Meaning of a Dream

There are five main types of dreams - daydreams, normal dreams, false awakenings, nightmares and lucid dreams. Take a look at the features of these hypnotic states and how each one can introduce you to the phenomenal world of lucid dreaming...

Scientific studies reveal that most people daydream for a whopping 70-120 minutes per day. During this time, you are only semi-awake - not asleep, but not fully checked-in with reality, either. It starts with a compelling thought, memory, or fantasy about the future, and your imagination runs away. The longer you daydream, the deeper you becomes immersed in your private fantasy land.

Contrary to popular belief, daydreaming is an important part of dream research. As with all types of dreams, you enter a kind of hypnotic trance and allow your subconscious thoughts to rise to the surface.

In daydreams, the right (creative) brain is dominant and you lose awareness of reality. Deeper worries or concerns will surface, usually by acting themselves out in the daydream. This only serves to reinforce negativity - so next time you are fantasizing about bad situations, turn it around and consciously create a positive outcome.

Similarly, many successful people use their daydreams to visualize their future. Athletes imagine winning their next big race. Business leaders mentally rehearse an important speech. They daydream about a positive outcome and in doing so, help make it happen. You can even look at the past and re-enact an upsetting event with a different outcome. These types of dreams are very healthy, helping you temporarily escape the demands of reality and release frustrations without physically acting them out.

I also use daydreams to initiate my next lucid dream by setting a lucid dream intention. I make a mental list of things I want to do in my next conscious dream, and visualize how I will get there. Let's say I want to: play the piano, fly to the moon, and meet an alien. First I'll visualize a concert hall (the place I expect to find a piano in my dream), then I'll imagine flying up and passing through the roof and into the night sky. I'll see myself landing on the moon (space rocket not required) and finding a super-intelligent bunch of aliens sitting around in a crater. These guys will give me very interesting conversation, offering insights directly from my unconscious.

The next time I become lucid, I will remember my daydream instinctively and begin to perform it all in the vivid detail of my lucid dream reality. Without this preparation, it's likely I'll just fly around and examine the dreamscape. This is great fun, but I prefer to follow goals to make the most of my lucid dreams.

I know "normal dreams" is a contradiction in terms, but let me assure you I simply mean your usual types of dreams, where you have no idea you're dreaming - at the time, anyway. In a typical dream, you could be having tea with the Pope and think nothing of it; you accept your dream reality as it is.

Everybody in the world has normal dreams every single night. These dreams that arise out of REM sleep are essential to our survival - we would die without them. Assuming you get eight hours of shuteye, you will dream for about 100 minutes, with longer and more vivid dreams occurring shortly before you wake up.

Normal dreams present us with important messages from the subconscious mind. They are based on your thoughts and experiences from the day before, and sometimes memories from long ago. The unconscious mind releases repressed fears, anxieties and desires through conceptual imagery - the coded language of the subconscious brain.

These typical types of dreams are also the gateway to lucid dreams. Anyone can become spontaneously lucid from within a normal dream. All it takes is to consciously recognize that you are dreaming. This awakens the conscious brain and the sensory system, so that the lucid dream looks, feels, sounds, smells and even tastes like anything you experience in reality.

Even bizarre experiences - like shape shifting into an atom - feel astonishingly real (or at least, what you expect that sensation to feel like). However, if you forget you are dreaming - it happens - your lucid dream will revert to a normal dream again and you will lose conscious control of your awareness within it.

Lucid dreams are the best types of dreams and I'm guessing the reason you are here reading this. Most lucid dreams arise spontaneously from normal dreams (called Dream Induced Lucid Dreams). All you need to do is teach yourself to constantly question your reality and you will become lucid much more often.

Alternatively, you can have lucid dreams by walking your brain from a conscious state directly into a dream state. This technique has been used by Tibetan Buddhists for over 1,000 years and is today known as Wake Induced Lucid Dreams. It involves a two-step process of meditation and inducing sleep paralysis. You will soon enter your very own lucid dream world.

