The Potentials of Lucid Dreaming

As you go deeper and deeper into the experience of lucid dreaming, you discover its enormous potential for powerful and life-changing experiences.  For those who have never had a lucid dream, this may seem like a bold claim.  But for lucid dreamers with decades of experience, and some insight into the proper approach, it seems readily apparent.

Highlighted below, you can read a list of the potentials of lucid dreaming:

1) Experience Joy and Personal Freedom — Consciously aware in the dream offers you the chance to do almost anything conceivable, especially if you have read enough to know ‘how’.  Flying around the dreamscape, interacting with a favorite childhood pet, sitting in a new Ferrari – all of these moments can naturally lead to a powerful sense of joy, wholeness and freedom from waking limitations.

2) Accessing Inner Creativity — Aware in the virtual reality of a dream, could you discover the most incredible piece of art that you create?  Seek out solutions to real world problems?  Become an ‘electron’ and experience the sub-atomic world?  If you know ‘how’ and have properly prepared yourself, accessing inner creativity seems a very enjoyable, practical and inventive way to use lucid dreaming.

3) Improving Emotional and Psychological Health — Though a number of journal articles support the claim that lucid dreams have significantly reduced the number of recurring nightmares in people with PTSD, more research would help solidify this observation.  Nonetheless, experienced lucid dreamers have noted that being aware at the level of dreams allows a path to improving emotional and psychological health.  In this virtual reality, a thoughtful and experienced person has the potential opportunity to deal with phobias, non-constuctive habits, anxiety and more.

4) Improving Physical Health — Research by LaBerge showed how a lucid dream action affects the physical body to some degree.  A lucid dreamer increases his breathing in the lucid dream, and a corresponding increase occurs in the sleeping physical body.  Given that, could a thoughtful, experienced lucid dreamer direct ‘healing intent’ onto his or her physical body?  Conceptually the results by LaBerge seem to indicate as much.  Accordingly many reports of physical healing exist in the lucid dream community.  This seems like a ripe area for alternative medical researchers to investigate scientifically.

5) Seeking Insights for the Science of Psychology — Aware in the virtual reality of a lucid dream, some scientist claim you exist in a “hybrid state of consciousness” with the dreaming portions of the brain and some of the waking conscious portions simultaneously active.  Could a lucid dreamer perform experiments in this state to observe ‘how’ the dream state or subconscious functions?  Could consciousness studies be informed by lucid dream experiments in the foundation of the subconscious?

6) Discovering Spiritual Insights and Growth — When lucidly aware, can you meditate?  If so, what happens?  Why do some Buddhist schools say that an action performed at this level seems seven times more powerful than one performed at the waking level?  In these books, you will see the technical and conceptual practices which you can use to explore the spiritual side of lucid dreaming.

As you can see, lucid dreaming seems a revolutionary psychological tool by which you can explore and affect many aspects of personal experience.  With the proper approach and insight, lucid dreaming can be used constructively to promote greater insight, psychological integration, personal health and wisdom.