How to have lucid dreams? Science explains it to us
Dreams and everything related to them is, for a long time, a world that awakens a deep interest to both the scientific community and the general public . The fact that our nervous system is capable of creating fictional environments and fictional narratives without hardly receiving stimuli from the outside world has made us look for meaning in dreams, try to relate them to our life goals and even ask ourselves if these hallucinations will have something to do with alternative realities.
However, there is another factor that makes the potential interest we have in the study of dreams look squared. It is about the existence of lucid dreams.
What are lucid dreams?
The lucid dreaming 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 dream situations in which hallucinations intermingle with the consciousness of being dreaming.
In addition, this fact usually also entails the appearance of the possibility of modifying the dream that is being lived , something that would transform the dream scene into a kind of magical playground in which desires are transformed into reality. This, of course, makes many people want to experience lucid dreams, although getting this is not easy.
The community of the onironáutica
The lucid dreams they are statistically uncommon , and most people do not even experience them on a monthly basis, although there are a few sleepers who live these episodes relatively frequently, several times a week.
However, there are many people who have come to desire so much to live lucid dreams with regularity that they have been forming all kinds of virtual communities, forums and books in which the onironauts, that's the name of the people capable of experiencing these dreams, describe tricks and recommendations for training in certain techniques that theoretically serve to increase the probability of being aware of what happens in the dream world.
So, to have lucid dreams, just follow these tips? Not so fast. The problem of the recommendations that are usually indicated 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 you are dreaming or when you are falling in the kingdom of Morpheus. .
Unfortunately, the same doorway to the world of dreams 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
That it is difficult to force the appearance of lucid dreams does not mean that it is impossible. Recently, Some research in neuroscience has shown that there is an option to generate these types of dreams no longer through internal dialogue and vital philosophy, but directly altering the way the brain works.
For example, it has been shown that inducing the appearance of brain waves of gamma frequency (specifically between 25 and 40 Hz) in some frontal regions of the brain during the REM phase significantly increases the possibility of having a lucid dream.
Of course, not everyone has the possibility of using laboratory machinery to modify the wave frequencies of our brain while we sleep on the days of each day, but this study has served as a precedent to reinforce the hypothesis that It can materially alter the functioning of the nervous system to have this kind of dreams . From there, we have been investigating what material changes are capable of increasing these probabilities ... and today we could have the answer.
Inducing lucid dreams with the alarm clock
An investigation last year seems to indicate that a good way to favor the emergence of lucid dreams could be to briefly interrupt sleep to go back to sleep (or almost-sleep) immediately after . For this, a trick would be to use the option to defer the alarm of the alarm so that it sounds again a few minutes later.
The research that leads us to this possible solution, however, does not offer a definitive answer, since it is not an experiment but the crossing of data from surveys administered to several people, some of whom experience lucid dreams with regularity.This means that people most likely to be aware of what happens during their dream experiences tend to use the button to delay the alarm more, but for the moment we do not know if it is this simple trick that makes these dreams appear . As always, correlation does not imply causality.
However, the results are promising and leave the door open for future testing in an experimental laboratory. In a few months we could have the definitive answer that all the onironauts are looking for, but, for the moment, the way to test oneself with the alarm is open to anyone who wants to try it.
Bibliographic 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.
