On Lucid Dreams…

(Quick fact: The vast majority of people forget 50% of what they just dreamt about within the first five minutes of waking up, and 90% within ten! An easy way to avoid this is to rush to write down your dream immediately on waking…)

Ever had a lucid dream before?

Oh wait…you haven’t even heard of ‘lucid dreams’? Well then, let me give a brief intro…

You know what? If you’ve seen the movie Inception, the intro is no longer necessary, because that, in essence, is lucid dreaming.

(**if you haven’t seen the movie, this post contains some spoilers!**)

No, I don’t mean pounding bad guys in your dream while disobeying gravity and other known laws of physics.

…though that would be pretty cool…

And no, I don’t mean having a dream within a dream within a dream within a…(goodness, when does it stop?!)

What I do mean is the possibility that you are dreaming, and you know it. More so, you steer your dream in any direction. That, in essence, is lucid dreaming.

This concept may make some roll their eyes in derision, but lucid dreams are real, and reportedly experienced by a lot of people today. In fact, according to some sources, not only can you know for certain that you’re dreaming, but you can even take control of the dreams, and do whatever you want in wherever you think up. They say once you master lucid dreaming, then even the stuff in Inception is no longer fiction – you can build structures anywhere (vacation spa on the Sun?), have lifetime adventures in one night, and even have dreams within dreams…

It’s fascinating because by nature we know and have been taught that ‘asleep’ means unaware. And that’s why this is a challenge to the norm – we are now learning that you can still be conscious even while you’re…well, unconscious!

Think about it. Look back in your own life. Have you ever had a dream that, while dreaming – not after you woke up but while dreaming oh – you, in the dream, suddenly realized, Hold the phone…this is a dream! If you have, then congratulations! You’ve had a lucid dream!

Or perhaps, you didn’t really get to conclude in your dream that you were dreaming. Dreams are by their nature weird because they don’t follow any logic we know/adhere to, so maybe in your case, you may have seen something odd or really out of place (like a cat playing the piano like Chopin…and doing so underwater; or Obama polishing your shoes…while wearing Aso Ebi) that made you go, Something’s really off here, but I just can’t put my finger on it…you began to suspect that this wasn’t real, but you still went along and didn’t conclude. If so, then though I’m no expert, I can say that you’ve had ‘baby steps’ in lucid dreams. Congrats still!

It all makes me wonder, is lucid dreaming a part of ourselves that God created to be utilized and taken advantage of that our sinful nature has dumbed us down to forget and/or ignore? Or is it the reverse – is lucid dreaming a twisting of something originally intended for our good into our harm?

Harm? What’s the harm in a dream? You may say. That’s just it – we don’t know. Surprised? It’s the truth oh! Even though man has been sleeping since the day of creation, we [i.e. the growing body of science] still don’t know much about this thing called sleep, let alone dreaming.

We may know how to induce sleep, we may know how to detect when one is sleeping (or lacks it), we may even know some (not all) of the benefits of sleep.

But guess what? We still don’t know why we sleep.

We still don’t know why if you don’t sleep for a number of days straight you will die, literally.

We still don’t know why some other animals require less sleep than humans but still function fine (Giraffes only sleep 1.9hours everyday!)

We still don’t know why our brains function more when we’re asleep than awake!

We know so little (comparatively) about sleep – and we want to dive headfirst into the lesser known realm of dreaming? And let’s not even start on the issue of “If I’m in control of my dreams, am I morally accountable for my actions then too?”

Be that as it may, there’re many today who strongly support (and even teach) lucid dreaming, claiming it has a number of beneficial uses (even learning new skills like cooking or another language!) I still don’t have a conclusive answer myself, but I have asked God anyway, knowing His answer will be what’s best for me. Till then, I still find the concept of lucid dreaming a bit fascinating though…

How about you? Ever had a lucid dream? What do you think of lucid dreaming?

(Image source: wegotthiscovered.com)