Can you control your dreams?

Dreams have been of paramount importance to cultures throughout the ages.  Lucid dreaming isn't new either. According to the podcast, Aristotle may have been the first to write about lucid dreaming, although he didn't have a term for it. And some Tibetan Buddhists have been practicing something like lucid dreaming for a very long time. They used to call it dream yoga.

A Dutch psychiatrist named Frederik van Eeden came up with the term for lucid dreams in 1913. He claimed that there are nine types of dreams in all, including ordinary, symbolic and vivid dreams. Lucid dreams often times involve flying.

Lucid dreaming occurs during the REM sleep, the fifth sleep stage. During this stage our body becomes motionless, with the exception of the eyelids. So, through the movement of our eyes, we can determine if a person is dreaming or not.

According to the podcast, we aren't sure what's going on in our brain during lucid dreaming. One prediction is that maybe the part of our brain which is connected to our logic is supposed to be "asleep," but it's possible that it "wakes up" while REM sleep, so that dreaming and logic are both working at the same time, enabling the dreamer to recognize the dream situation for what it is.

The grand idea of lucid dreaming is all about control. In your dream, you could consciously decide to visit a specific place, say, Italy, France -- and your dream would obey the waking mind. The possibility of controlling the mind even in sleep has led some researchers to consider lucid dreaming as a treatment for nightmares. One study showed that lucid dreaming helped a group of people having nightmares to have them less often.

There is a great debate over the subject of dream control. The majority of scientists say that it's not possible. But there are some scientists who argue that there's so much we don't know about the human mind that we can't make any conclusive judgments one way or the other.

According to the podcast there are several techniques that can help you to have lucid dreams. The first suggestion was to keep a diary near your bed. And when you wake up, write down what you have seen. Another good technique is that when you wake up from your dream, try to recall it. And when you go back to your sleep again, you keep in mind that you are going to see the same dream and it is quiet feasible, that you will go on dreaming the same dream.

This episode was very interesting for me, as I see dreams mostly every day. And the interesting fact is that sometimes I wake up and don’t see the whole dream. Then maybe after a week I can see the rest of my dream. Another interesting fact was that in the podcast one of the speakers said that once he saw a dream, where his teeth were pulling out of his mouth, it was amazing, as I have seen the same dream too. It was like a nightmare, and the awful thing is that I was seeing the same dream mostly every night for 3 months. Maybe it was connected with stress or I don’t know what, but, fortunately, I haven’t seen that dream for a long and I hope I will never see it again.