How to Do Anything in Your Dreams

hey 42 here have you ever had a dream that felt extremely important no not the one where you were naked at work or the one where you were playing tennis with stevie wonder wait was that just me i mean a dream that stayed with you long after you woke up as if it had something edifying to teach you if that sounds familiar then you're in good company because some fantastic ideas and discoveries have emerged from dreams albert einstein once had a dream that saw him sledding down a steep mountainside at a velocity approaching the speed of light you may be thinking hey that's no dream i did that once after a bottle of vodka naked funnily enough albert didn't see it as a dream either which is how it eventually led to the formulation of his theory of relativity in a series of similar slumber revelations famed physicist niels bohr saw the structure of the atom in a dream long before he was able to prove it scientifically chemist dimitri mendeleev conceived the periodic table whilst taking forty winks and auguste cooley unlocked the chemical structure of benzene thanks to a vision that came to him in his sleep that last one may not sound like a big deal but the discovery opened up a whole new branch of chemistry aromatic chemistry without which we wouldn't have some of life's essentials like cheap polyester suits tennis racket strings polystyrene balls and tie-dye t-shirts speaking of hippies when john lennon wasn't too busy imagining all the people he was writing songs in his sleep namely the appropriately titled number nine dream and john wasn't the only beetle to get creative whilst catching up on sleep either the melody for the beatles classic yesterday was simply playing in paul mccartney's head when he woke up one day and he's not stopped playing the damn thing ever since it seems that dreams are pretty powerful things capable of inspiring startling scientific breakthroughs and catalyzing captivating creativity but what if i was to tell you that you could have dreams like these at will or even better that you could control those dreams playing out your wildest fantasies in full hd that you could wake up fully conscious in your dreams that you could fly breathe underwater learn any skill or hook up with the man woman or beast hopefully not beast of your well dreams these are the promises of lucid dreaming an ancient practice that allows the dreamer to gain full consciousness whilst fast asleep sounds impossible well thanks to neuroscience and a guy called stephen leberge we know it's not le berge is a psychophysiologist apparently that's a thing and pioneering o naira naught apparently that is too using regular person words he's a scientist and enthusiastic lucid dreamer cultures throughout the world have been practicing lucid dreaming techniques for at least two millennia greek physician gallon of pergamon prescribed lucid dreaming as a form of psychotherapy and aristotle wrote of it often when one is asleep there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream it wasn't until the early 1980s however that we saw scientific proof of their validity as it was le berge he provided it during his time at stanford university in controlled experiments le burge's collaborators waited until they could confirm he was fully asleep and dreaming then using a set of pre-agreed eye movements as signals leberge was able to communicate to his colleagues that he was conscious or lucid since then the field of neuroscience has exploded thanks to radical advances in technology that allow us to analyze the human brain whilst the owner of said vital organ is still alive the previous approach was more of the hannibal lecter variety and mostly involved taking the top of the subject's skull off and having a good poke around inside a bit like breaking a light bulb to look for the source of the light you can see why this method didn't yield much in the way of results even when scientists got to examine albert einstein's brain for example they could discover nothing particularly unusual about it except that it was slightly smaller than the average human brain that's right guys it turns out that size really doesn't gray matter by the late 20th century the refinement of cerebral monitoring equipment like eeg and fmri finally made it possible to watch the human brain in action leading to multiple breakthroughs in our understanding of neurobiology one of the biggest was the discovery of neuroplasticity the brain's ability to change shape size and operation in response to learning and behavior remember that point because it's going to be really important later so what does all this fancy new tech have to do with lucid dreaming well scientists are now able to prove that lucid dreaming has discernible neural correlates which is a fancy way of saying lucid dreaming isn't just a phenomenon of the mind it's physical too and if it's physical it can be measured by analyzing brainwaves and neurological functions researchers have been able to prove how lucid dreaming works in a lucid dream you are sound asleep but a specific part of your brain the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to be exact has been reactivated allowing you to experience the dream state whilst fully aware we'll get to the details on this later but for now to put it simply something that is usually switched off in your brain whilst you dream switches back on again and you have the sudden recognition