Lucid Dreaming

My, It’s sure been a chilly month hasn’t it? March isn’t feeling too much like spring to me- thanks a lot, worthless month. I trusted you. Today is one of the first days it’s been above 60 degrees in what feels like a century, and I’m inclined to say “too little, too late.” But it’s not, don’t leave me, nice weather!

It’s been so cold, in fact, that layers of ice made a couple days two weeks ago quite perilous to drive in. The roads were nicely iced over, causing many businesses to close for fear that Elsa’s wrath would hit them with a renewed fury.

Sorry, had to work in at least one Frozen joke there. Never again, I assure you. Anyway, because of this Tennessee snowpocalypse,  my lovely college decided to do something positive for its students for a change and close down for a short while. In fact, it closed down the day I had a few midterm tests scheduled, allowing me a sort of early spring break that I was quite glad to take advantage of. Most of my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a schedule I enjoy because it allows me to spend the least amount of time on campus while still getting enough of my homework done on all the other days. Because the fearsome winter storm had been several days in the making, on the Tuesday of March 3rd my teachers all agreed that it would be unlikely that we’d be meeting again until the next week, the glorious week known as spring break, would be over.

This caused them to seethe with the fury of teachers scorned; threats of online quizzes and poor midterm grades reverberated around those ancient and learned halls, but they fell on deaf ears. My classmates and I were listening for one thing and one thing only: the ticking of the clock which would sound out a call to escape.

Eventually, as it always does, the time came to leave. All the students of MTSU waited breathlessly to find out if we would have to study for our midterms that were scheduled on the 5th. We received no word until 3-freaking-50 in the morning, of the next day, because that venerable institution absolutely hates closing down on days it could be making money. Nearly 4 am, but my phone was on in the hope of hearing the dulcet chime of a message telling me I had a day off intellectual labor. As it turns out, it was a good thing that my phone woke me up, because I was having some really weird borderline-nightmare dreams.

Dreams. Pretty trippy things, really. We walk around the Earth until our body can’t take it anymore, at which point it shuts down and takes several hours to completely restore our power. During that time, occasionally our brain decides to take a magical journey through its subconscious, resulting in a bizarre and often creepy outcome. Mine are pretty strange anyway, and on the night of the 4th it was no exception. Among the highlight reel of events my mind convinced me were reality was me oversleeping my midterms and failing all my classes. I think I saw a future life for myself as a hobo there too. Terrifying stuff. I woke myself up in a cold sweat, and, still hazy, scrambled to get ready for class only to find they’d been canceled. However, one interesting thing about my experience that night is that about halfway through it, and the reason I was able to wake myself up, was because it turned into a lucid dream.

What exactly are lucid dreams? We’ve all probably experienced them at one time or another, and I’m pretty sure you guys know the basics of regular dreams and how REM (rapid eye movement) sleep works. The term lucid dreaming, coined by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, refers to the state of dreaming and yet knowing that you are in the dream. He’s actually a pretty interesting guy who wrote a lot on the concept of dreams, and was pretty ahead of his time on the subject. Well, really ahead, if this picture helps date him any. (Hint, late 18th century.)

I think we can all agree that dreams are pretty cool, and so could van Eeden. He was one of the early researchers of Oneirology, a way too complicated word that means the study of dreams. While van Eeden published several works on the subject, it wasn’t until the mid 1900’s that Oneirology saw many breakthroughs. After all, it’s pretty hard to measure something that you can’t see, feel, or touch, and forget about within minutes of experiencing it.

While the study of why and how we dream is an utterly fascinating subject, it would take far too long to go into it. I’ve posted an amazing video at the end of this article that explains dreams in a brilliant, concise way, but I’d like to focus on lucid dreaming. As I mentioned before, it’s a term that describes being aware that one is dreaming, and it’s also fairly rare for someone to experience. If you practice at it, it becomes easier,  but even then it can be hit or miss.

Now those of you who haven’t heard of lucid dreaming might ask “how does this happen?” Well, a website called Lucidity.com which has many articles on dreaming notes that “Lucidity usually begins in the midst of a dream when the dreamer realizes that the experience is not occurring in physical reality, but is a dream.”

This is what is known as a DILD, which stands for Dream Initiated Lucid Dream. The term refers to “waking up” in a dream without actually waking up in real life. You become self aware. The other type of lucid dreaming is less exciting and is known as a WILD, or Wake Initiated Lucid Dream. It’s pretty much advanced meditation, you go straight from being awake to a WILD with no lapse of consciousness in between the two states.

DILDs are the cooler one in my opinion (though I really don’t like that acronym for some reason). As for how they occur, it’s actually kind of difficult. They can sometimes be intentionally induced through various ways that I encourage you to research if the subject interests you, but to tell the truth no one knows how to guarantee a lucid dream. More often than not, the dreams we do have make us believe that we’re doing something in real life, no matter how absurd it is, and only realize it was a dream after we’ve woke up. What further complicates successful lucid dreams is that when you realize you are dreaming, your brain instinctively goes “Whoa! What the heck is going on here?!” and snaps you out of the dream, waking you up. If you don’t though, and it does occasionally happen, you can become master (or mistress!) of your dream, and that’s awesome.

That’s pretty much why you’d want to do it too. Dreaming/REM sleep has been proven to help your memory, so why not have fun while doing it? When I manage it, I do the typical flying around, creating things from nothing, becoming a god- you know, the stuff I do in real life. Usually I wake up pretty soon after, because unfortunately the longer a person is lucid dreaming, the weaker his or her hold on their dream state becomes. Eventually they can’t take it anymore, and wake up. In the meantime though, you can dream up some pretty cool, and crazy, stuff. I especially like it when I realize I can wake up from a nightmare. Those jogging skeletons that like to chase me around haven’t come close to mugging me since I was 8 or so. No matter what though, being aware of your dream opens the door to do anything you want to. It’s kind of like a perfect version of your imagination, and it can be just as limitless.

Research is still being done on this fascinating subject, and there’s still so much we don’t know about dreams of any kind, lucid or not. There are many theories as to why we dream as well, but no one really knows for sure. I’ll be interested to learn more if we ever do find out, but for now I’m content with soaring through the skies with some graceful flaps of my arms. Until jetpacks are invented anyway- whiiiich I just did. In a dream. They’re just as cool as you think.

I wish I could have written more on what I’ve discovered about dreams, but I don’t want you to fall asleep until after you’ve finished reading this. As a parting gift, I leave you with this video, as promised. The guy in it does an excellent job of showing just how fascinating dreams and oneirology truly are. Now go out and dream responsibly!