Mar 11, 2010

Control Your Dreams at Night

Control your dreams at night easily with a few practice techniques that expand your ability to both recall and influence your dreams.

Being able to make things happen in your dreams gives you some amazing benefits.  Not only can you use your dreams to do things you might not get a chance to do in real life, but your dreams are visions of your brain’s thought processes.  Getting clues to what keeps your brain occupied at night can help you find out amazing things about yourself – self-esteem issues, fears, and phobias.  Once you know what those things are and can tackle them in your dreams, your experiences can help you tackle those same things in real life.

In order to control your dreams, you need to have really good dream recall.  The average adult dreams 4-6 times a night during their REM sleep.  The Labratory of Neurophysiology, Dept of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School published a study in 1997 in which a number of students kept dream journals in an effort to measure the rate to which people remember their dreams.  Comparing the number of remembered dreams to the average number estimated to actually occur, it appears people remember their dreams somewhere around 40% of the time.  That would equate to recalling 11-17 dreams a week!

Your chances of being able to influence your dreams will be better if your dream recall is at least average, if not better.  (For tips on improving dream recall see:  How to Remember Your Dreams.)

The next objective is to be able to tell when you are dreaming while you are in the dream.  This is called “lucid dreaming”.    If you don’t KNOW you’re dreaming, how will you be able to have any impact on your dream?  (For tips on lucid dreaming see:  Lucid Dreaming Guide.)

Assuming you already have some dream awareness, the final step is to actually make things happen in your dreams.  There are a number of techniques you can use:

Removing Yourself from Danger in Nightmares

Letting dreams play themselves out is really what gives you the clues to your inner self, however, sometimes dreams can get pretty scary.  Yes – that’s what we’d call a nightmare….one, very, scary dream.  Dreams are fun.  Nightmares are simply terrorizing.  I’m not sure I always want to know exactly what my head is thinking about when presenting a nightmare and so I’d rather escape.  Once you can exhert a little influence in your dreams, you can remove yourself from dangerous situations.  Hover or fly out of danger, rescue your family, put a wall up to block any beasty animals or wild creatures that may be chasing you.

Stop the Chase

There are times in your dreams when you’re chasing someone.  Maybe you see a long lost loved one in the distance and it seems you can’t get close to them to talk to them.  You can stop them from running or get yourself closer to them so you can actually stop the chase and get to the meat of the dream.

Talk to Famous Personalities in Your Dreams

Sure, it would be really cool to talk to the entire cast of your favorite movie, but some might prefer a chat with Benjamin Franklin or Christopher Columbus.  Before going to bed at night, read up on the person you want to chat with to try to induce them showing up.  When you enter a lucid dream state, try calling out to the person you want to talk to or imagine a piece of technology you could use in your dream to reach them.

Expand Your Creativity

Have you ever had such a great dream that you knew if you could have captured it on film it would have been a blockbuster?  When you are aware within a dream, you capture more detail for longer periods of time than if you simply woke from the dream and tried to grasp at it like an evaporating mist.  Soon, you’ll be able to write down incredible journeys you’ve taken in your dreams with much more detail than you could before.  Aspiring writers can unlock unique story concepts.  Artists can envision new projects.  Even scientists can develop new experiments and theories.

There are a number of tools you can use to enhance the ability to control your dreams at night.  Use sound and images to inspire your dreams.  Immerse your awake self in what you want to do in your dreams to prepare your mind for such an adventure.  If you want to journey to the moon in your dream, watch a video about walking on the moon right before going to bed, study NASA’s website, read books about the people you want to meet, look at pictures, use visual aids, listen to binaural beats to create a lucid dream state.

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