“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”
– Thomas Edison
I can remember as a kid I would have this recurring dream where I would levitate my body and then fly through the sky, passing over buildings and people I knew. It was incredible and so vivid. Unfortunately, I haven’t had that dream for a really long time. But is it possible to bring it back?
From an evolutionary standpoint, we have to wonder why dreams have survived for so long – they must provide some type of survival mechanism.
Research is revealing insight into how dreams can actually make us healthier and more productive. Some research suggests, dreams are a way to work out problems and organize your memories. Think about how much information we process every day. We really don’t have the time or emotional strength to thoroughly process all this while we’re awake. Dreams allow us the opportunity to do just that. They act like a filing cabinet, organizing everything that went on in your day, allowing us to be more productive the following day. Interestingly, you can induce dreams to solve problems, influence nightmares, and even dream about a specific person or problem.
By remembering a positive dream, we can actually lower our cortisol levels, the stress hormone, which in turn reduces the negative effects stress can have on our bodies.
There are several dream hacks that allow us to take full advantage of dreams and put us in control of them. It’s even possible to become conscious during dreams and affect their content, also known as “lucid dreaming”. In fact, Tibetan monks have been practicing lucid dreaming for thousands of years, but it was considered fringe speculation until it was captured in a controlled environment.
To control your dreams –
1. Identify common dream elements that recur from night to night such as water, and use these as “reality checks”. As you experience these cues throughout the day, ask yourself if you’re dreaming. Look at your environment for clear indications of a dream state such as changes in text like written signs, digital clocks and complex patterns. If you look away and then back again and the pattern has changed, you are in a dream state and have become lucid.
2. Right before falling asleep, try visualizing a dream you’d like to have. For example, if you want to lose weight, think about how you would look ideally. These thoughts will slip into your subconscious. Your subconscious mind is 88% of your minds power.
If you wake up, relax, focus on sleeping, and try to visualize where your dream left off. Two other strange but effective techniques for extending lucidity are spinning (a la a pirouttein place) and looking at your hands. I won’t get into the details but it’s worth a try.
3. As soon as you wake, keep your eyes closed, don’t move a muscle and ask yourself “What was I dreaming about.” Replay this question 3 times. Make this the most important thing you do upon waking. We are so used to immediately racing through all the things we have to do that day that we cut that line between our dreams and reality. The more you do this, the better you get. In fact, you’ll be able to have extensive recollection after 2-3 weeks.
To induce lucid dreaming –
Take half a serving of B6 or B vitamin complex with a multivitamin in the morning and half in the evening.
Ben Greenfield’s “lucid dreaming” formula is 15mg melatonin, 300mg 5-HTP, 3000mg L-Tyrosine. He recommends proceeding at your own risk. Note that dreams on melatonin tend to be more colorful and more chaotic
Tim Ferris recommends 200-400 mcg of Huperzine-A.
I’ve noticed that if I wake myself up at 4am on the weekends and then go right back to sleep, I’ll dream the rest of the time that I’m asleep.
Try the free app Dream:ON, created by Dr. Richard Wiseman as a social experiment to track your sleeping habits and induce dreams using music and verbal cues.
Happy dreaming!
QUESTION: What have you done to control your dreams or induce lucid dreams?
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