Meaning of a Dream

Hi, I'm Rebecca. I'm 29 and have been lucid dreaming for more than half my life. I live in New Zealand with my partner, Pete, our brand new son Fox, and loads more animals of the Sheltie, sheep and chicken variety.

I built this website from scratch to share my love of lucid dreaming and to enable me to work from home. Whenever you click an ad or purchase something here, it contributes to our future and to the life of this site. Thank you!

Fun fact: Astute visitors will notice Pete was "accidentally" classed as both human and farm animal in my photo mosaic.

I have been lucid dreaming since I was 14 years old (more on that in a moment). It turned out to be an awesome discovery - evolving both my perception of reality and the way I look at human consciousness.

With countless lucid dreams to my name, I have a lot of first-hand experience to share, as well as tips I learned from the experts like Dr Stephen LaBerge and Robert Waggoner. I try to pass on my research and experience in a thoughtful and entertaining way to visitors of all talents and backgrounds.

If you enjoy any the 200+ free articles on this website, please consider downloading my dedicated course, The Lucid Dreaming Fast Track. It offers a structured approach to learning lucid dreaming and exclusive benefits including my Lucid Dreaming Hypnosis MP3. The aim is to teach ANYONE how to get lucid, with commitment.

In doing this, I'll help you learn the life-changing skill of lucid dreaming, and you'll help me continue to earn my living online doing what I love.

The earliest dream I can remember is when I was growing up in England at 4 or 5 years old. I fell asleep in front of the TV one afternoon watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon... and had an exceptionally long, vivid dream about a cat chasing a mouse. Even more bizarrely, the entire dream was in cartoon.

I woke up confused, unsure of what had been a dream and what was real. The transition into dreaming had been unnoticeable.

Growing up, I became fascinated by science, psychology and the dreaming mind. I discovered lucid dreaming in a magazine article as a teenager. I couldn't quite believe it was actually possible to become conscious inside the dream world.

I had to try it for myself. So over the following weeks I studied lucid dreaming and read about it as much as I could. I soon had my very first lucid dream...

Here is an edited excerpt from my lucid dream diary:

"I'm standing in an empty white room, which is completely bare like a new house. The complete lack of detail makes me curious... What is this place? Suddenly, I realize: this is a dream!

The room surges into focus. I become self aware: conscious of my body and its place in the dream world. I do my reality check and feel my fingers push right through the palm of my hand. I'm lucid!

I am so excited, I run out the door, looking for someone to tell. I find a woman who I don't recognize and shout in her face. "I'm dreaming! I'm dreaming!" I'm so excited, I accidentally wake myself up."

It was like a light switch had turned on in my head. Suddenly I existed in a new, alternate reality, in which anything I could conceive of came true.

What was this phantom place?

At first, I was stunned by the realism of my dream reality - and then overjoyed by the realization that I could control and direct my awareness in the dream!

I practiced more in-depth lucid dreaming techniques. Sometimes I could have several lucid dreams per week. Yet other times, when I slowed my practice, I had nothing for a whole month. It was anything but consistent in those early days.

But when I had those lucid dreams... they were totally worth it!

In lucid dreams, I know I am dreaming and increase the intensity of the dream at will. I can "turn up my consciousness" allowing me to see, hear, feel, taste and smell everything as vividly as waking life.

I can create my own dramatic scenery, teleport to anywhere in the universe, interact with dream figures and speak directly to my subconscious mind.

This is where I start to get lost for words... because no matter what I say here, I cannot convey the beauty and emotion of a truly inspired lucid dream.

A great lucid dream can change the way you view the world.

One way to become lucid is via the WILD method. It leads to the most vivid kind of lucid dream possible because there is no lapse in consciousness.

You move directly from a conscious waking state to a conscious dreaming state. It requires some decent focus and visualization, after which your awareness "pops" into a lucid 3D dreamscape with complete immersion. Your body, by then, is asleep.

Like many WILDs, my first was extremely memorable:

"As I fall asleep, lying on my back and totally relaxed, I imagine a white sandy beach in my mind's eye. I put myself in the scene and start to place every detail as I become completely mesmerized. After a few minutes, I lose all awareness of physical reality and I "pop" into the dreamscape.

I'm standing on the beach in a vivid 3D landscape, my toes sinking into the soft, white sand. I feel completely calm and at peace with myself, without a care in the world. As I look out across the sparkling ocean, I have an urge to soar over the surface and take a big leap towards the sea.

I pick up speed as I fly over the surface of the ocean like a bird. The water is deep blue and shimmering in the sunlight. I dip my hands in and relish the feeling of the cool water running between my fingers. The dream forms automatically beyond my awareness. It is really happening.