that holy i'm dreaming with this realization comes profound power once you are lucid in a dream you are able to take control of your dream experience you can do anything go anywhere be anyone it's like virtual reality on steroids except you're no longer just a character in a pre-designed game you're the game designer and you aren't coding for some puny games console you have at your disposal the limitless potential of the human mind sounds amazing doesn't it and i'm sure by now you're asking the obvious question how can i do that before we look at some possible answers allow me for a moment to explain how sleep and dreaming work every night we go through four primary stages of sleep in stage one your breathing heartbeat and eye movements begin to slow as you move through semi-consciousness this is the hypnagogic state that trippy phase between wakefulness and sleep when you might wonder if someone put acid in your bedtime chamomile it is also in this stage that you may experience hypnic or myoclonic jerks involuntary muscle spasms that make you twitch like a michael jackson backup dancer stage two is light dreamlessly your muscles relax further your breathing and brain activity slow even more by stage three you are in a deep dreamless sleep everything slows down your breathing your heartbeat even your brain frequencies drop to super low frequency delta waves it is at this stage that your body and brain recharge and restore deep dreamless sleep is what you need to feel refreshed and well rested in the morning the fourth stage of sleep is called rem sleep named after the rapid eye movement that typifies this state not the american rock band this is where the dream action happens in rem sleep your brain activity increases and your body becomes paralyzed so that you don't act out your dreams which is great because it stops you from punching yourself in your bollocks sleep is not a one-way journey in a normal night's sleep you will cycle through all four stages about four or five times with the amount of time spent in rem increasing with each cycle by the end of your night's sleep you could be spending up to 90 minutes in dreamland most people don't pay a second thoughts to what happens during their nighttime slumber which is astonishing if you consider that you spend about a third of your life fast asleep no one knows for certain why we dream and most people think of dreams as these random things that just happen to them one moment you're falling asleep and the next moment you're arguing with katy perry over who gets to keep the talking penguin lucid dreams flip this view on its head because they don't just happen to you they happen for you they are there to be explored and played with but first you need to learn how just like the normal kind lucid dreams take place during rem sleep but they don't look and feel quite the same even from an outside perspective studies conducted at frankfurt university's neurological clinic found that lucid dreaming constitutes a hybrid state of consciousness that is measurably different from both the waking state and the dream state in 2012 scientists from the max planck institute of psychiatry found that when subjects were lucidly conscious in a dream activity surged in the parts of their brain associated with self-awareness including in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex this was a big discovery usually when you dream your prefrontal cortex switches off this makes sense because it's responsible for most of the clever things you do every day like rational thought and choosing matching socks those faculties aren't needed in the imagination land of dreams where rules and logic don't apply but it's also believed that the prefrontal cortex houses the roots of your personality and sense of self so as this area of the brain takes a break whilst you dream it's quite easy for your mind to accept that you are not as most people believe a middle-aged father of two named dave but rather lord zoltran defender of the outer galaxies and all those who dwell there in a lucid dream though the prefrontal cortex fires up again and with it the sudden thought wait a minute my name's not really lords ultron i must be dreaming with that realisation a world of infinite opportunity opens up you start being just the star of your dream and take on the role of director too you can choose to join lord's ultron in intergalactic battle you can teleport to the center of the earth you can change the shape of mountains you can have sex with a goddess and yeah fulfilling sexual fantasies is unsurprisingly one of the most popular lucid dreaming pastimes but once the novelty of that wears off which usually takes a year or two most experienced lucid dreamers turn their attention to other goals things like training and developing new skills remember earlier i mentioned something called neuroplasticity the brain's ability to adapt and change its function and even its shape in response to behavior or environmental needs what this means is that no matter how old you are you can train your brain to evolve and become better at certain things by physically building or reinforcing neural pathways collections of neurons in your brain connected by dendrites the number of dendrites increases the more a behavior is performed which is why the more you do something the better you become at it and this amazing expandability of the brain can be hacked professional athletes have been