Remember, a lucid dream is any dream in which you:

a) know that you're dreaming; and/orb) can control and direct your awareness in the dream

That's all! Lucid dreams don't have to involve 100% dream control - far from it! Most of the time I only control my own movements and simply follow the action going on around me. You can also be lucid and fully aware of the dream and assume zero control; just a silent observer of a miraculous dream world. Not surprisingly, most people use lucid types of dreams to fulfil desires they can't fulfil in reality. But once you look past this novelty feature, lucid dreams offer brilliant insights into the subconscious mind. Read Robert Waggoner's Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self for some extraordinary applications of lucid dreams.

Ever watched Groundhog Day with Bill Murray? False awakenings are a bit like that. You may wake up as normal and plod into the bathroom, get dressed, eat breakfast, and be half way to work before you realize "oh my God, I'm still dreaming!" It's a bizarre place to be.

False awakenings are basically very vivid types of dreams. They begin in your bedroom, with you waking up, and somehow your conscious brain mimics every detail of the room, exactly as it should be. Unless you question your reality on waking (like many lucid dreamers) you don't stand a chance...

It usually takes something quite obvious to shock you out of these types of dreams. Maybe you look in the bathroom mirror and see yourself 20 years from now. Or maybe you're driving down the road and realize there are no other cars. I once had a false awakening, where I did my reality check as I got out of bed - but that wasn't enough. I sat for about 5 minutes banging on the glass of my bedroom window, trying to figure out if I could push my hand through. I simply couldn't get the conscious part of my brain to wake up! In the end, the dream revealed itself when I walked into the kitchen and found my partner cooking a roast dinner at 7am. I immediately became lucid and flew away!

Some people even report multiple false awakenings, one after the other in quick succession. They get trapped in a seemingly never-ending cycle, tired of getting dressed for work for the seventh time that day. If this happens to you often, I strongly recommend getting into the habit of doing reality checks on waking - and give yourself a fighting chance! Truly recognizing a false awakening can go two ways: either you are shocked into waking up - or you enter a lucid dream.

Perhaps most importantly, false awakenings may be frustrating but aren't at all harmful. They are also extremely vivid but not nightmarish in content. And if nothing else, they provide a fascinating talking point the next day.

In the western world, nightmares are considered to be normal types of dreams with a very scary twist. In nightmares, you don't know you're dreaming so the subconscious mind takes everything on board as if it were really happening. Some nightmares can be so vivid that the sensory system is triggered and you can feel certain types of pain. It can be very unnerving.

According to dream analysis, being chased by a monster or dark character in a nightmare represents our evolutionary fear of being hunted. Children - who are arguably more vulnerable than most adults - report this type of dream the most. Studies show that nightmares are usually caused by sickness, stress, trauma, and drugs or alcohol.

One excellent way to stop nightmares and recurring types of dreams is lucidity. By questioning your reality, you stand a better chance of recognizing a nightmare when it occurs, particularly if you plant a monster (or whatever the common theme) as your dream symbol. Whenever you think of this symbol in waking life, do a reality check. The next time it appears in a dream, your habitual reality test will lead to lucidity. Then you will have the conscious courage to confront your monster in the lucid dream state - and reason with it!

For step-by-step tutorials in lucidity, check out The Lucid Dreaming Fast Track, my digital course that shows beginners the fastest way to lucid dreams.

I first heard about lucid dreaming about 6-7 weeks ago and come to this site fairly regularly. I've been keeping a dream journal, which now has more than a dozen entries and I've bought a cheap digital watch that I use for reality checking. Last night I had a dream where at one point, a girl I knew from back in the school was holding a piece of paper and she wanted to know who it belonged to so she could return it. She let me see this piece of paper, and written on it were a bunch of lucid dreaming related notes that I recognized as being written with my own handwriting.

I even remember seeing "I will remember my dreams" written in upper case and underlined. However, it seems instead of realizing it fully, I stuffed the piece of paper in my pocket and thought nothing more of it. Was I close here?

Rebecca says: Nice job! Your subconscious expressions was giving you a big fat cue to become lucid. Unfortunately we don't always pick up on these cues-especially in the early days of practicing lucid dreaming-and we bypass them.

I've had lots of conversations about lucid dreaming within a normal dream, and still not become lucid. I once also gave an entire lecture on it in my dream! Duh!

The way to can tell is you have a realization; (a) a light bulb moment where your thought process suddenly pings into life. You'll KNOW for sure that you're dreaming and it's not real. At the same moment, as the logic centers of your brain wake up, your vision and tactile senses will kick into life, so everything becomes extremely vivid. You'll suddenly be IN the dream; like going from 2D to 3D. Even in your very first lucid dream, this is easy to recognize and you won't miss it.

