Home » Tests and diagnostics » How to control your dreams. How to control dreams? Lucid dreaming Guided dreams

How to control your dreams. How to control dreams? Lucid dreaming Guided dreams

When we have nightmares or other not very pleasant dreams, we want to be able to control the plot. In fact, dreams can be programmed. This phenomenon is called “lucid dreaming”, and many scientists have already confirmed its existence.

Remember your dreams

If you can remember the details of your dream, you are already lucky. 80% of people around the world cannot remember the plots of their dreams. In order to remember dreams, you need to write them down immediately after waking up. At first it may just be some moments or details, but then you will be able to remember the plot from beginning to end.

Learn to be aware that you are dreaming

Some dreams can be so realistic that they can easily be confused with life. But until you understand that everything that happens around you is a dream, you will not be able to control it. Once you can write down at least ten of your dreams, analyze them. Among them you need to find signs of sleep that you will rely on if you want to know whether you are sleeping now.

Develop critical thinking

It helps you realize whether you are in reality or in a dream. It is necessary for the status control to work automatically. For example, while reading, turn away and look at the text again. Some practitioners say that in a dream, numbers and letters change places if you take your eyes away from them.

Dream before bed

To fall asleep, just lie down and close your eyes. Very soon pictures will appear in your imagination, which will then become connected plots. When you begin to develop your lucid dream, you will be able to control the plots of it and transfer whatever you want there.

It turns out that if you perceive a dream as a transition to another dimension and manage to realize yourself in it, it is quite possible to begin to control dreams according to at will. Of course, such power over one’s dreams can only be achieved through long-term and careful practice. But the idea of controlling reality, even if it is the reality of a dream, is too tempting to spare time and effort to implement it.

So, there are several types of exercises for dream control. All of them are based on working with memory, the ability to concentrate and self-control. The classification of exercises for dream control will look like this:

Awareness of the moment of transition to the sleep state

This dream control exercise involves repeatedly repeating to yourself the phrase “I'm not dreaming” as you begin to fall asleep. That is, it is necessary to fall asleep in such a way that the awareness of what is happening does not “fall asleep.” Having managed to get into a kind of “dream-not-dream” in this way, a person will be able to control his dream, changing it at his own discretion.

Exercise for controlling dreams “reality check”

If you train yourself to regularly doubt the reality of what is happening, you can eventually doubt the reality of the dream, and thus become aware of yourself in it. This exercise for dream control is a constant questioning of your own consciousness: “is this a dream?” By checking reality in this way, you will get used to even asking yourself this unconsciously. One day you will ask, “maybe I’m dreaming?” in a dream, and you won’t go wrong. And from awareness of a dream to its control is one step: you just have to want (literally want) - and the dream will become manageable!

Creating a Dream Body

If you are not very good at focusing, but you are good with your imagination, then this dream control exercise is just for you. To realize a dream in this way, you need to imagine, while falling asleep, how an ephemeral double emerges from your body - the so-called dream body. Thus, you can create yourself a messenger into the world of dreams and, sending him on a journey, see everything that he sees.

Exercise for controlling dreams “Dream Diary”

This dream control exercise involves writing down your dreams regularly. Every morning, having just woken up and not yet forgotten the dream, you need to take up the “Dream Diary” lying next to your bed and carefully write down everything that happens in your dream, all your sensations during sleep, all the smallest details that you can remember. By constantly keeping such records, the mind will get used to monitoring and remembering what happens in a dream, and, over time, becoming aware of it. This way you can discover the “land of your dreams” and learn how to manage it. This exercise for controlling dreams requires much more time than the others, but it will allow you to become aware of your dreams gradually, exploring them step by step. While other dream control exercises involve a more abrupt transition to dream awareness, this method is more suitable for people who prefer to feel every inch of the ground under their feet.

Dream Control Exercise by Stephen LaBerge

Dr. Stephen Laberge is the most famous researcher in the field of lucid dreaming. The dream control exercise he proposed requires a person to wake up in the middle of the night and immediately begin to carefully recall his dream. You can also write it down for greater persuasiveness. Then you need to carry out a special procedure for visualizing the dream you just had and go back to sleep. Laberge assures that after this exercise a person will almost immediately fall into a lucid dream and be able to control it.

Exercise to control dreams by Carlos Castaneda

The great American mystic Carlos Castaneda, following his teacher Don Juan, attached great importance to lucid dreams, even devoting one of his books to this topic, “The Art of Dreaming.” The essence of the exercise for dream control proposed by Castaneda is as follows: first you need to have a clear intention to become aware of the dream. Once you are confident in your desire, you need to force yourself to look at your hands in a dream. To do this, you should fall asleep while being able to look at your hands. If you can fall asleep while still remembering to look at your hands, consider dream control in your pocket. Next, you should do the same exercise to control dreams, but with the participation of other parts of the body, until you see your whole self in a dream.

