How to have lucid dreams? Science explains it to us

Dreamers are in luck: here are some tips to achieve lucid dreams.

Dreams and everything related to them is, for a long time, a world that awakens a deep interest in the scientific community as well as in the general public.. The fact that our nervous system is capable of creating invented environments and fictitious narratives without receiving hardly any stimuli from the outside world has made us look for meaning in dreams, try to relate them to our life goals and even wonder if these hallucinations have something to do with alternative realities.

However, there is another factor that increases the potential interest we may have in the study of dreams to the square. It is the existence of lucid dreams.

What are lucid dreams?

The lucid dreams are those dreams in which we are aware that what we are experiencing is not real..... The person who experiences lucid dreams, in short, is immersed in dreamlike situations in which hallucinations intermingle with the awareness of dreaming.

In addition, this fact usually also entails the appearance of the possibility of modifying the dream itself. the possibility of modifying the dream that is being lived, something that would transform the dream scene.This would transform the dream scene into a kind of magical playground in which desires are transformed into reality. This, of course, makes many people wish to experience lucid dreaming, although achieving this is not easy.

The onironautical community

Lucid dreams are statistically rareMost people do not experience them even on a monthly basis, although there are a few sleepers who experience these episodes relatively frequently, several times a week.

However, there are many people who have come to want to experience lucid dreams on a regular basis so much that all kinds of virtual communities, forums and books have been formed in which the onironautspeople who are able to experience these dreams, describe tricks and recommendations for training in lucid dreaming, describe tricks and recommendations to train themselves in certain techniques that theoretically that theoretically serve to increase the probability of being aware of what is happening in the dream world.

So, to have lucid dreams, is it enough to follow these tips? Not so fast. The problem with the recommendations often given in books and onironaut forums is that the vast majority of them focus on the management of subjective states of consciousness, something difficult to achieve when dreaming or when falling into the realm of Morpheus.

Unfortunately, the very gateway to the dream world is the place where the techniques learned during the day and the plans to be followed during the following hours are left to rest.

Speaking the language of the brain

Just because it is difficult to force lucid dreaming does not mean that it is impossible. Recently, neuroscience research has shown that there is an option to generate this type of dream, not only through internal dialogue no longer through internal dialogue and life philosophy, but by directly altering the way the brain works.

For example, it has been shown that inducing the appearance of gamma-frequency brain waves (specifically between 25 and 40 Hz) in some frontal regions of the brain during REM sleep significantly increases the likelihood of lucid dreaming.

Of course, not all of us have the ability to use laboratory machinery to modify the wave frequencies of our brains while we sleep every day, but this study has served as a precedent to reinforce the hypothesis that the functioning of the nervous system can be materially altered in order to have these kinds of dreams.. From there, it has been investigated what material changes are able to increase these probabilities... and today we could have the answer.

Inducing lucid dreams with the alarm clock

Research from last year seems to indicate that a good way to promote the occurrence of lucid dreaming might be to briefly interrupting sleep to go back to sleep (or almost-sleep). almost-sleep) immediately after. To do this, one trick would be to use the option of snoozing the alarm clock so that it goes off again a few minutes later.

The research that leads us to this possible solution, however, does not provide us with a definitive answer, since it is not an experiment but a cross-checking of data from surveys administered to several people, some of whom experience lucid dreaming regularly. This means that people who are more likely to be aware of what is happening during their dream experiences tend to use the snooze button more, but we do not know for the moment if this is the case. at the moment we do not know if it is this simple trick that causes these dreams to appear.. As always, correlation does not imply causation.

However, the results are promising and leave the door open for future tests in an experimental laboratory. In a few months we could have the definitive answer that all onironauts are looking for, but, for the moment, the way to test oneself with the alarm clock remains open to whoever wants to try it.

Bibliographical references:

• Smith, B. and Blagrove, M. (2015). Lucid dreaming frequency and alarm clock snooze button use. Dreaming, 25(4), pp. 291 - 299.

• Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Hobson, A., Paulus, W., Koppehele-Gossel, J., Klimke, A. and Nitsche M. A. (2014). Induction of self-awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity. Nature neuroscience, 17(6), pp. 810 - 812.