Tips to control your dreams
In fact, lucid dreaming can be complex. It requires practice and nothing guarantees that you will achieve it.
If you want to try it, here are some of the most successful techniques to help you control your dreams.
Before putting them into practice, make sure that your bedroom favors rest. Since these dreams appear in REM sleep, it all starts with getting adequate sleep.
1. Reality Test
This technique is used to distinguish whether you are dreaming or awake. Although a dream shows an environment or object in a familiar way, there will always be elements that make it different from reality. Therefore, the objective is to learn to detect it.
It is a mental training in which from time to time you control and verify reality to find out if you are dreaming. Once you have a mastery of how things really are, it is easy for you to later detect when they belong to a dream.
That is the use of the top used by DiCaprio in Inception. While in reality the object ended up falling, in the dream the spinning never stopped. Thus, the character knew how to distinguish which plane he was on.
Some common items that people use for this technique include:
- Mirrors: Check your reflection to see if it looks normal.
- Heavy objects: Try pushing against a wall or table to see if something unexpected happens.
- Hands: Look at your hands and see if they change.
- Looking at a clock: If you are dreaming, the time on a clock will constantly change or go in the opposite direction.
Once you choose how you want to check reality, it’s about checking it frequently. Later, you can develop this ability by inducing lucid dreaming.
2. Mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD)
LaBerge developed this technique for the induction of lucid dreams based on the intention to remember something in the future.
To do this, use the memory of a previous dream and detect an abnormality within it. That is, something “weird” that showed that you were dreaming. Then, visualize yourself in the dream acknowledging this abnormality and being aware that it only occurs in dreams.
As you do this, repeat the mantra: “The next time I’m dreaming, I want to remember to acknowledge that I’m dreaming.” It is about that in the long run, when you detect that strangeness in the dream to realize that you are asleep.
Research has shown that this technique is very effective in increasing the frequency of lucid dreaming.
3. Help yourself to a sensory stimulus
Also, to induce a lucid dream you can program a device so that it emits a light signal while you sleep.
This light will be incorporated into your dreams and with practice, it will allow you to identify that you are dreaming.
4. Start a dream journal
Writing down your dreams in detail every day will not only help you understand them. It will also allow you to identify “dream signals” or patterns.
Later, these will make it easier for you to notice that you are dreaming when they appear while you sleep.
5. Promotes waking times between dreams
To improve the results obtained with the previous techniques, you can put them into practice between periods of sleep. Increasing the duration of wakefulness seems to better prepare the brain to become lucid during sleep.
Set your alarm two hours before your usual time and stay awake for a few minutes before falling asleep again. This methodology is known as Wake-Back-To-Bed (WBTB) and seeks to increase the activity of the prefrontal cortex of the brain during the following REM phase.
Although if you are going to put any of these techniques into practice, be careful. Although nothing assures you that you will be able to manage your dreams, it is very possible that you will end up sleeping worse along the way. This will take its toll on your health or at least put you in a bad mood that day.