acid for ages using visualization to trick their brain into learning something faster by repeatedly imagining an action without physically doing it it might sound crazy but science has proven that this really works studies have shown that simply imagining lifting weights every day for 12 weeks can grow muscles without you actually lifting a thing lucid dreaming can be used to the same effect but with far greater results our neurological system doesn't differentiate between waking experience and lucid dreaming experience which means you can use your dreams to strengthen the normal pathways associated with any skills or competencies that you want to develop want to become a better sportsman practice in your lucid dreams want to learn a new language practice in your lucid dreams want to be a kinder more compassionate person just stop being a dick not only will you accelerate your learning by spending extra hours every night on your development some exercises are actually amplified by dreaming for example tibetan buddhist master nam kai nobu once said that meditating in a lucid dream was nine times more powerful than meditating whilst awake you just can't argue with that kind of maths or small wrinkly tibetan men lucid dreaming is also associated with mental health and well-being with a 1995 study suggesting that a higher frequency of lucid dreaming was associated with a better ability to manage thoughts and emotions whilst awake and the majority of lucid dreamers 65 report that their dreams had a positive effect on them even if they often weren't quite able to explain why so self-development limitless fun better mental well-being sounds like lucid dreaming might be a good hobby to get into but how do you do it well first up it's disclaimer time some people seem to be hardwired for lucid dreaming and pick it up very quickly whilst for others it takes longer estimates vary but between 47 and 100 of the population are thought to have had at least one lucid dream and many children lucid dreams spontaneously but if you don't remember making all the grown-ups disappear and manifesting the world's biggest ice cream from those early lucid dreams of yours that isn't all that surprising because the biggest block to lucid dreaming is memory that's why the first thing to do if you want to start lucid dreaming is to improve your dream recall keep a detailed dream notebook and read through it at night before you sleep to better prepare your mind for the idea of dreaming if you're struggling to remember your dreams in the first place try staying motionless for a minute or two after you wake up nobody's sure why but keeping the same posture as when you were dreaming helps you to remember the dream no i don't mean the posture you had in the actual dream nobody ever needs to see that tip number two is to identify your dream signs dreams can be weird but sometimes things happen that are just plain ridiculous so next time you recall something properly odd like shopping with barack obama or riding a dolphin through rush hour traffic make a note of it in your dream record over time you may see certain dream signs cropping up in your dreams regularly so make a note of that too tip number three involves something called mnemonic induced lucid dreaming a technique crafted by stephen liberge himself that relies on something called prospective memory which is the intention to do something in the future as you're falling asleep think of a recent dream or one of your dream signs and repeat these words over and over to yourself until you fall asleep for example next time i dream i will remember that i am dreaming and you might just do that tip number four involves making reality checks during your normal waking day this can be as simple as asking yourself is this real and then testing it this tip is similar in principle to the totems used by leonardo dicaprio and his pals in inception to check whether they're dreaming you know the ones i mean is it spinning is it about to stop spinning is christopher nolan really going to end the whole effing movie like this if you can make reality checks a habit the theory goes that your brain will start performing them whilst you're sleeping and wham you'll just realize that you're dreaming and become lucid my final tip is called the wake back to bed technique which involves interrupting your natural sleep cycle to optimize your most active dream period of the night set your alarm for five to six hours after bedtime when the alarm goes off get out of bed and stay awake for 20 to 60 minutes then get back to bed this has the effect of stimulating your conscious brain at a time when you normally would be experiencing rem sleep so that when you go back to sleep you'll drop straight back into rem sleep from a conscious state and begin to lucid dream these techniques won't work for everyone but if they work for you you might just be in for one of the wildest adventures of your life let me know what you decide to do the first time you wake up fully conscious in your own dream in the comments section below actually on second thoughts don't do that thanks for watching you can now pre-order my brand new book stick a flag in it on amazon link in the description thank you

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 1,094,469

Rating: 4.9435911 out of 5

Keywords: lucid dreaming, lucid, dreaming, dream

Id: CiuMRq32JBk

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020