Are you sure you aren’t dreaming right now?
Every night, our brain constructs a reality that's completely separate from the outside world. Usually, the dream experience feels so real that we don't realize it's actually a dream until we wake up. But sometimes, people become aware that they're dreaming during a dream — and from there, they have the control to act and bend their dream reality.
Lucid dreaming sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, but it's totally real. So how and why does it happen? We reached out to two experts, Susana Martinez-Conde, Ph.D, professor and director of the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience at SUNY Medical Center, and the "Sleep Doctor" Michael Breus, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, to find out.
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A lucid dream starts out just like any normal dream.
Dreams are unconscious visual manifestations of information and memories that are already floating around in our heads. That's why all the imagery in our dreams is familiar. There can technically be new characters or places in a dream, but they're really an amalgamation of things you've already seen before, says Breus.
The neural mechanisms that allow our brain to "see" our dream reality are probably the same ones at work when we imagine the future. The only difference is that in our dreams, it seems like what we're "seeing" is reality. "Dreams are illusions — we are seeing a reality which doesn't exist but we also can't tell the difference between this and actual reality," Martinez-Conde says.
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But when you start to lucid dream, you suddenly become aware of the fact that your dream world isn't real.
And when you become aware or "lucid," you can then control and manipulate aspects of the dream reality, says Breus.
Lucid dreaming was first described in 1913 by Dutch psychiatrist Frederick Van Eeden to describe a dream in which he could act voluntarily and had full awareness of his waking life — but he was still so deeply asleep that no external stimuli or bodily sensations entered his dream perception.
That's what makes a lucid dream different from a hallucination — your physical body is in deep sleep and can't actually feel anything you do, even though you're aware and have control.
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Scientists aren't sure what triggers you to realize you're dreaming and become lucid.
Studies show that brain waves look pretty much the same in people who report lucid dreaming compared to their normal dreams, Breus explains. So it's hard to pinpoint which specific mechanisms or parts of the brain are at work during a lucid dream. And obviously lucid dreaming is hard to study since it relies totally on self-reporting after you wake up.
"Studies haven't observed a significant enough increase in heart rate or breathing to demonstrate a physical change in the body during lucid dreams," Breus says. But the experts agree that whatever triggers a person to become lucid is definitely from within the brain, and not an external stimuli. Some studies suggest that lucid dreaming could be due to an overactive frontal cortex during sleep, but this hasn't been proven yet.
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