As you can see, enough ways to become aware of your sleep and exercises to control dreams have been invented. So a person who is determined to understand this facet of reality can choose the method that suits him most. But we shouldn’t forget that the most important thing in dream control exercises is not to stop controlling yourself.

Do you want to challenge the philistine view of the world and gain an interesting experience in transforming habitual ideas? All you need to do is learn how to manage your sleep. Yes, yes, the same dreams that you have more than once throughout the night.

There is a point of view that lucid dreams are a journey through the space of options for events that could happen to you, but you turned onto the wrong branch of your life.

The authoritative esotericist Vadim Zeland writes about this in great detail in his books. Tibetan monks more than a thousand years ago and Carlos Castaneda also dealt with a similar problem. The pioneer in this area was the Dutch psychiatrist Willem van Eeden.

The American scientist S. Laberge conducted a lot of research on this topic and defended his doctoral dissertation at Stanford University. He gave a scientific explanation of how one can learn to control dreams. If people of authority spent their time and energy on such things, why don't we try to follow in their footsteps?

There is no need to think that when we sleep and dream, the brain and body are resting and are not able to perceive anything. The heart beats, the intestines and lungs work, the blood runs through the vessels. They are controlled by our subconscious, which never turns off, so dreams are not a disconnection from reality, they are reality itself. When you realize this, you understand that you are dreaming, and at the same time you can completely freely control your actions.

You need to learn how to induce lucid dreams in order to:

Convince yourself that your own capabilities have no limits, and this is the ability to transfer this into reality;
create different options for a situation that is disturbing in real life, try models for getting out of it;
exercise your right to make mistakes without consequences;
practice possessing what is still beyond the realm of possibility (a prestigious car, your own business, talents and abilities);
overcome your complexes and fears;
just enjoy the experience.

Inspired by these possibilities, I decided to learn how to induce a lucid dream. I started by trying to understand how one can determine whether they are dreams or reality.

Where am I?

To be honest, I didn’t succeed the first time. I just closed my eyes and opened them in the morning. It turns out that you cannot begin such experiments on sleep control in a tired state. It is necessary that the body has enough strength for such experimentation. Extreme fatigue, mental and physical, prevents you from entering a lucid dream.

Here's what I had to do to learn to understand whether these were dreams or whether I was already in reality:

In the dream, I tried turning the lamp light on and off.
I looked at my alarm clock, because when a person sleeps, the alarm clock shows different times at the same moment.
I tried to pinch, pull my hair or finger, scratch my arm or leg, because if we sleep, we don’t feel pain.
I was looking for unusual objects, phenomena, something that is radically different from the usual reality;
I tried to go where I wanted, in my dreams the road to the right place seems to lower, and you immediately find yourself where you want to go.
I tried to do something that I can’t do in real life: do the splits, walk on the balance beam, climb the rope. The latter is the most reliable indicator, because in life I am terribly afraid of heights.

What didn’t work out was following the popular advice on how to become aware of yourself in a dream - it is recommended to call yourself by name. They say that a person cannot do this when he is sleeping - he immediately wakes up. I just couldn’t think about myself while I was sleeping. Unfortunately, I also never managed to see myself in the mirror. Stories where you see your changed appearance in the mirror, or don’t see it at all, make it clear that this is a dream.

How to Prepare for a Lucid Dream

You can increase your chances of having a controlled dream. Before you go to bed, you need to sit down, try to relax and free your mind from the burden that has accumulated during the day. Helps me breathing exercises. The exercises are very simple:

slow breathing with a delay between inhalation and exhalation,
inhale and exhale while counting to five.

The atmosphere should be calm, you can light candles and give a soothing massage. A hot bath with aromatic salts or a handful of ground ginger to cleanse the aura is great for relaxation.

In preparation for lucid dreaming, I learned a great exercise. It came to us from the tantric tradition of India. Here are the detailed instructions:

Sit in a comfortable position with your eyes closed.
Slowly review the events that happened to you today in reverse order. Start in the evening and end with your feelings when you wake up in the morning.
Remain detached and do not analyze your own or others’ behavior.
Fill an imaginary bottle with the events of the day and throw them into an imaginary ocean. The second option is to fill a balloon with impressions and into the stratosphere...
As a result, you will definitely get high-quality dreams and excellent memory.

