Influencing your dreams: How do we control our thoughts while we sleep?

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Everyone knows this: You wake up in the morning, think you can briefly remember a dream, and suddenly forget it again. For many people, dreams are nothing more than unpredictable images floating around in your head at night. However, this is not the case for those who have mastered lucid dreaming.

Because anyone who believes that dreams are just a series of random images in the head is wrong. There are a number of complex processes taking place in the brain behind the ideas we think about at night. Peter Widmer (60) knows this too. Zen teacher and managing director of Zen-Integral in Basel has been involved in dream work for more than 20 years; This includes lucid dreams (still called lucid dreams). “When we dream, our brain is not perfect, but it is largely ‘offline’ from external sensory sensations,” Widmer explains. Instead, many parts of the brain are very active during sleep and work on our dreams. There are parts of the brain that are responsible for the perception of moving images and the development of emotions while dreaming. Others cause what is known as sleep paralysis, thus preventing our dream self’s movements from being translated into real body movements.

What am IUCIDAL ARE YOU DREAMING?

All these processes also occur during lucid dreaming, but there are other processes as well, as Widmer explains: “The transition from normal dreams in the REM phase to lucid dreaming is characterized by increased activation of the prefrontal cortex.” During lucid dreaming, a conscious dream ego emerges that can, for example, notice when contradictions or inconsistencies occur in the dream and infer from this that it is in the dream. “Now this conscious dream self, the dreamer, can consciously direct his attention, think about himself, and form intentions about what he wants to do with the resulting dream clarity or lucidity,” the expert says.

matter of evaluation

If you want to know whether you can now realize your dreams, you should ask your family if this is also true for others. Because Widmer knows this: “On the one hand, lucid dreaming, like good dream memories, is a matter of temperament.” On the other hand, there are other ways to be clear. Sometimes lucid dreams may occur suddenly in young children between the ages of four and six.

It is not an easy application

Widmer himself became sane for the first time without even trying. “I started meditating when I was 17. The intense meditation led me to lucid dreaming without me wanting it, looking for it, or even knowing it at the time,” he says.

According to the expert, there is a real flood of apps these days to learn and practice lucid dreaming. However, you should not be fooled by this. «Unfortunately, you can’t learn lucid dreaming easily with just a few tricks. People are very different, and everyone can learn lucid dreaming in their own personal way,” says Widmer.

Exercises for beginners

However, there are some classic techniques that are often used when someone wants to learn lucid dreaming:

• Dream diary: Good dream memory is an essential prerequisite for learning lucid dreaming. So try to write down your dreams in as much detail as possible in your dream diary in the morning. If you wake up at night, you can record your dream as a voice memo on your smartphone and transfer it to your dream diary during the day.

• Be aware of dream signs: A good starting point for realizing that you are dreaming is dream signs. These are the things that make you suspicious because they can’t be real and only happen in dreams, like your long-dead grandmother. Mark these characters in your dream diary.

• “Wake Up – Go Back to Bed”: With this method, you set an alarm for the second half of the night. Once you are fully awake, you consciously go back to sleep with the intention, “When I’m dreaming, I know I’m dreaming.”

Source : Blick