A full disclaimer. I’m a lucid dreamer and this piece of article might be one of its kind and will be based on my own experiences in addition to that of the existing science behind it.
To the folks who don’t know what lucid dreaming is, it’s basically a state of consciousness between dreaming and waking. In other words, it’s when your mind wakes up while you’re dreaming and is well aware of the fact that it is and your body is not.
This edition of Geekswipe explores the weird science behind all the fantastic stuff about lucid dreams.
Understanding why doesn’t the brain realize dreams are fake
Have you ever wondered why in our dreams, we’ve mostly never pondered about reality at all? Like, if a train runs through your house, or a huge whale is swimming in the clouds, your brain would still be okay with it. Why?
It all comes down to a region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). This is the logic and reasoning center of our brain. It’s the part that applies reality checks and wonders, “Wait, trains can’t go inside my home! And why is there a floating whale in the sky!”
During normal Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, the DLPFC is basically shut down. It goes offline. And the brain is hallucinating wildly, but the critical thinking department is simply closed. So, we accept the hallucinations as reality. We become a passive passenger in our own mind’s movie.
Pretty cool, right?
So, what happens when you go ‘lucid’?
Lucid dreaming is a neurological paradox. It’s a hybrid state of consciousness.
When someone enters a lucid dream, neuroimaging shows something incredible. The DLPFC suddenly wakes up. It lights up with activity, even though the rest of the brain is still in deep REM sleep. The critical thinking department suddenly boots up while the hallucination engine is running at full throttle.
That’s when our brain basically goes into the ‘Wait a minute!’ mode and realize that we’re flying. Gravity is off. The architecture is brilliant … and that we are dreaming.
This realization bridges the gap. We regain our waking memory, our sense of self, and our logical reasoning, all the while we’re still immersed in the dream world. We’ve basically hacked the system. It’s sort of like running admin commands in a simulated environment.
How does the ‘paralysis’ part work? (And why is it terrifying?)
You might wonder, if we’re acting out insane fantasies in the dream world, why aren’t we flailing our arms or jumping out of bed in the waking world.
Evolution thought of (or more like adapted to) that. During REM sleep, your brainstem releases neurotransmitters (specifically glycine and GABA) that actively paralyze your major muscle groups. This is called REM atonia. It’s a safety mechanism to stop you from acting out your dreams.
But this system isn’t perfect though. Sometimes, you wake up mentally before the paralysis wears off. You open your eyes, you are fully conscious in your bed, but you cannot move a single muscle. This is sleep paralysis. The first time I had it, it was absolutely scary, but the more lucid dreams I had, I am now used to this state. Sometimes, I’ve even gone back to the dream, albeit for a very shorter duration before I’d wake up without any sleep paralysis.
Can you actually train yourself to lucid dream?
Yes, and the methods are surprisingly technical. It’s all about tricking your brain into questioning reality while you’re awake, hoping that habit bleeds over into sleep.
The most common technique is reality checking. You train yourself to look at a clock, look away, and look back. In reality, the time stays consistent. In a dream, the part of the brain that maintains consistency is asleep, so the clock might appear gibberish most of the time (at least for me) or read something weird like the hour hand could be on 13. Another trick is trying to push your finger through the palm of your opposite hand.
Based on my experience, the first thing I do most of the time is look at my hand when I am aware inside the dream. If my fingers are warped or I have trouble counting them, that’s a confirmation that I am in a dream.
If you do this obsessively while awake, eventually, you’ll do it while dreaming. Your finger will slide right through your hand, your DLPFC will boot up, and bleep bloop! You are lucid.
There’s also the Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method, where you wake yourself up after about 5 hours of sleep (right before the longest REM cycle), stay awake for roughly 20 minutes to jumpstart the conscious brain, and then go back to sleep. Here, we’re intentionally trying to carry a sliver of consciousness back into the dream state.
And it aligns with my experience too. I have traumas that creep up as nightmares, and most of the time, I accidentally wake up and the time coincides with the 5 ish hour window. And then when I go back to sleep, I’d mostly have a lucid dream.
I’d love to share about my lucid dreams, but I’ll do that in another blog, perhaps at my personal site, so to keep this article purely on the science front of it.
Are we all walking simulators?
All my lucid dreams have revealed something profound about how we construct reality.
When you look around right now, your brain is taking imperfect sensory data, making a bunch of assumptions, and rendering a conscious experience. And in a lucid dream, it’s doing the exact same thing, just without the sensory input. It’s rendering a world from scratch presumably using memories and expectations.
The fact that we can hijack this process, that we can wake up the logic center while leaving the simulation running, is still mind-blowing to think about. It proves that the line between reality and hallucination is just a matter of which brain regions are currently ‘online’. And sometimes, the bugs in the code are the most fun parts to play with.
Hopefully, with more dedicated research and studies, we’d learn more about sleep, dreams, and the purpose of lucid dreaming itself.