I start to hear beautiful music coming from my subconscious mind; a man singing to an acoustic guitar, backed by many layers of strings. The music captures the beauty of the dream perfectly. I am in paradise."

Lucid dreams really are something else.

In other guided dreams, I have:

Spoken with my subconscious mind to resolve inner conflictsTeleported across the world to "visit" other people in my dreamsTraveled into the distant past and observed ancient manFlown high over New York City at night hand-in-hand with PeteRocketed through the universe at impossible speeds

I'm not alone - there are millions of people who have these flights of fancy. And you can be one of them, since we all have the untapped ability to lucid dream.

This website is both my creative outlet and a source of helpful information for people all over the world. Inspiring people to lucid dream is the #1 goal of this site.

I launched the site as a hobby in 2008 and it quickly turned into my career, delivering a healthy income while I wrote more articles and developed my own multimedia lucid dreaming course.

Today World of Lucid Dreaming is one of the top authority sites on dream control and receives around half a million page views each month.

If you'd like to learn more about how I made this website and how it pays my bills, read my article How to Make an Income-Generating Website on Your Hobby.

My partner Pete is also a frequent lucid dreamer and has become increasingly involved with building content for this website, not to mention the website design.

Pete has written articles on making music in lucid dreams, becoming lucid via subliminal induction, and how video games affect conscious dreaming, as well as helping produce my new lucid dreaming app due for release in 2013. If that wasn't enough, he also creates original digital music such as Lucid and Lucid Redux Alpha which appear in my lucid dreaming videos.

It's about time he got a mention for it all here. If you like what he does, check out his website featuring his music, cartoons and other musings.

One way to have more frequent lucid dreams is to keep the idea firmly on the brain throughout the waking day. It's called dream incubation. So I encourage all readers to follow me on social media and receive instant updates on the latest lucid dreaming articles, news, dream research, tips and techniques.

Lucid Dreaming Forum - Register for free at my dedicated lucid dreaming forum to ask questions and share experiences and dream philosophies. Facebook - I run a lively Facebook Page with 10,000 fans sharing questions, advice and experiences every day. Twitter - I Tweet every new article I publish online, so if you want to know about new content and other musings, follow me on Twitter @luciddreamers. Newsletter - Every 1-2 months I send out a free newsletter with new lucid dreaming tutorials, insights, Q&A, feature articles, news and giveaways.

If you've found my work helpful, please donate to show your support.

Thanks for giving back - you are awesome.

If you have any burning questions about lucid dreaming, please check out my Lucid Dreaming FAQ or my article 10 Mistakes Made by Beginner Lucid Dreamers. If you find your question isn't covered, do post it at the Lucid Dreaming Forum.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you enjoy exploring my website as much as I enjoy writing it :)

Rebecca Turner
Creator, World of Lucid Dreaming

Copyright © Robert Waggoner of The Lucid Dream Exchange

Recently I was asked by ABC News to comment on Christopher Nolan's new movie Inception, which I was happy to do. But as it's impossible to do the movie justice in a 15-second sound bite, I want to offer you my list of 10 things I like about Inception...

1. "Dreams seem real while we're in them," the main character, Cobb, says. It's a simple point, but an important one, and the dream sequences in Inception get it right. As the team's newest student, Ariadne, learns, the assumed reality of our experience, waking or dreaming, seems to us compellingly real.

It's only when the street disintegrates that we question reality. Just a few nights ago a dream figure asked me, "How do you know you're not sleeping right now?" I blew him off for asking such a sophomoric question - and woke up in my bed!

2. Inception illustrates the way in which expectations operate in the dream state. Cut your finger in a lucid dream and you'll feel pain - unless you actively expect otherwise. Even in lucid dreams we carry with us the idea of physical senses. Yet there is an escape clause: the mind's expectation about what it experiences. To feel pain in a lucid dream, you must mentally believe in it. No belief, no pain.

3. The brilliant creativity accessible to lucid dreamers shines through Inception like the sun - and is equally taken for granted. Aware in the subconscious, the mind's warehouse of creativity stands completely open and ready for requests. Many lucid dreaming painters, novelists, song writers, programmers, and engineers access their Muse while consciously aware in the dream state, and marvel at its beauty and creativity. Lucidly knock on the door of your subconscious, and Creativity opens it.

4. Inception offers a cautionary tale. Lucid dreamer Cobb fails to resolve major personal issues and they prove to be his undoing. Dream architect Ariadne repeatedly begs Cobb to deal constructively with his guilt and grief; instead, he both avoids and befriends his guilt and grief, and it accompanies him in each layer of the mind. Cobb fails to learn the fundamental psychological lesson of lucid dreaming: No matter where you go, there you are.

