Article written by Gendreau Alexane – M2 PCPI
One night during my exam period at the end of my senior year in high school, I had a dream where my alarm clock would ring, and when i would turn it off, it just wouldn’t stop. Even after unpluging it from the wall, it kept ringing. It was the first time I realised that I had to be dreaming. I was so sure that my alarm clock was still on in real life, that i had the strange feeling of being stuck in my sleep.. I was really scared to be late for my exams, i tried my best to wake up. But i couldn’t. It was my first lucid dream, or could I say lucid nightmare.
I chose to speak about the phenomenon of lucid dreaming in this article. I chose a ted talk to illustrate my sayings. The ted talk presenter starts off by telling his own story of experiencing lucid dreaming when he was 7, then develops on how lucid dreaming is conceptualize nowadays in science, and finish off by wondering how lucid dream could help us in our awakened life ?
His story :
He recalls a night where he was having a nightmare about an evil witch who scared him a lot. Once awake, he went to his mom’s bedroom and sought for her reassurance. After hearing her, telling him it was only a dream, and none of it was real, he went back to sleep. When he saw the evil witch a second time in his new nightmare, he remembered what his mom had told him when he was awake. And when the thought “I am dreaming” came to his mind, it didn’t wake him up which left him conscious in his own dream.
Lucid dreams in science :
Lucid dreams happen during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phase of sleeping. These dreams are said to be immersive, flexible, and learnable. Immersive because when it’s happening, you feel 100% inside of it, it looks, seems and feels like reality. It is a multisensorial hallucinatory experience, researchers says. It is said to be flexible because while you are dreaming, you can have control over what is happening to you and around you. You can choose the environment, the protagonists, the events and practically everything. Lucid dreams are also learnable, there are a lot of cognitive techniques to do while being awake, in order to have them happening when you’re asleep. Those techniques are mainly habits you take, asking yourself several times a day “am I sleeping ? am I awake”, some are called “reality checks”. Once you have the habits of doing it, when you’re asleep and you find and experience being odd, you will automatically do a reality check which will inform you that you are not awake, and this is when the lucid dream can occur.
There are some arguments between scientific researchers. Some affirm that we cannot be fully lucid during the REM phase of sleep, and that lucid dreaming may only be people who dreams that they are lucid while dreaming. Others believe it’s only short awakenings during the sleep and some believe that only one part of the brain is awake while the other parts sleep. A research from the late 90s proved that lucid dreams do exist. They asked participants to make an eye signal, -eyes going left, then right, then left and right again- when they felt lucid during the dream (during the REM phase of sleep, the movement of the eyes that we have, is actually the movement of the eyes we have in our dreams). The experiment succeeded and a participant was able to send the signal while sleeping.
It is still in debate wether lucid dreams allow a reflective awareness of if it is another state of consciousness which would be hybrid -half brain dreaming, half brain awaken.
How could it help one another :
Cognitive theories provide that the function of dreams is to help us cope with life threatening experiences we have in our daily lives. When we confront a struggle while being awake, our brain reminds this difficulty during our sleeping time, so we can learn from the experience and grow from it. This is the nowadays cognitive theory for the purpose of dreaming.
Researchers suggest and even provide proof that lucid dreaming could enhance this process and help each and everyone to improve their personal development. It could then be considered a psychological tool.
- Lucid dream could help in nightmare treatment, researches are done in order to see in what extent people can control what’s happening in their dreams when they are trained for lucid dreaming.
- It could also be used for mental rehearsal before a competition or some events you need to be psychologically prepared for.
- In REM sleep, we are very creative, this could help find creative solutions to solve problems from daily lives.
In many ways the practise of lucid dreams could help psychological development, it’s a path for future scientific research that seems full of promises.
Link to watch the full Ted talk : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK3SfNxbK3Y
Vocabulary : (I didn’t learn new words, ted talk are rather accessible)
- immersive – immersif
- awakening – réveil
- rehearsal – entrainement
- path – chemin