Lucid Dreaming
What are the benefits?
Have you ever wanted to gain the competitive edge on the competition? How about healing yourself psychologically? What about harnessing your inner creativity? Well lucid dreaming can help to answer all of these questions. Once you become consciously aware in your dreams, you can become more consciously aware in your life. You can live lucidly through the benefits of lucid dreaming.
Benefit # 1 : Performance enhancement
Imagine being placed in a virtual realty simulator where you can practice any sport or exercise without ever having to worry about making a mistake or hurting yourself. You are not bound by any limitations, free to practice or train what ever you please. The price to use this simulator must be astronomical and completely out of your means, right? Wrong. It’s actually free and you can do it in your mind while you sleep at night. Charlie Morley’s guide to lucid dreaming explains that “training while in the lucid dream state creates neural pathways that will carry over into that waking state.” Morley reports that “scientists say that the reason we can increase our performance through mental practice is that ‘the peripheral activation of the supplementary motor areas that occurs when we imagine engaging a motor action leads to kinaesthetic feedback from the muscles and builds the basis of the learning mechanism’, even though those muscles aren’t moving.” So you can practice landing that 360 or serving that perfect pitch in your lucid dream and “gain new sensory-motor skills” as the research from the book quotes.
Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple by Robert Waggoner and Caroline McCready gives an account of a sports science student who wanted to become a better swimmer. He used his lucid dreams to train and gain the skills to achieve his goal. While lucid, the student would change the consistency of the water, transforming it into thick honey in order to build endurance from the resistance. He could position himself outside and above his physical body in his dream. This allowed him to watch himself swim and correct his technique with his second set of eyes. He could change his perspective more readily in his lucid dreams and improve his over all skills as a swimmer in the waking world.
Benefit #2: Psychological healing
Lucid dreaming has helped those with addiction, post — traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and even overcoming fears and phobias. Morley says “a lucid dreamer might implant a beneficial suggestion once lucid” to break an addictive behavior. So, say your a smoker who wants to quit smoking or a nail bitter who wants to fight the urge to bite your nails. Once you become lucid you can suggest to yourself that you will be happier and healthier if you stop smoking or biting your nails. The suggestion will then be implanted in your unconscious. This “self-inception” as Morley calls it, can alter our actions in real life and “implant a new habit pattern in our minds.” Hypnotherapists use a similar method to help patients discover the underlying meaning of their addictive behaviors.
Lucid dreaming creates a space for those who have certain fears or suffer from PTSD to explore what is troubling them. Again, imagine you are in a virtual realty simulator and know that nothing can harm you. Since you are lucid and aware that you are only dreaming, you can give yourself “gradual exposure” as Morley says, to what scares or troubles you. For example, if you have a fear of water, you could slowly submerge yourself in an ocean or in a lake during a lucid dream to overcome your fear. According to Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple, “It appears that lucid dreaming allows for a new type of desensitization, inasmuch as lucid dreamers can realistically engage fear on multiple sensory levels in the virtual realty of the lucid dream.” In the case of someone who has reoccurring nightmares as a result of PTSD, lucid dreaming presents the opportunity to seek out what is causing the nightmares and come to terms with it. The causes are usually repressed feelings or memorizes that the dreamer must confront in order to heal. Once the dreamer has come to terms with the nightmare they can start to engage in a more regular sleep pattern.
Benefit #3: Harnessing your inner creativity
Lucid dreaming can be the gateway to finding your inner creativity. Many have used lucid dreaming to tap into their creative core to compose music, construct art and even experiment with math and science. Our creative streak comes from the right hemisphere of our brain. When you become aware in your dreams you gain more access to this inner creativity. “Lucidity brings a strand of left-brain cognizance into the dream, meaning that we can intentionally engage the dream’s right-brain creativity,” says Morley. So, when you become lucid while dreaming you open yourself to the opportunity of asking your unconscious to help you with any block in creativity. You can even ask your dream a direct question concerning your creative motives and the unconscious can reveal a solution in your dream. According to Shirley S.Wang of The Wall Street Journal, a study done by the University of Lincoln in England found that people who lucid dream frequently are better at problem-solving. Once you hit the nail on the creative head in your dream, you can apply those problem-solving skills in real life.
