How to have lucid dreams? Science explains it to us

The dreams Y everything related to them is, for a long time, a world that arouses deep interest from both the scientific community and the general public. The fact that our nervous system is capable of creating invented environments and fictional narratives without receiving hardly any stimuli from the outside world has made us look for it. meaning to dreams, trying to relate them to our vital goals and even wondering if these hallucinations have something to do with realities alternatives.

However, there is another factor that makes the potential interest we may have in the study of dreams squared. It is about the existence of lucid dreaming.

What are lucid dreams?

The lucid dreaming They 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 dreamlike situations in which hallucinations are interspersed with the awareness of dreaming.

In addition, this fact usually also leads to the appearance of the possibility of modifying one's own dream that is being lived

, something that would transform the dream scene into a kind of magical playground in which wishes become reality. This, of course, makes many people want to experience lucid dreaming, although achieving this is not easy.

The onironáutica community

Lucid dreams are statistically rare, and most people do not get to experience them even on a monthly basis, although there are a few sleepers who experience these episodes relatively frequently, several times per week.

However, many people have come to want so much to live lucid dreams regularly that all kinds of virtual communities, forums and books have been formed in which oneironauts, because that's what people capable of experiencing these dreams are called, describe tips and advice for training in certain techniques which theoretically serve to increase the probability of being aware of what is happening in the dream world.

So, to have lucid dreams just follow these tips? Not so fast. The problem with the recommendations that are usually indicated in dream books and 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 into the realm of Morpheus.

Unfortunately, the very gateway to the world of dreams is the place where the techniques learned during the day and the plans to follow during the following hours are left to rest.

Speaking the language of the brain

Just because it is difficult to force lucid dreaming does not mean that it is impossible. Recently, some neuroscience research has shown that there is the option of generating this type of dream not through internal dialogue and life philosophy, but by directly altering the way the brain works.

For example, has been shown that induce the appearance of brain waves of gamma frequency (specifically between 25 and 40 Hz) in some regions front of the brain during REM phase significantly increases the possibility of having a dream lucid.

Of course, not all of us have the possibility of using laboratory machinery to modify the frequencies of waves of our brain while we sleep every day, but this study has served as a precedent to reinforce the hypothesis of what the functioning of the nervous system can be materially altered to have this type of dreams. From there, it has been investigated what material changes are capable of increasing these probabilities... and today we could have the answer.

Inducing lucid dreams with the alarm clock

Research from last year seems to indicate that a good way to promote lucid dreaming might be to briefly interrupt sleep to go back to sleep (or almost-sleep) immediately after. To do this, a trick would be to use the option to snooze the alarm clock so that it sounds again a few minutes later.

The research that leads us to this possible solution, however, does not offer us a definitive answer, since it is not an experiment. but from the crossing of data from surveys administered to several people, some of whom experience lucid dreams with regularity. This means that people who are more likely to be aware of what happens during their dream experiences tend to use the snooze button more, but at the moment we do not know if it is this simple trick that makes these dreams appear. As always, correlation does not imply causation.

However, the results are promising and leave the door open for future tests in an experimental laboratory. In a few months we could have the definitive answer that all oneironauts are looking for, but, for the moment, the way to test oneself with the alarm clock is open to whoever wants 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. TO. (2014). Induction of self-awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimmulation of gamma activity. Nature neuroscience, 17 (6), pp. 810 - 812.