FAQ’s: Taking Control of Your Dreams
Dreams are fascinating diversions from life’s rigid rules. Sometimes we have dreams that we would just as soon forget; but more often than not we have dreams we would like to remember.In a recent article (July 2010) published in Scientific American the editors tackled some of the most frequently asked questions concerning dream control by posing the questions to a dream expert from Harvard University.Following are some highlights:What’s the scientific definition of a dream?The literal definition is a narrative experience that occurs during sleep. A few people will define it as a REM (rapid eye movement) sleep experience but, actually, the research doesn’t support that. Some things that seem to look like dreams occasionally occur in other stages of sleep.Given that there’s higher-level thinking going on in our dreams, to what extent can we control them?That we can control our own dreams is quite true and really much more so than people seem to know or realize. The details of how to do it are very different depending on whether you’re trying to induce lucid dreams, whether you’re trying to dream about particular content or whether you’re trying to dream a solution to a particular personal or objective problem. Another really common application has been influencing nightmares, especially recurring post-traumatic nightmareseither to stop them or turn them into some sort of mastery dream.What about if you want to, say, dream of a certain person or about a particular experiencehow can you do that? If you’re just trying to dream about an issue or you want to dream of a person who’s deceased or you haven’t seen in a long time, you’d use very similar bedtime incubation suggestions as you would for problem solving: a concise verbal statement of what you want to dream about or a visual image of it to look at. Very often it’s a person someone wants to dream of, and just a simple photo is an ideal trigger. If you used to have flying dreams and you haven’t had one in a long time and you miss them, find a photo of a human flying.As the article points out, the “ability to manipulate our dream worlds goes beyond” what some might consider a science fiction plot and can in actual fact be tackled with diligence and understanding.
Posted by www.dreambay.org at Saturday ~ October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Category: Controlling Your Dreams