You can put a bouquet of dried thyme, rosemary, or lavender under your pillow to relax. Has the same effect essential oil, selected according to your taste.

Learning to induce lucid dreams

Absolutely every person can get into the controlled world of night dreams and take control of their dreams. This skill does not depend on temperament or individual characteristics. The main thing you need to do for this is to maintain for several weeks the desire to learn how to enter a lucid dream. With persistence, you can master this skill very quickly. I learned to have such dreams in about a month.

The desire to collect information on this topic, read literature, articles on various sites, and take part in forums helped me a lot to maintain my intention. You can quickly get into meaningful dreams if you write down what you dreamed. I put a notepad and pen on the bedside table and began to write down the dreams that I could remember. The very presence of the notebook helped me remember that I was learning to control my dreams.

I was able to fall into my first dream, as it seemed to me, for only a few seconds. I remember exactly that I walked through the wall there. By the end of the month, I learned to control my dreams within a few minutes. Here is the result of my experiment - in order to see dreams where you are not an extra, but the master of the situation, you need

Devote a lot of time to dreams in your thoughts,
Check the reality of the dream
Write down every time what you dreamed.

Most of these dreams can be quickly caught during a false awakening, when you dream that you are awake and getting out of bed. At least, that’s how it worked out for me at first. Having done the “dreams or reality” check, I ended up where I wanted - in lucid dreams. I really like to control my dreams, where I can do magic; apparently, the glory of Harry Potter subconsciously haunts me.

The acquired abilities help to quickly get out of nightmares, which, although rare, still happen. Or rather, I don’t go out anywhere, I just understand that no one can harm me. Denying the danger helps turn your nightmare into fun entertainment, or just a funny farce. Learning to manage nightmares helps the ability to tell myself in time that I am now dreaming.

Is this dangerous?

Those who have decided to use control over their own dreams often ask questions: is it possible to leave your body and not return? Authoritative researchers answer that dream control is not access to the astral plane, and not the exit of the soul from its body. A person who controls dreams does not go anywhere and does not return to his brain from anywhere. There is no need to be afraid that a person will not wake up if he is awakened while he is indulging in lucid dreams.

This phenomenon is based on physiology human brain. The soul does not leave its home, no matter how tempting the landscapes are spread out in the mind of a sleeping person. There is no need to be afraid that by being carried away by such dreams, a person deprives the brain of the night rest it is entitled to. On the contrary, after positive impressions you feel freshness and a surge of strength. After such an experience, the mood remains elated all day, and I feel excellent.

Managing dreams and getting interesting impressions cannot make you turn away from real life, no matter how bright and pleasant they may be. On the contrary, reality begins to change for the better, because a person’s self-confidence increases. And positive qualities, experienced in a dream and previously not existing in reality, gradually begin to appear in the waking state.

Shared

Sleep is generally considered to be something beyond one's control. Incredible events, bizarre fantasies, scary characters - this is simply called the reaction of the sleeper to what happened during the day. Everyone is accustomed to dreams where a person acts as a simple spectator, taking what is happening at face value, and then being surprised to find himself in his own bed. But this is just the result of insufficient awareness and lack of free energy. With desire and some effort, almost anyone can learn to manage their sleep. How to do this? And most importantly - why?

The first question that arises in the mind of a potential practitioner is how necessary lucidity in sleep is at all and whether it is harmful to physical and mental health. In this sense, there is nothing to worry about. The ability to control dreams is completely normal for humans and is often found in young children, who easily create their own worlds and explore them with interest. But why does an adult need this? There are several main reasons:

New sensations. Exciting flights in a dream and stunningly beautiful landscapes are worth upgrading your awareness skills.
Self-knowledge. Finding himself in conditions of permissiveness, the sleeper often begins to behave completely differently than he is used to in life. Murder, rape and other manifestations of aggression towards the characters in your dreams are especially “popular”. There is something to think about.
Disappearance of fear of death. Sleep is a little death. At least that's what Buddhists think. They argue that a person's behavior in a dream determines how he will behave when he dies. Most people who practice OS quickly get rid of the fear of death, seeing that the consciousness is able to maintain itself even when the body shuts down.

You should not be afraid of “getting lost” in a lucid dream: the chances of this are the same as in the case of a normal dream - zero. Physically, the body cannot suffer in any way from the fact that the sleeper has acquired control over sleep (unless it may accidentally roll out of bed, but no one is immune from this even in the “normal mode”).

The only significant problem that practitioners face is over-enthusiasm. People who are not doing well in real life sometimes go headlong into the world of dreams. Such addiction is comparable to computer addiction, but this is more likely a problem of a weak psyche and dissatisfaction with oneself than a real lack of lucid sleep.

