Controlling your dreams

[Devon Gibbons]

What does it mean to control your dream?

[ParaSait]

What do you mean exactly, are you talking about lucid dreams?

(I know a thing or two about that)

[Pepin]

That you are conscious during your dreams, that you are aware you are conscious, and that you can achieve some level of control of your dreams when you are conscious.

 

I have a big issue with lucid dreams. I have a tendency to think in my dreams and to analyze various aspects. The more I do this, the more awake I become, and I usually wake up. This is frustrating because I have issues staying asleep and this causes me to wake up over and over again.

 

Oftentimes I start noticing things that don't make sense, or continuity that doesn't follow, or what I will call dream blurriness. I often figure out that I am dreaming.

 

It is kind of weird because there is part of my brain whose job seems to be to keep me in the dream. If I start to catch on that it is a dream, I usually jump to another dream as if nothing happened, or the issue tries to resolve itself.

 

For instance, I had a dream where I was talking to my friend Nate, and all of a sudden he changes into somebody else. I said "I was talking to Nate", and he changes back to Nate, and the conversation continues like nothing happened. There are lots of other methods, with jump cuts being very effective.

 

Another dream I had was where I was on a blimp and it crashed in an usual manner. That part of the dream replayed over and over again to try to correct the mistake, which made it ironically obvious that I was dreaming.

 

Now if I put in an effort to lucid dream, weird stuff starts happening. That whole waking up in your bed thing but you're still dreaming cliche happens way way too much. The point of it is of course to make me think that I am awake and not in the dream.

 

When I started doing dream analysis, I started to actually analyze my dreams while I was dreaming. My brain fought back against this by making my dreams overly long pieces of abstract art which I was incapable of describing.

 

I could go on about this. Lucid dreaming is not something I set out to do, and is something I'd prefer to stop doing. It might be more alright if I had more time to play around in the dream, but I always wake up shortly after, and then my subsequent dreams become very weird and abstract.

 

I don't believe that it says anything important about you besides that you prefrontal cortex is a little too active, or that you've naturally learned or used various method to induce lucid dreaming. If you look into lucid dreaming, the usual ways of inducing it is to look at the time. People say that you can't read in a dream, which isn't true as I do it all the time, but sometimes you can't, other times it is a very strange process where you can only see one word at a time.

[Devon Gibbons]

What do you mean exactly, are you talking about lucid dreams?

(I know a thing or two about that)

Yeah, so I'm aware I'm dreaming, then I for instance do something intentional in the dream, like search for meaning and connections.

 

That you are conscious during your dreams, that you are aware you are conscious, and that you can achieve some level of control of your dreams when you are conscious.

 

I have a big issue with lucid dreams. I have a tendency to think in my dreams and to analyze various aspects. The more I do this, the more awake I become, and I usually wake up. This is frustrating because I have issues staying asleep and this causes me to wake up over and over again.

 

Oftentimes I start noticing things that don't make sense, or continuity that doesn't follow, or what I will call dream blurriness. I often figure out that I am dreaming.

 

It is kind of weird because there is part of my brain whose job seems to be to keep me in the dream. If I start to catch on that it is a dream, I usually jump to another dream as if nothing happened, or the issue tries to resolve itself.

 

For instance, I had a dream where I was talking to my friend Nate, and all of a sudden he changes into somebody else. I said "I was talking to Nate", and he changes back to Nate, and the conversation continues like nothing happened. There are lots of other methods, with jump cuts being very effective.

 

Another dream I had was where I was on a blimp and it crashed in an usual manner. That part of the dream replayed over and over again to try to correct the mistake, which made it ironically obvious that I was dreaming.

 

Now if I put in an effort to lucid dream, weird stuff starts happening. That whole waking up in your bed thing but you're still dreaming cliche happens way way too much. The point of it is of course to make me think that I am awake and not in the dream.

 

When I started doing dream analysis, I started to actually analyze my dreams while I was dreaming. My brain fought back against this by making my dreams overly long pieces of abstract art which I was incapable of describing.

 

I could go on about this. Lucid dreaming is not something I set out to do, and is something I'd prefer to stop doing. It might be more alright if I had more time to play around in the dream, but I always wake up shortly after, and then my subsequent dreams become very weird and abstract.

 

I don't believe that it says anything important about you besides that you prefrontal cortex is a little too active, or that you've naturally learned or used various method to induce lucid dreaming. If you look into lucid dreaming, the usual ways of inducing it is to look at the time. People say that you can't read in a dream, which isn't true as I do it all the time, but sometimes you can't, other times it is a very strange process where you can only see one word at a time.