So, I'd say you were close ... but no cigar. The fact that you could read the writing in the dream is good-your language centers were active, which is much closer to normal than a dream lucidity. Keep practicing, and I'm sure you will have a lucid dream soon.

This article looks at some easy lucid dreaming techniques, helping most people have their first lucid dream between 3 days and 3 weeks.

I have packed as much information into this beginner's article as I can, so don't worry if you feel overwhelmed. Just take it slow.

First, my name is Rebecca. I've been lucid dreaming since I was 14 years old. Over the last 12 years I have researched a lot about dream control. I have practiced many different lucid dream exercises and developed my own ways to become lucid and stay conscious in the dream state for longer, enabling me to have many fantastic lucid dreams at will. The following is my "big picture" take on easy lucid dreaming for beginners. It combines the most popular lucid dreaming techniques and the best value dream control products to leapfrog you to success.

You should improve your dream recall so that you remember at least one dream every night (and preferably more). The easy way to do this is to tell yourself regularly, "I will remember my dreams", especially just before you go to sleep. This plants the intention in your subconscious.

Also keep a dream journal by the bedside so you can write down your dreams when you wake up. Discuss your dreams with friends whenever you can, to really hit home the message that dreams are important to you and must be remembered. Your subconscious will attend to it.

A very easy lucid dreaming exercise, reality checking is the secret weapon of those who tend towards Dream Initiated Lucid Dreams (DILDs). By performing reality checks regularly throughout your waking day, you will enhance your awareness of the waking state and be much more likely to recognize the dreamstate. Soon you will spontaneously perform a reality check in a dream, exposing the nature of the dream reality and giving you instant dream control.

Meditation is the exploration of the subconscious mind. When you meditate deeply, you can experience some fascinating phenomena, including hallucinations, feelings of euphoria and sudden insights. Meditation tunes you in to your waking reality on new levels, and helps you feel more at peace in your daily life.

Research has linked meditation with easy lucid dreaming for several reasons. First, it trains you to enter altered states of awareness on demand. Second, it bridges the gap between your conscious and unconscious brain. And third, it makes you more self-aware, helping you to recognize the unreality of the dream world and become lucid more often.

Start by introducing a simple 10-minute meditation into your daily routine, such as an easy breathing exercise. To access deeper meditative states, I like to listen to brainwave entrainment. I find it deeply soothing and it gives me the opportunity to improve my visualization skills for my next Wake Induced Lucid Dream.

If you are serious about having regular lucid dreams, you do need to do a little research. It can help you latch on to the best induction methods for you, and learn easy ways to control and explore your conscious dream world. If you don't know the ropes, the whole process takes a lot longer to learn.

This part is easy. Lucid dreaming is becoming increasingly popular with books, websites, forums and even TV and movie coverage. You will find more than 100 free lucid dreaming articles on this website. And the more you think about lucid dreams during the day, the more likely you are to become conscious in your dreams at night. The more you understand about this amazing mind phenomenon, the sooner you will take to it.

If you are looking for a great introductory book on lucidity, read Exploring The World of Lucid Dreaming by Dr Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold. It's a truly comprehensive and practical workbook for beginners and experts alike. Once you nail the easy lucid dreaming techniques, like dream journaling and reality checking, it's time to begin more involved methods. Get ready for some acronyms (the bane of any beginner's guide to lucid dreams).

So far, I have only offered methods for Dream Induced Lucid Dreams (where you start dreaming normally and become lucid from within the dreamstate). The most popular type of DILD is called Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams (MILD), created by Stephen LaBerge. I recommend starting out on this route, because DILDs often give way to spontaneous lucid dreams.

There is also a whole other category known as Wake Induced Lucid Dreams (WILDs). These were originally developed by Tibetan Buddhists in the form of Dream Yoga, which involves training yourself to go directly from waking to a lucid dream state. It involves falling asleep consciously and induces some strange phenomena linked with the out of body experience (OBE).

So there it is - easy lucid dreaming for beginners. Of course, a beginner's guide is only the start. Once you have found some effective ways to become lucid, you will have more questions about controlling and working with the alternate reality of lucid dreams. But that is another article altogether...