Dream control: where to start

Having become interested in the topic, the future dreamer begins to scour all sorts of forums in search of tips on how to quickly learn to manage his sleep. As a result, one way or another, the following areas of activity are being sought:

Maintaining the desire to get into the OS. In many ways, the success of a plan is determined by the strength of intention: the more a person thinks about lucid dreams, the higher the chance that he will find himself in one of them. True, excessive desire can be even more harmful to sleep than complete disinterest in it. It is necessary to adhere to the “golden mean”: to experience and maintain interest in the topic, but not so much that every dream in which it was not possible to become conscious causes attacks of despair and disappointment in one’s abilities.
Reading specialized literature. In this case, you can kill two birds with one stone: learn the methods of getting into a lucid dream and maintain your “appetite” for it. There are a lot of books on the topic of dreams, but the most popular are the works of R. Webster, M. Raduga, R. Monroe, T. Bradley and C. Castaneda. At the same time, you can read not only “serious literature”, but also various blogs and forums in which users share their own experiences and give practical advice.
Keeping a dream diary. Paper notepad, Word file or online blog with full description of all dreams is a mandatory attribute of a “successful dreamer.” You need to record your “night adventures” every day, without missing a single detail. It is advisable not to forget to record your own feelings: what emotions were evoked by the characters in the dream, what kind of thoughts came to mind, was it scary or interesting, etc. If before falling asleep or after waking up any unusual physical experiences were observed (dizziness, pressure on the chest or forehead, trembling throughout the body...), then this information should also be noted in the diary. It will be useful to record the time you go to bed and the moment you wake up. In general, the more data is recorded, the better.
Regular practice. It’s rare that anyone manages to get into the OS the first time (although such cases also happen). A lucid dream can happen either after a week of active practice or after several years. It happens that the first OS appears when a person has already abandoned this topic as hopeless. In view of the unpredictability of the development of events, the only thing a beginner can do is to constantly train, without losing heart, if dreams remain ordinary.
Following a diet, avoiding stimulants. It is generally accepted that it is easier to get into OS if there is no meat in the diet (such food pollutes the consciousness). They also advise not to drink alcohol, drugs and quit smoking.

Training mindfulness in a dream should be treated like ordinary sports: the result is not immediately visible, but it is there. Even in case complete absence any “symptoms” of OS, small shifts in consciousness still occur. Over time, these changes will accumulate enough so that the dream ceases to resemble a film and allows the sleeper to make his own adjustments to the events taking place.

The most important thing for entering OS is to relax your body as much as possible, without letting your mind fall asleep. This can be achieved using relaxation techniques, namely muscle relaxation and observation of breathing. It is recommended to retire to the room, turn off mobile phone, close the curtains and lie down in a comfortable position. You can light candles or play soft music if you are sure that this will not distract from the main goal.

You just need to breathe evenly for a few minutes, observing your sensations. Then you can begin to relax your muscles. There are many techniques for this, the most common methods are:

Mentally say “Such and such a muscle is relaxed,” feeling that this is really so. And the smaller the better: you need to start with the muscles of each toe, gradually moving up and describing each small area of the body. If you immediately say that the muscles of the legs, arms and torso are relaxed, there will be no effect.
Visualize a certain amount of anything in each muscle (metal, water, you can even imagine tiny gnomes or butterflies - whatever your imagination allows). Having felt the heaviness in yourself, you need to get rid of it. To do this, you need to imagine liquid metal flowing out of your body or gnomes briskly walking. As a rule, this exercise is very easy: the mind always knows exactly how many gnomes it has left in its right leg.
Imagine yourself falling from a very great height. As a result of such a “fall,” the body completely relaxes for a moment. The dreamer’s task is to prolong this moment as long as possible.

Often relaxation leads to falling asleep: this is a normal reaction of the body to what is “happening” to it. In another case, a person enters the OS. If neither one nor the other happens, you should try the following methods on a relaxed body:

Rocking. You need to imagine yourself swinging on a swing or in a boat on the waves;
Visualization of an object in the hand. It is usually recommended to present a mobile phone. When you feel the sensation of an object being squeezed in your palm, you need to try to raise your hand (not your physical hand, of course);
Imagine yourself in a place you like. In this case, there is a chance that consciousness will cling to this picture and move into it in a dream;
An attempt to “fly out” of the body. This usually becomes possible when there is strong pressure on the head;
Movement by a non-physical body. The method is similar to the previous method, but is less “radical”: you just need to move your leg or hand, trying not to “disturb” the physical body.

These methods may seem strange, but when a person is in a near-sleep state, the above actions are not particularly difficult and are very easy to understand.