I've had that experience too, brain coming up with really long artistic abstractions. That can feel overwhelming. I wonder if it's a kind of BLARP of the unconscious trying to tell us a lot of stuff, though, and not meaningless over-reacting pre-frontal cortex action.

 

What do you guys think it means about our conscious waking lives? Does it mean we are more conscious or less conscious? Does it mean we are more in tune with our unconscious or subconscious mind which is why we feel awake in the dream world, or does it means we are more distant and its the distance that's causing so much "conscious awareness" in our dreams, as a sort of compensation to get us to look inward? Just interested in your thoughts and experiences about it.

[QueechoFeecho]

I've had some successful attempts at controlling my dreams.  I wrote down detailed notes (full page) any time I woke up, whether in the morning or middle of the night.  After doing that for 7-10 days, the lucidity became stronger and more frequent.  I never fully flew yet, but I was able to make myself float upwards.  Often I'd do that for a few seconds, then the instance of me in my dream would notice being off the ground, get nervous, and I'd float or fall back down.  Very fun stuff though.

[Pepin]

What do you guys think it means about our conscious waking lives? Does it mean we are more conscious or less conscious? Does it mean we are more in tune with our unconscious or subconscious mind which is why we feel awake in the dream world, or does it means we are more distant and its the distance that's causing so much "conscious awareness" in our dreams, as a sort of compensation to get us to look inward? Just interested in your thoughts and experiences about it.

 

I don't think there is exactly one cause or one answer.

 

It may mean that we are not sleeping as well. Not sleeping well could be due to stress, or it could be because we consumed caffeine that day. It could be because our minds are racing because of an awesome night we had with friends. It could be because we are having a problems with our love life. It could be because our natural neurology allows for lucid dreaming more. Or it could be because our neurology was shaped when we were young in a way that caused more lucid dreaming.

 

I think there are plenty of instances where it could be from everyday events that tell us nothing about ourselves, and that there are plenty of other instances where it might have more to do with ourselves.

 

It might be because we unintentionally trained in the methods of lucid dreaming. I work in a job where the time is pretty important and so I look at the clock a lot. In my dreams, I also check the clock a lot. It just so happens that this is a method to induce lucid dreaming. There isn't anything special about my checking of the time in real life or in the dream, it just so happens that I have a behavior which just so happens to induce lucid dreaming.

 

I am pretty certain that a lot of my lucid dreaming comes from the fact that I have a very high acuity for noticing things that are off or don't make sense. Noticing that something doesn't make sense is more of an unconscious and very linked to long term memory. This high acuity continues when I sleeping as many parts of the brain are involved. When I am sleeping, when some part of my brain notices that something that doesn't make sense, it naturally forwards it to my pre-frontal cortex since that is a very strong connection, and as a result it causes me to be more conscious. 

 

Of course the above is just arm-chair theorizing. I don't know the answer, but I assume that lucid dreaming happens in many different ways, with some being positive, others negative, and many being neutral. Weighing it on a case by case basis seems more apt in my opinion.

[Devon Gibbons]

I think there are plenty of instances where it could be from everyday events that tell us nothing about ourselves, and that there are plenty of other instances where it might have more to do with ourselves.

It could be that what I do to interpret my dreams is just a sloppy kind of free-association, so I may not be consciously recognizing the irrelevance of the thing to my dream. Like I attribute the meaning of the smaller category to the larger. Erroneously finding out what the individual symbol's meaning is and applying that to what the WHOLE dream means". Some fallacy there. Speaking generally I commit it often. Pretty amateur. Spaghetti? The dream means I want to go to Italy. Jumping to conclusions. 

 

I work in a job where the time is pretty important and so I look at the clock a lot. In my dreams, I also check the clock a lot.

Do you look at a real analog wall clock, or a digital watch, or digital computer time? Just curious.

 

Of course the above is just arm-chair theorizing.

 

 

My theory on armchairs is they resemble a parent's lap, and we want to fulfill our imprinted childhood need of that feeling of stability we had when we sat on our parent's lap... jk lol. I need to get an armchair, I've always wanted one, a nice leather armchair that I fit snugly into. I got terrible back support on all chairs around here.

 

But really, it's sensible actually to think about the multifactorially affected nature of dreams. Thanks for commenting.