From Walter Mitty to Malter Witty!
Sleep stages are divided into two main categories: non-REM sleep and REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, where dreams typically occur. Over the course of the night a sleeper will cycle through the five stages of sleep a number of times with the REM stages lasting longer and longer towards morning.
The key to Lucid Dreaming is for the dreamer to recognize when they’re dreaming. That’s where Remee can help. Inside what looks like a normal sleep mask is a microcontroller. Towards the end of your sleep cycles, when your REM sleep is longest and dreams are most vivid, Remee flashes a series of customizable, recognizable light patterns via six rear facing LEDs. The lights can be customized by pattern, intensity, and duration. When these customized patterns play during a dream, they can appear as visual anomalies in your dream, helping the dreamer recognize the fact that they are dreaming, and become lucid. Once lucid, you can begin controlling the world around you.
Lucid Dreaming: Contemplating the journey
For nearly as long as recorded history, the idea of consciously recognizing and controlling our dreams has been woven into the human narrative. From the Hindu Upanishads to Aristotle’s On Dreams, people have been puzzling out the mysteries of lucid dreaming for centuries. In 2012, lucid dreaming experienced a massive surge in interest, and there’s more information on lucid dreaming, the science behind it, and the modes and methods of experiencing it than there ever has been… yet the average person remains sadly unfamiliar with this fascinating, entertaining, and instructive activity. Lucid Dreaming can be a truly profound experience, but is often difficult to explain to someone who has never done it. Controlling the flow of your dreams is so visceral and ineffable that it can rarely be related in a meaningful way to a non-lucid dreamer.
So what is it, exactly?
Put simply, lucidity is knowing that you’re dreaming, while you’re dreaming. If you consider the fact that you have been dreaming many times a night, every night, for your entire life, it suddenly becomes clear how strange it is that your subconscious experiences these long and often bizarre excursions without any real awareness of it. Your mind simply accepts whatever disjointed data its presented with, pieces the parts together in a diffuse and nonlinear manner, constructs utterly implausible justifications for the impossible details and then plays back the resulting amalgam almost as if you’re a character in a movie. Practicioners of lucid dreaming aim to take back this portion of their life, dissatisfied being a simple actor in their dreams, they choose to become the director and author of these nightly narratives.
But why?
An even better question: why not? If you spend two hours dreaming out of every 24, then you’ll have experienced over two years worth of dreams in your lifetime. That’s two years of sights and sounds, trials and tribulations, mundane meetings and exciting chance encounters – and no one bothered to ask for your input on where to go, what to do, who to meet. Wouldn’t you prefer to have some control over such a limitless tool as your sleeping imagination?
The applications of lucid dreaming are boundless. No matter what your intentions or expectations, there’s something in lucidity for everyone. Sail the seven seas, traverse space and time, plot out the next great novel, or fly, fly, fly. In the dream world, the impossible was always possible, but with lucid dreaming, you can finally be in the driver’s seat.
And now for the bad news: lucid dreaming is hard. Unless you’re one of the handful of natural lucid dreamers out there, lucid dreaming takes practice and dedication to achieve. And so, as you read through this guide, understand that lucid dreaming is both a journey and a destination. Like most journeys, safe arrival requires preparation, attentiveness, and the right tools for the job. Below are some of the steps that can help you on this exciting and worthwhile trip! Enjoy!
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By: Melanie’s Bizarre Dream Involving Rape and Orgies | Read it to absorb my awesomeness on February 18, 2013
at 7:51 am