Can you control your dreams?

 Have you ever tried to direct the path of a dream? In a ‘lucid dream’ a person becomes aware they are in a dream. With practice, you can master the art of controlling or changing your dreams – just like directing a movie in your sleep!

The first step to lucid dreaming is becoming aware that you’re in a dream. You can work towards this using a technique called ‘reality testing’.

Reality Testing

The aim of reality testing is to test whether you’re awake or in a dream several times a day. Once this becomes a habit you will start to repeat the action in your dreams too – with interesting results!

Some common ways to test whether you’re in a dream include:

1. Look in the mirror and check whether everything looks normal.
2. Look at your hands and count your fingers. Does everything seem normal?
3. Pinch your nose and close your mouth, can you still breathe?
4. Look at a clock or watch and check the time, does it make sense?

Choose one method and repeat it a few times a day. This will train your mind to repeat the reality checks while dreaming, which can induce lucid dreaming.

Keep a dream diary

Writing down your dreams not only helps you to remember them, but also encourages you to pay more attention and recognise signs that you are dreaming.

Wake back to bed

We don’t dream the entire time we sleep. Most dreams take place during a phase called REM (or Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, which makes up about a quarter of your sleep time.

The name refers to the way a person’s eyes move behind their eyelids when they dreaming.

To ‘wake back to bed’ you set an alarm for about 5 hours after your bedtime, then go to sleep as usual. When the alarm goes you should wake up and engage in a quiet activity like reading for 30 minutes before you go back to sleep. When you fall asleep again, you’ll be more likely to lucid dream.

Controlling your dreams is a fun experiment and it could be a good way to overcome nightmares – but we don’t recommend losing any sleep over it!