minds at night.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the practice of dream yoga combines meditation and various yoga techniques to refine and purify the mind and gain insight into the nature of consciousness and the illusory nature of reality.

One of the visionaries, Rudolf Steiner, the father of Anthroposophy, believed that sleep is not only for sustaining life force, but it can also help us grow spiritually and think differently about spirituality and ourselves through lucid dreaming.

While ancient wisdom offers a spiritual perspective, modern science is showing us more and more that lucid dreaming is not just a strange thing, but a skill that can be studied and developed. Freud was the first to suggest that our dreams might have meaning, and since then they’ve been the focus of neuropsychology and neuroscience.

We spend a significant portion of our lives asleep, and dreaming is an essential aspect of that time, even if we don’t always realize it. Dreaming helps us process information, store memories, and may even have psychotherapeutic benefits.

And yet, despite the fact that we dream every night, most dreams are forgotten when we wake up. Given that so much of our lives are spent sleeping and dreaming, it is worth making the effort to be more aware and conscious during these moments when life force is being restored.

During REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, our brains are as active as when we’re awake, but our muscles are temporarily paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our vivid dreams. As the night progresses, we enter REM sleep more frequently and for longer periods of time, increasing the likelihood of experiencing lucid dreams.

That’s because the part of the brain responsible for logical thinking is less active when we dream. As a result, dreams often seem vague, unusual, and fragmented. Yet in their apparent chaos, they can contain important messages and insights about our inner lives.

While there are still many unanswered questions about the practice of conscious dreaming, there is no doubt that it offers a unique opportunity for an inner journey. Sean McNamara, author of Renegade Mystic: The Pursuit of Spiritual Freedom Through Consciousness Exploration and Renegade Mystic’s Concise Instructions for Lucid Dreaming and the Out of Body Experience, asserts that it has various benefits.

Lucid dreaming is a very exciting phenomenon, and there are still many questions to be answered, to which researchers from the Sleep Laboratory of the Faculty of Education and Psychology at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University) are actively contributing.

Researchers Tamás Bogdány and Péter Simon, together with Philippe Peigneux from the Université libre de Bruxelles, published an article in the journal PNAS in 2022, providing very interesting information and observations for studying brain function.

Their article gives a brief overview of predictive coding, which originated in computer science but is now being used by neuroscientists to study dreams.

The purpose of their research is to better understand the nature of nightmares, strange dream experiences (such as levitation, flying, out-of-body experiences), the human brain, subjective reality, and the treatment of insomnia.

The idea of predictive coding is that the human brain compares what we experience now with what we experienced in the past. This helps us shape our experiences through our internal model, from how we process sensory information to how we make sense of it all. During sleep, we don’t get as many sensory inputs as we do when we’re awake, which is different from the vivid, complex, and detailed dream experiences we have.

Have you ever thought that controlling your dreams can be a great way to gain deeper spiritual insight, connect with your subconscious, and better understand your inner self?

The reason is that this state is different from normal dreaming. You’re aware of what’s going on while you’re still asleep, which gives you the opportunity to achieve a higher spiritual vision.

Hopefully, this article will inspire you to begin the exciting journey of discovering the realm of vivid, lucid dreams, because developing consciousness is one of the most enriching things you can do in life.