I Believe I can Fly

The Benefits of Lucid Dreaming

I loved my grandmother to bits. She was a wonderful woman, semi-famous as an author, a playwright, life member of the PEN club with mayor-gifted keys to many cities including Amsterdam and Berlin.

But more than anything, she was my Omi. And like the guy in the song Chet Atkins made famous, which he didn’t write, but dedicated to his dad, she always had time for me. She took me for trips around Amsterdam, and even for my 13th birthday, took me to watch the extended version of the Woodstock movie, and watched with interest.

The last time I went to visit her in Amsterdam, she was 98. She was bedridden, something that came on fairly quickly.

When I went to see her for her 90th birthday, she was recognised for her contribution to the arts at a celebration of signatories. She was 100% lucid and able to hold her own in any circle and still travelled around Europe for speaking engagements on her own.

The last time I saw Omi, she was 98 and spent most of her time asleep. She was absolutely happy and loving life. Seriously, she was extremely happy. She told me she had met a new man, and fallen in love. He had proposed to her and she had accepted. They were going to get married.

Caregivers and people around her thought she had lost the plot. It was clearly dementia talking.

But it wasn’t.

Omi was able to describe this man and tell me all sorts of details about things they had done together, outings they had been on, and how much she was looking forward to their life together as a couple.

Not only did she tell me, and others, about this, but she was consistent on consecutive days. There was no stopping to think before she spoke, just a little slow and short of breath. She hoped I would come back to Holland to attend the wedding and was looking forward to introducing me to him.

I’ve seen dementia. My mother-in-law suffered from dementia. She didn’t even recognise her children most of the time and was pretty much away with the fairies. She had gone down a path that is the common path of someone going into progressive stages of dementia. I read up on it, to understand how we could be there for her, and she was a classic case. She started forgetting things, she went wandering up the road, trying to go home, but couldn’t remember where home was, she often asked after her husband, who had passed away years ago, but she told us she had seen him just that morning when he had been on his way to the RSA (Returned Services Association) for a beer with his ex-air force mates.

So why was my grandmother so consistent and normal in her story? Why did she know all of us, and remember all the things we had done together, not just over the years, but also more recently? How was she able to have normal conversations with me? Why did she remember I had seen her on previous days and even exactly what she had told me on those visits?

These are not actions associated with dementia.

OK, it’s a theory, I have no evidence, but it makes total sense to me. She was bedridden. She didn’t leave her bed to go to the bathroom, or anything else. She was frail and light as a feather. But she was totally with it, bright as a button.

What I believe happened was that she had started lucid dreaming most of the time when she was asleep. Her dreams were so vivid, and so under her control, that they became more real than her reality. When she was awake, she thought she was just tired and maybe a little unwell, and looking forward to getting back on her feet. When she slept, she was on her feet and her life experiences were as contiguous as one of her novels. There are 19 of them on Goodreads. She was able to write and live her own story.

How wonderful a thing that is, and it got me thinking. Imagine if we were all able to lucid dream.

When was lucid dreaming first discovered? It may have gone right back to Aristotle, but it was first accepted as a thing not much more than a hundred years ago.

I first experienced it when I was a teenager. I had dreams about flying. You may have had something similar. I would dream I was flying, and sometimes I would wake up on the floor where I had fallen out of bed. perhaps the whole dream had only taken a few seconds.

I read an awful lot and was fascinated by the occult and concepts such as astral travel. I studied Yoga Nidra, a form of conscious sleep. I experimented with it and felt like I could rock myself out of my body and travel.

One thing I loved to do, and often did in my dreams was fly around my local roads. I loved riding motorcycles and my local roads in Titirangi were perfect, with loads of corners and sadly, loads of grates and potholes, and I knew where they all were.

In my dreams, I flew sort of like Superman, but without any dramatics, sometimes just feet above the ground, and sometimes I would soar up into the sky and look down.

I don’t know how I got into those dream states. I wasn’t able to evoke them consciously, but I was able to control the dreams while I was asleep and decide where to go. I decided to try going to Holland, even though I was asleep in New Zealand. I found that I could go pretty much anywhere, but only to places I had been before.

I often thought about how wonderful it was for my grandmother to be able to live a happy life, despite being bedridden, through her lucid dreams, and wondered if it might be possible to achieve that state.

It turns out that this is something being studied in universities, including Stanford where people like Doctor Stephan LaBerge researched. He founded the Lucidity Institute, which continues to study this phenomenon.

I recently read his book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, which I found to be extremely interesting, and it made good sense.

I’ve also been listening to The Lucid Dreaming Podcast, which sadly looks like it has gone into a hiatus, but it contained some interesting material, including info on several Kickstarter projects, like the LucidCatcher with technologies designed to help people get into and recognise a lucid dreaming state.

I used to be a frequent visitor to floating tanks, sensory deprivation tanks, where you float on water, heavy with Epsom salts. I mentioned in one post how I used them to avoid jetlag on long-haul flights.

I will share more information about those experiences in future posts. I experimented with using them to learn music I wanted to play on the guitar. The idea was to enter a lucid state, where I could lie in a lucid dreaming state and listen to this music and learn it, such that I would be able to create an arrangement of it. Unfortunately, the length of the piece and the cost of floating was too high for me to complete the project, but it certainly showed me that it was possible. I even toyed with the idea of buying a second-hand tank, but the reason why they were second-hand is that they were high maintenance, especially the older technologies. This is the piece I wanted to arrange for the guitar.

This concept of learning while you sleep is not uncommon. You have probably heard of courses designed to teach you foreign languages while you sleep. There is still a lot of debate about this, and while I think it is possible, I feel most of the systems are too simplistic and you need to learn other disciplines before this might be possible, at least in conjunction with learning while you are awake.

There has been a lot of research about what happens while you are lucid dreaming and the similarities between brain and nerve connections between the dream state and being awake. For example, it’s not uncommon for the muscles you would be using if you were running in real life, to be activated during REM dreaming, that you would use if you actually were pounding the pavement. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone who has a dog, if they have observed their pet during REM sleep, making noises and twitching their legs.

It has also been observed that people who are able to lucid dream, often wake up feeling tired, as if they have been getting a lot of exercise, physical and mental, while asleep. We sleep for a purpose, nevertheless, it sometimes feels like wasted time, and we only have so many goes around the sun.

Anyway, I’ve decided to look into it a bit more, and from what I have read and heard, the first step is to try to remember your dreams as soon as you wake up with a dream diary. I’ve only done this for a week, but I have found that I am not only recalling my dreams fairly easily, but they also appear to be more vivid in sound and colour than before. Of course, this could simply be that I have simply been less focused or aware of my dreams in my conscious state. But what do I have to lose? If I wasn’t dreaming, or aware of dreaming, I would still be doing nothing besides sleeping.

If it comes to anything more, I’ll let you know. If there is one thing about me, it is that when I study something, I tend to be compulsive about it and put 110% effort into it, including reading, studying, and practising. if anything interesting happens, I’ll let you know.

Have you had any experiences with lucid dreams? I’d love to hear about them. Just imagine being able to go anywhere you want to in your dreams, travel, fly, play sports, play an instrument, and enter a new relationship, like my grandmother did. I would welcome your comments.