It’s the middle of the night, and you’re fast asleep, dreaming. The waking events from the day before, and your busy schedule the next day pale in comparison to what’s happening now during REM sleep.
You’re not running, but flying across snow-capped mountains away from the FBI’s Most Wanted. Realizing the frantic reality of the situation, you escape the wilderness and head to the city, where the mountain tops you’d been gliding over with ease turn to the roofs of skyscrapers in a matter of seconds.
Then, it hits you: this isn’t really happening. I’m not barely escaping the grasp of the most dangerous man in the country, I’m sleeping.
This is where the fun begins. All bets are off now that you know your actions don’t have consequences beyond your dream state. Maybe your flight path gets a little riskier, maybe you decide to confront the man you were previously desperately trying to avoid head-on. From now until your alarm clock goes off, you’re in total control.
There’s a name for this: lucid dreaming. According to sleep experts, lucid dreaming is dreaming in which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain a level of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment.
The ability to turn a terrifying nightmare into an exciting adventure piqued our interests – so we decided to explore this phenomenon further for our first Double Talk Asks segment. We chatted with Certified Dream Analyst Lauri Loewenberg to learn more.
Lauri truly is an expert in the ‘field of dreams’ – she’s a syndicated columnist, author, radio personality, and a member of IASD, the International Association for the Study of Dreams. If she looks familiar to you, it’s no wonder why: she’s appeared on The Today Show with Kathie Lee and Hoda, Doctor Oz, The View, E! Daily Pop, and many more shows across the country.
We ask Lauri about what it’s like to lucid dream, whether you can ‘learn’ how to lucid dream, and even if we will one day be able to record our dreams to play back.