The following technique helps many people. You need to set the alarm for early in the morning (4-5 hours). Get up, go to the toilet, drink some water and go back to bed (the “walk” should not take more than 3-5 minutes). After this, you need to lie down and try to get to sleep in any way. Some people simply fall asleep without using any methods and remain conscious.

How to behave in a lucid dream

Don't be afraid. Fear is the main obstacle to successful OS. Nothing can happen in a dream that can in any way affect real life. All the monsters that the sleeper encounters are just a figment of his imagination. Also, do not be afraid of sleep paralysis - a state of complete immobility of the body while the mind is awake. This phenomenon means that the “entrance” to the OS is practically open. Immobilization of the body is necessary for its own safety, so that it does not repeat the movements of the sleeping person in a dream and does not injure itself.
Use the power of thought. In a dream, it is enough to think about something for it to appear immediately. This way you can create your own worlds, move in space, and modify unpleasant characters.
Move. Beginners very easily “fall out” of the lucid dream state. You can prevent this by constantly being on the move, fixing your attention on anything.

The first lucid dreams often occur “blindly”: a person simply does not have enough energy to see anything. In this case, the sleeper feels awake outside the body, but at the same time in absolute darkness. Sometimes a long whistle is heard and there is a feeling of flight. Often, it seems that your eyes are simply closed and you just need to open them: having done this, a person wakes up. Don’t be disappointed - a start has been made, which means there will be other, more “effective” dreams.

Lucid dreaming is a fascinating experience that makes you feel more alive. No matter how strange it may seem, no real landscapes can compare in beauty with the pictures that appear in the OS.

Sleep, a well-known state for everyone, is necessary for the physical body and mind to rest and recover. We can give the following definition of sleep.

Sleep is a naturally occurring, repetitive state of mind and body that is characterized by an altered state of consciousness, decreased sensory activity, suppression of almost all voluntary muscle activity, and decreased interaction with the environment.

Every person dreams, regardless of whether he remembers them or not. A person begins to dream in infancy and continues to dream until death. The average person spends a third of their life sleeping, which is between 25 and 30 years.

Every night we find ourselves in the unknown world of dreams. Moreover, in a dream we can be ourselves or someone completely different. We can see in a dream both familiar places and people, and places and people that we have never seen while awake.

And there is hardly a person who, at least once in his life, has not had fantastic or fabulous dreams that he could not invent in a waking state of consciousness.

Despite the fact that for the last 150 years psychologists, doctors and neuroscientists have been actively trying to unravel the phenomenon of sleep, this condition, familiar to every person, is still fraught with many mysteries.

At the same time, the secrets and possibilities that sleep brings with it have been known since ancient times. The Bible and other sacred books describe many stories in which miraculous or prophetic dreams had a great influence on the development of history.

Expression, prophetic dream, is present in every culture. In ancient times, people capable of interpreting dreams were in every royal or imperial court and were revered on a par with sages.

In the Western tradition, work with dreams is more related to psychology and is based on the interpretation of the plot and meaning of dreams. In this relatively modern tradition, the nature of the dream itself is rarely explored. At the same time, it is the nature and character of dreams that have a decisive influence on the plot, symbols and meaning of the dream.

At the same time, in Eastern culture and in the traditions of many indigenous tribes of America, shamanic traditions, dreams were used as a very powerful tool for gaining knowledge, personal and spiritual development.

Eastern and indigenous Indian traditions have given modern culture the knowledge of lucid or controlled dreams. Some of the most famous techniques for consciously working with dreams are Tibetan dream yoga and lucid dreaming. And in the tradition of the Yaqui Indians. The latter gained its popularity thanks to the books of the famous anthropologist Carlos Castaneda.

In the Western world, one of the pioneers of the practice of lucid dreaming and out-of-body travel is Stephen Laberge and Robert Monroe. We want to talk about the above methods in more detail in our article.

But before moving on to their description, I would like to dwell in more detail on why you need to pay so much attention to sleep. Some people may have a completely natural question: if sleep is, first of all, rest for the mind and body, then what is the point in continuing to do something in a dream?

Isn't it better to just make sure that your sleep is healthy and sound? Certainly, healthy sleep in itself is a great benefit for the human body. But giving away 25 years of your life to just sleeping unconsciously is like keeping all your savings in a jar buried in the yard.

In this way, of course, you will preserve your wealth, but you will not be able to increase it. In a sense, this is a talent buried in the ground.

The truth is that lucid dreaming not only can be used to gain and use knowledge and skills more effectively, but it also helps the best holiday and even healing the body.