6. Inception shows us the vast creativity of the subconscious in the hands of a psychologically wounded lucid dreamer who fails to learn his lessons and so accumulates increasingly complex karmic wounds. Whatever else you may think, lucid dreaming remains, fundamentally, a spiritual journey. Until you clear away the emotional and psychic wounds and misperceptions, they distort your view, your understanding, and the lucid landscape. Once they are taken care of, lucid dreamers see clearly that lucid dreaming follows a spiritual path of extraordinary beauty, complexity, and depth.

7. Inception illustrates what most experienced lucid dreamers know: layers of lucid awareness exist. While the movie relies on the "dream within a dream within a dream..." metaphor, some lucid dreamers have become consciously aware and moved to other levels of consciousness. How? Well, they didn't use Inception's fantasy device, PASIV; rather, they did it the old fashioned way: they used the power of the mind. Next time you're lucid dreaming, shout out, "I want to go to the next level!" and see what happens.

8. Inception hints at, but never asks, "How would society respond if technology offered a drug and device that would place you with others in a stable lucid dream?" Would you give up weekly bridge games for a few hours in a shared Holodeck, lucidly aware with friends? I can only speculate, but a chemical compound that creates stable lucid dreams may be discovered in our lifetime. Science fiction seems headed toward science fact. One day those weekly bridge games may collapse faster than bee colonies, as people swarm to lucid dream gatherings.

9. Inception presents us with something lucid dreamers grind their metaphysical teeth on: another type of reality. Sure, physical reality has physical pleasures: peaches and watermelons in season, Lady Gaga. But physical reality also has death, taxes, and lutefisk. Lucid dreaming offers whatever you expect and more in a lucid reality; except that it's not real. Or is it? If you step outside of Plato's physical cave and stumble into Plato's lucid dream cave, who's to know?

10. I like Inception for bringing up these reality checking ideas, these "How do I know that I know" questions that push thousands of lucid dreamers like myself to go deeper and deeper, to play lucid dreaming reality off of so-called physical reality, to see more clearly the attributes of a physical, mentally mediated reality (waking) contrasted to a mental reality with Gumby-like physical forms (lucid dreaming), and to experience, behind it all, the unseen Architect, the "awareness behind the dream" that I discuss in my book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self.

So these are the 10 reasons I like Inception. Hey, wait a minute. There are only nine reasons here. My software arbitrarily removed #5 - no kidding. I guess that's the final reason I like Inception: the minor details and anomalies our awareness floats over and fills in reminds us of the mentally "created" aspect of this experienced reality. Who knows, maybe we're dreaming, right now, but managed to overlook that, too.

About The Guest Author

Robert Waggoner is a lucid dreamer and author of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self. He is President-Elect of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD). Check out his lucid dreaming blog at Lucid Advice or subscribe to the quarterly Lucid Dream Exchange.

I've gotten my fair share of weird looks when I tell people I'm doing my high school research project on lucid dreaming. It feels that people associate sleep science with palm reading and the like...

Have you ever had anyone react negatively or oddly to the revelation that you practice lucid dreaming? If so, why do you think there are so many misunderstandings about lucid dreaming?

Rebecca says: I encounter this a lot, when people ask me what I do for a living. I tell them I write a website. About what, they ask. About lucid dreaming. Then I pause and wait for their giveaway reaction.

Generally smart people already have a good idea of what lucid dreaming is. The term is becoming more of a household phrase, and these people realize it's something real. It sparks some interesting discussions, and I find more and more people I know already naturally lucid dream (but just don't call it that).

Some people just ask what it is outright, and I explain as best I can without sounding like a broken record. This can be hit or miss. On the plus side, what starts out as polite small talk quickly becomes quite deep and you get to know complete strangers on a more meaningful level. On the downside, some people just don't get it. It's hard to explain lucidity when they don't understand the difference between conscious and subconscious awareness... so that ends in an awkward moment and I quickly move on.

A few times I've had people give me funny looks and say things like "do you really believe in all THAT?" as if it literally means invading other people's dreams or psychically dreaming of the future or some other hocus pocus. Again, these are the ones who just don't get it and though I'll try to explain, it's difficult to teach people whose minds have already been made up about something, especially when you know their belief completely lacks any reasonable foundation. It's like trying to argue Evolution to a Creationist, you have to change their whole belief system just to define the concept to them.

So, why the misunderstanding?

We live in a world where the scientific method is not revered as it should be. Science gives us every single piece of technology in the world today. Yet when you apply science to people's personal beliefs, they suddenly want no more of it. Many people believe in angels, ghosts, the afterlife, mediums, telepathy, psychic energy, chakras, auras, the list goes on... These are all beliefs based on wobbly "I-want-to-believe-it-so-I-will" theories which have not been backed by observable evidence, and so science rejects them until such time that they do. 

