During a lucid dream. View Source , the sleeper gains awareness that they are dreaming and can sometimes control the trajectory of the dream. People are interested in lucid dreaming in hopes that it may stimulate psychological growth. View Source , allow them to try impossible acts like flying, or even treat nightmares.
Lucid dreams are when you know that you're dreaming while you're asleep. You're aware that the events flashing through your brain aren't really happening. But the dream feels vivid and real.
“A lucid dream is defined as a dream during which dreamers, while dreaming, are aware they are dreaming,” specialists explain. The very first record of lucid dreaming appears to feature in the treatise On Dreams by the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Generally, lucid dreaming is quite rare. Only one half of the general population know the phenomenon from personal experience, approximately 20% have lucid dreams on a monthly basis, and only a minority of approximately 1% have lucid dreams several times a week.
What Causes Lucid Dreams. Though it may not be possible to understand exactly why lucid dreams occur, some research reveals that dreams of this type may be associated with times of stress and anxiety. Psychopathologies, such as depression and OCD, may also play a role.
Some research has suggested that lucid dreaming and certain personality traits may be connected in some way. One study found that lucid dreamers tend to have a greater internal locus of control. They also score higher on measures of a need for cognition and creativity.
Lucid Dreams
These are the rarest type of dreams where the person is aware that they're dreaming, while dreaming. Not just that, people actually feel like they're in complete control of their dream. Because of the awareness that you have, you can easily interpret your own lucid dreams.
It is possible to get the sensation that you are stuck in a lucid dream, if you have many dreams back-to-back, or try to go back to your body and keep waking up into a new dream. However, you will always wake up, so you are never actually stuck.
Recurring dreams that tend to be negative can be stressful. Since our dreams typically don't repeat themselves, all it takes is dreaming the same dream twice or more for it to be considered recurring, Barrett said. They're more common in childhood, Barrett said, but can last into adulthood.
Dreams can be so realistic that it can be hard to tell if we're awake or asleep. And sometimes, we wake up in the middle of a dream and wonder if it's possible to go back to sleep and pick up where we left off. It is possible to resume a dream, but it requires a certain focus and concentration.
So, why do my dreams sometimes feel so incredibly real? It comes down to how intensely stimulated parts of the brain become during REM sleep. Coupled with the powerful emotions we're experiencing within them at the same time – creating an illusion that feels more life-like than reality itself!
Lucid dreams are very memorable and vivid, but vivid dreams are not always lucid. If you remember your dream very clearly when you wake up, but were not aware that you were having a dream while you were asleep, you had a vivid dream, not a lucid dream.
Scientists and psychologists, old and new, tell us that dreams reveal critical aspects about ourselves. Dreams are a reflection of your recent state of mind, future possibilities, and changes that you have experienced. Related Blog: Do I Really Need 8 Hours of Sleep a Night?
At times, dreams may occur during other stages of sleep. However, these dreams tend to be much less vivid or memorable. The length of a dream can vary; they may last for a few seconds, or approximately 20–30 minutes. People are more likely to remember the dream if they are awakened during the REM phase.
“Since dreams are thought to primarily occur during REM sleep, the sleep stage when the MCH cells turn on, activation of these cells may prevent the content of a dream from being stored in the hippocampus – consequently, the dream is quickly forgotten.”
1. Falling. The most frequent in the common dream family, researchers say that the average human will dream about falling to his or her death more than five times in their lives (yikes).
While every human being so far as we know exhibits REM sleep, not every human being reports dreams. It appears you can have REM sleep with very low dream recall or possibly without dreams entirely. There may even be groups of individuals who never recall their dreams or who do not dream.
One of the earliest and most influential studies of color in dreams was performed by W.C. Middleton in 1943 — of the 277 college students tested, 70.7% reported “rarely” or “never” seeing colors in their dreams, whereas only 10% reported “frequently” or “very frequently”.
Experiencing recurring dreams may point at underlying issues regardless of the dream's content. Adults who experience frequent recurring dreams tend to have worse psychological health than those who do not, and many experts theorize that these dreams may be a way to work through unmet needs or process trauma.
"Since the '80s, we've known that lucid dreamers can communicate out of dreams by using these signals," says Karen Konkoly, a Ph. D. student at Northwestern University who is the first author on the study published this month in Current Biology.
In patients, pain dreams might be instigated by actual pain whereas for healthy persons pain dreams might be pain memories (self-experienced pain and/or seeing persons in pain). Future research should clarify how pain is processed during sleep.