Meaning of a Dream

Each and every night, your brain passes through five stages of sleep. Passing through all these stages takes about 90-110 minutes and marks one full sleep cycle. So, if you sleep soundly for eight hours per night, you're getting five full sleep cycles.

Let's take a closer look at the five stages of sleep:

Stage 1 is a light sleep and you are easily woken. You begin to lose muscle tone, causing twitches and hypnic jerks (suddenly jumping awake from a doze). You have hypnagogic hallucinations, swirling light and color patterns which hypnotize your mind into a restful sleep. Stage 1 also marks the loss of self awareness and most sensory attachment to the physical world. Your brainwave frequencies descend from ALPHA through THETA state (4-7 Hz). Stage 2 is marked by a loss of nearly all muscle tone (sleep paralysis or REM atonia) so your physical body can't act out your forthcoming dreams. Although your brainwaves have slowed further, they do show brief bursts of higher brainwave activity called sleep spindles in the lower BETA range at 12-16 Hz. You spend around half of all your sleep in Stage 2; a light dreamless sleep. Stage 3 is the beginning of a deep sleep, also known as Slow Wave Sleep. It is harder to rouse someone from a deep sleep, but if you are woken you will feel especially dopey and confused for a couple of minutes. Brainwaves have descended to the DELTA range of 0.5-4 Hz, the slowest frequency you'll ever experience. Once again this is another dreamless stage of sleep, however it is also the most likely time for sleepwalking to occur. Stage 4 is the deepest kind of Slow Wave Sleep. This stage replenishes your energy both physically and mentally, and without enough deep sleep (such as when sleeping on a long-haul flight) you won't feel refreshed in the morning. Your brainwaves are now exclusively in the DELTA range. REM Sleep marks the onset of dreaming. After submerging itself through the deeper stages of sleep, brainwave activity returns to the THETA range (4-8 Hz) through BETA (12-38 Hz) and Rapid Eye Movement denotes dreaming. If you are woken from REM sleep you'll dive back into this stage when you next return to sleep. REM sleep is important to healthy brain functioning for many reasons, including the creation of long-term memories. This is also where lucid dreaming occurs, signified by even greater brainwave frequencies sometimes as high as the GAMMA range of 38-90 Hz, marking a highly active brain state.Your longest and most memorable lucid dreams will usually occur in the fourth and fifth sleep cycles (after about six hours of sleep). This is where periods of REM sleep become longer, as shown below:

The graph shows REM sleep occurring at the end of each sleep cycle. This is your dream time - which finishes off each sleep cycle.

If you don't wake up to an alarm, you'll find you often wake directly from a dream, which makes it much easier to remember. When this happens, don't move and just allow yourself to gently re-enter the dream, while thinking "I'm dreaming".

This graph also shows how it's essential for lucid dreamers to get sufficient shuteye and not miss out on REM sleep by cutting sleep short. Indeed, the more chances you have to sleep in, the better. Sleeping-in allows extended REM time in the morning, more vivid dreams, and more chances to become lucid.

When you're deciding how many hours to sleep each night, also consider how many sleep cycles that will give you. For instance, a 7-hour sleep will wake you up in the middle of your fifth sleep cycle (assuming each cycle takes 90 minutes). This cuts you short and prevents your fifth REM phase. It's much healthier to wake up after the cycle is complete and in a light Stage 1 sleep of your next cycle.

Do you repeatedly wake up "on the wrong side of the bed" each morning? It's likely your alarm clock is interrupting your final sleep cycle at a crucial point. If you can, allow yourself to wake up naturally each morning. Otherwise, go to bed earlier and give yourself the extra minutes needed to complete the cycle.

So, how many sleep cycles should you aim for each night? Four? Five? Six? It seems that the amount of sleep required differs from person to person, however as a rough guide experts have come up with the following chart based on age:

We can measure the length of dream time using an EEG machine which reads brainwave activity. Dreams are directly correlated to REM sleep - to the extent that your eyes can move and track in the same direction you are looking in the dream.

The brainwave readings tell us that REM sleep at the end of the first sleep cycle lasts only a few minutes. Much of the first cycle is dedicated to non-REM sleep, driven by the need for physical rest. So, these early dreams are often fleeting. You are unlikely to remember them and they're unlikely to yield lucid dreams.

As you sleep on through the night, your REM phases grow longer in each sleep cycle. By morning, your fourth or fifth sleep cycle (ending when you wake up for the day) may allow for 45-60 minutes of uninterrupted REM sleep. It's perfect for lucid dreaming.

"My dream lasted a lifetime!"

Every now and then I hear an urban myth or even a first-hand claim that someone had a dream that encompassed an entire lifetime.

I've only once had such a dream, while taking the dream herb, Calea Z. Time seemed to stretch and I felt like I was in this dream for years. But as vivid as the dream was, I didn't literally experience those years, minute-for-minute. It was more like watching an epic movie that spans 200 years in the space of two hours, yet you feel like you were there longer.

Generally, the timeframe of regular dreams are in line with reality. However it's always difficult to judge the length of a dream from the first-hand perspective of dreaming it. Whether you're lucid or not, time can be distorted in dreams - and there are few "constants" against which you can measure the passing of dream events.

So, if you feel a dream lasted for days or years, it's just your perception of events in the dream that made it seem to last so long. I don't believe that such dreams - however mind-blowing in their realism and adventure - are comparable to the experience of real time passing in the waking world.

This also means you can't get "stuck" in dream limbo for 70 years ;)

Like regular dreams, lucid dreams can last anywhere from a few seconds up to an hour (and possibly even more). For me, a typical lucid dream lasts 10-20 minutes.

Most beginners find their lucid dream collapses within a few seconds because the emotions of becoming lucid are so overwhelming. However with a few simple dream stabilization methods, you can massively prolong your lucid dreams.

As soon as I learned how to prolong my lucid dreams, it opened up a world of possibilities. My dream world posed a new adventure playground, in which I could travel anywhere and do anything I wanted to with complete clarity and awareness. What's more, these stabilization techniques serve to enhance the dream clarity and my ability to control it, while preventing me from waking up prematurely.

For more lessons in lucid dreaming, check out my course The Lucid Dreaming Fast Track, which teaches anyone my proven strategy for having lucid dreams.