Lucid Dreaming as a Way to Explore Consciousness

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Lucid dreaming must be regarded as a special and unique state in which our brains exhibit unusual qualities. From now on, the objections of skeptics are not accepted: from the esoteric class, lucid dreams are moving into the category of scientifically confirmed, documented and incredibly important phenomena.

On average, a person spends about six years of their life in dreams, in the so-called rapid eye movement phase. That is, about 2190 days, or 52,560 hours, we spend watching dreams. Although we may experience emotions and feelings during sleep, our consciousness is in a different state from when we are awake. That is why it is difficult to distinguish dream from reality, and we often take what came to us in a dream as the actual state of affairs.

But there are people who can experience lucid dreams, during which part of the consciousness remains awake. Thanks to this, lucid dreaming can be controlled - something like what we saw in the movie "Inception" with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Lucid dreaming has been known to science for a long time, but still not well understood. However, recent research suggests that this state is borderline: we are simultaneously asleep and awake.

Lucid dreaming is one of the many "abnormal" phenomena that can occur during sleep.

An example of another such phenomenon is sleep paralysis, due to which you wake up terrified and cannot move any part of your body. Most often, it occurs immediately after we fall asleep, or just before waking up. Sleep paralysis is experienced by more than 30% of people, and 8% admit that it happens to them quite often.

Although sleep paralysis is a common symptom of narcolepsy, PTSD, and panic attacks, it is experienced by those who do not suffer from any of the above problems.

There are also false awakenings - when you wake up only to realize that you are still asleep. The fact that such awakenings happened at least once in the last month was reported by 41%.

Along with lucid dreaming, all such states train our ability to remain conscious while we sleep. Scientists are considering the hypothesis that lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, false awakenings and many other similar phenomena occur at the moment when our consciousness is in a "hybrid" state - between sleep and wake.

Lucid dreaming and the brain

Research says that more of us have experienced lucid dreaming at least once in our lives. And this is good news, because this experience allows a person to create the desired scenarios while sleeping. There is evidence that lucid dreaming can be stimulated. People come together in online communities to discuss techniques for achieving greater clarity in their dreams. They teach consciousness to separate dream and reality, control dreaming and use what happens in a dream for personal growth.

During the research study, participants were asked to elaborate on their last dream.

Scientists have found that during lucid dreams (in comparison with ordinary ones), people become much more insightful, control thoughts and actions, actively use logic and remember well everything that happened to them in reality.

Other scientific work investigated the ability of people to make conscious decisions in real life and during sleep. It turned out that volitional abilities to a high degree from reality to dream. However, the ability to plan is impaired when a person enters a state of lucid dreaming.

You can feel the distinct difference between lucid and ordinary dreaming. Scientists suggest that this means that these processes involve different mechanisms of brain activity. But confirming this hypothesis is much more difficult than it might seem. If scientists were to conduct an experiment for this, they would need to scan the brains of the participants throughout the night, and then decipher the data obtained in order to distinguish a lucid dream from a normal dream.

Brilliant work on the study of this issue has led to the creation of a communication code between people in a state of lucid dreaming and researchers. Before starting the experiment, participants and researchers agreed on a conventional sign - for example, two eye movements to the right. When people went into REM sleep, they could give this signal as soon as they entered the state of lucid dreaming.

Thanks to this study, scientists were able to find out that lucid dreaming differs from normal dreaming by increased activity of the frontal lobe of the brain. It is noteworthy that it is this area that is associated with abilities of the "higher order": logical thinking, willpower. Usually we can observe their manifestation only when the person is awake. The type of brain activity during lucid dreaming is gamma-wave, which means that we use different aspects of our experience (memories, thoughts, emotions) and use them individually and in symbiosis.

Further studies have shown that stimulation of the frontal area of the brain during lucid dreaming leads to an improvement in these human abilities.

Other studies have more accurately indicated the regions of the brain involved in lucid dreaming. These are the frontal lobe and the fore-wedge. Thus, the hypothesis of a hybrid state of consciousness has only been confirmed.

The problem of consciousness and its solution

One of the most difficult questions for modern neuroscience is: how does consciousness arise in the brain? One of the hypotheses suggests using lucid dreaming as a key to understanding consciousness and the accompanying processes.

Lucid and ordinary dreams are two different states of consciousness, in each of which we have a unique experience. At the same time, the state of the brain remains almost identical in both situations. By comparing small differences in brain activity during lucid and normal dreaming, we can find those features that affect our level of awareness during sleep.

In addition, because the participants in the experiments were able to send signals with their eyes, we can learn more about the neurobiological activity of the brain at a particular moment in lucid dreaming. This will help scientists investigate the basic processes taking place in the human mind.

Moreover, there is now hope that researchers will be able to understand how consciousness generally arises in our brains.