This creates a whole lot of uncertainty for people stuck in the middle. These are people who were never educated properly in the scientific method, and so have no system to decide what is and isn't real - yet feel we should draw the line somewhere.

So at one end of the scale you have people who believe anything if it suits their philosophy. In the middle the uncertain ones who have no way to measure what's real and what's not and so flip-flop on their beliefs. And at the other end people who trust in the scientific method to find objective truths. 

The middle group, who flip-flop over their beliefs, are the ones who will potentially label you crazy for believing in lucid dreaming. Partly because they are uneducated and don't know what it is nor the science behind it, and partly because they don't know how to categorize what's real even if the evidence hit them in the face.

If that all sounds pompous, then forgive me. I don't know everything, this is just my educated opinion. And I place a huge amount of importance on education. This doesn't mean you have to have a fancy college degree, you just need a thirst for learning. The day you stop learning and caring about finding answers, settling instead for whatever you are spoon fed by your local spiritual / religious group, then you have officially given up on meaningful intellectual progression in life.

Also, don't worry about what these other high school students think. They're too immature at the moment. When I explained the OBE vibrational state to my friends in school, they said "Haha. You used a vibrator." :/ QED

One of the best things I've found about getting older is you and your peers get wiser, and you can have more meaningful discussion of these things. So I think it's pretty awesome when teenagers ask questions like this, because it suggests you're already ahead of the game and actively applying your intelligence. Don't let your school friends put you off this method of thinking - because it really does serve you well.

What do blind people dream about? This article highlights the latest studies into the dreams of blind people, colorblind people, and black-and-white dreamers.

In 1999, dream researchers at the University of Hartford analyzed 372 dreams of 15 blind people. They found that both the congenitally blind and those who went blind before five years old did not have any visual dreams at all.

That's because our dreams are made up of real world experiences and our innermost thoughts, anxieties and desires. So for someone who has never perceived images or light (or can't remember any) their dreams simply can't manifest visually.

People who go blind after seven years of age do report visual dreams in the same way we perceive them. It seems the longer you experience the world with sight, the longer you will go on dreaming visually. Someone who goes blind in their senior years can experience vivid dreams for many years after losing their sight.

Of the people who went blind between five and seven years the results were mixed; some went on to have visual dreams and some did not. However, regardless of the visual dream content, all groups reported rich and imaginative dreams, suggesting visual imagery is no measure of dream intensity on its own.

So, what do blind people dream about if there is no visual imagery involved? As a sighted person it's pretty hard to imagine. But we can say that blind people's dreams are representative of their real lives, charged with sound, touch, smell and emotion.

Because they lack the sense of sight, their brains automatically compensate by putting more emphasis on the remaining sensory data. They can build up a highly detailed perception of the world (especially with advanced development of the senses such as echolocation) and these senses create a vivid dream world.

In one study of dreams, 60% of blind people reported dreaming about transport (compared to 28% of sighted people) which is understandably a big cause of anxiety for blind people because of the danger it presents.

Research has also shown that blind people who never dream visually show very little or no Rapid Eye Movement during the REM phase of sleep. They are still capable of having vivid sensory dreams, but they don't show any eye movements.

This highlights an interesting function of REM sleep: the only reason our eyes are darting all about the place is because they are scanning a visual dream world. The dreams of blind people suggest there is no other reason for it.

What does this mean for colorblind people - do they dream in color?

As you might expect by now, your waking experience dictates your perception of dreams. So someone who has a red-green color vision defect since birth (affecting a surprising 8% of males with Northern European ancestry) will dream in the same colorblind mode.

If you were born with full color vision but later became colorblind, you may have full color dreams if you have sufficient intact long term memories of them. This aspect of visual memory is interesting; for instance people who became blind later in life report how familiar faces become blurry with time - and they never age.

Do you dream in color? For sighted people, this seems like a pretty odd question. If you see in full color during the day, then you dream in color at night - surely?

Curiously, in 2008, researchers at the University of Dundee surveyed generations of people who grew up with black-and-white television (which emerged throughout the entire first half of the twentieth century). Even though they saw in full color in everyday life, they still recalled dreaming in black and white. By the 1960s, when color TV became more widespread, people reported fewer black-and-white dreams and shifted back to full color.

Incidentally if you can't recall any colors from last night's dream, this doesn't mean it was in black and white. It just means you don't recall that particular detail - and increasing your dream recall and practicing lucid dreaming will improve this.

Yes, I believe so. Blind people can have a highly attuned sense of self awareness, just like sighted people. In fact, they are more accustomed to using what we consider "back-up" senses as primary senses, meaning they can be more aware of their own environment. This could enhance your ability to notice whether you're dreaming and become lucid. What would those lucid dreams be like...?