Ever heard of lucid dreaming? It’s when you’re aware that you’re dreaming. This may sound mundane to you, because maybe it comes to you easily.
You may have been doing it all the time but aren’t really aware that you are, because it is so involuntary to you. Well, that’s pretty normal – a lot of people are able to lucid dream and they don’t label it as such.
They don’t really see the significance. Most people are able to experience lucid dreaming a few times in their lives, without having to induce it.
It’s as unremarkable to them as having to chew their food or scratching an itch on their body. But a lot of people actually need to consciously work on it in order to be able to achieve it.
You may be wondering why other people would want to be able to lucid dream. Well, imagine being experiencing a nightmare. Having it once could be okay, even if it leaves you waking up feeling a bit anxious.
But what if it’s the kind of nightmare that affects you the whole day? Or what if it doesn’t just happen once – instead, you get recurring nightmares most days of the week?
There are a lot more reasons why people would want to be able to lucid dream. There are ways that it can be of benefit to you even if you don’t experience any major anxiety-related problems. Here are some of the benefits of lucid dreaming.
The Many Ways Lucid Dreaming Can Help You
Lucid dreaming can be medicine to a condition that you are already experiencing – it could alleviate your pain or your discomfort.
It could also be a good part of your diet – something that will help prevent any issues from developing to begin with.
Apart from all that, it could even be something that could enhance your life – a way for you to live your life in a fuller, more satisfying way.
How can lucid dreaming do all that? How can awareness of your dreams give you all these seemingly amazing benefits?
Well, here’s how.
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Lucid dreaming can help you increase your metacognition – awareness of your awareness.
Awareness is a very powerful thing – even as it sounds so automatic and humdrum to us, something we don’t even have to think about. But the truth is, we may need to practice our awareness more than we think.
A similarity can be drawn towards the practices of meditation – quieting our minds in order that we may listen more deeply, feel our bodies more holistically, and live our lives with more intent.
Meditation helps get rid of the noise in order that we may know where we are really going and proceed with more clarity and purpose.
Awareness is very similar. It helps us see things the way they ought to be seen. It helps us pay more attention to our thoughts, our experiences, and our perceptions of people, situations, and even ourselves.
Awareness helps us form better connections and understand ourselves and the world better. All this can be established by doing something seemingly mundane – making sure you are in the moment, fully present, fully aware of what is happening.
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Lucid dreaming can help you control your dreams – and effectively, your nightmares as well.
If you find yourself in a dream that you aren’t particularly pleased with, or are stressed by, lucid dreaming can help you steer your dream towards a more desirable direction.
Yes, you can actually determine what will happen next – and make your dream experience delightful and enjoyable – totally turning it around from the nightmare that it is supposed to be.
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Lucid dreaming can help decrease your anxiety.
Nightmares can cause anxiety. Dreams that are stressful or just make you feel or recall unpleasant emotions can cause anxiety.
Because you can control your dreams via lucid dreaming, you can change how the dream unfolds, making it a less stressful, less anxiety-inducing ordeal. You can actually make the dream into a happy one.
If you have experienced something particularly traumatic or stressful, and are still reeling from the after-effects, lucid dreaming can help you get relief. If in your waking life you find it hard to get focus or direction, at least you can find solace in your dreams.
As you rest and fall into a dream state, you can determine the direction of your dreams, and have complete control over how they will unfold.
You can literally dream up the most pleasant, most desirable things that you can possibly imagine, and experience them as if they were real in your dream state.
The pleasant feelings are carried over to your conscious waking life, and can have an overall effect on the alleviation of your pain and the management of your daily stressors.
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Lucid dreaming can help improve your motor skills.
People who have gone through physical injury or have other physical disabilities can actually improve their motor skills via lucid dreaming.
In their dreams, they can imagine themselves having complete command over their motor skills, and practicing them as if they were functioning perfectly well.
In much the same way that athletes can visualize their top notch performance and let it translate to their actual implementation in their game, enacting motor performance in a dream can have a direct translation to your motor skills in your waking life.
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Lucid dreaming helps regulate your sleep quality.
Because you can directly control your dreams and the feelings that they induce, you are also able to improve your sleep quality.
Better dreams mean more restful nights, and deeper, more satisfying slumber. This has an overall effect on your mental, emotional, psychological, and physiological health – and its benefits are overreaching.
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Lucid dreaming can help you increase your creativity.
Because you are able to dictate the direction of your dream with your imagination as the only limit, you are unrestricted in how you want it to go.
It can be as fantastical and implausible as you want it to be and it can happen – you are in your dreams, after all.
This exercise helps you become more creative, and encourages the establishment of more connections in your life as you go along.
The increased brain activity helps you find patterns you wouldn’t have been able to do as easily if you weren’t exercising this muscle.
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Lucid dreaming helps manage your depression.
As you are able to determine the direction of your dreams, you of course choose happy thoughts which translate to happy outcomes.
This releases hormones in your body which help combat depression and other low moods. The more you practice lucid dreaming, the more you are empowered to go on this track, and the easier it will be for you to be happy.
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Lucid dreaming can serve as your therapy.
There have been people who have been taught to lucid dream as part of their cognitive behavioral therapy programs.
The imagery that they are encouraged to think up all help with their stresses, traumas, anxieties, and other psychological disruptions and disorders.
This can actually be practiced even if you are not a trauma survivor, so you have a better handle on stressful things if they do come up in your experience.
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Lucid dreaming helps lessen sleep disturbances or insomnia.
Practicing awareness will help you get to sleep faster as you are able to condition your mind to let go of distractions.
As this is one step that you need to take in order that you may be able to lucid dream effectively, it will also be easier for you to have a fuller night of sleep.
However, there are some lucid dreaming techniques that require you to wake up in the middle of your sleep in order that you may practice this more effectively.
Make sure that you are still able to fall back to sleep, instead of letting it be the one to disrupt your cycle.
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Lucid dreaming can help improve your memory.
One of the ways you can be able to lucid dream is to write your dreams down as soon as you wake up so that you are easily able to remember them.
It is best to do it right when waking up, so you can list down all the details to the dream. This exercise helps improve your memory.
Apart from that, it also helps you examine which specific details make you feel that you are dreaming, and which ones let you know that you are awake.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many benefits to lucid dreaming – those that can help you alleviate a painful condition or disorder that you are already dealing with, as well as be a preventive measure for your stress or anxiety.
It would be good to practice lucid dreaming even if you don’t feel the need for it, so you won’t have to feel pressured to do it when the situation does call for it in the future. Besides, it is enjoyable and actually empowering to be able to dictate the outcome of your dreams.
Any person can and should try this at least once in their lives, if just for the upliftment that they get out of the practice. It can be helpful even to the normal person.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article !