Lucid dreaming as a healing tool
Awareness in our dreams can help us increase our awareness while we’re awake
This post was originally published on my Substack newsletter.
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When was the last time your dream deceived you?
For me, it was earlier this month. I dreamed that a friend I hadn’t talked to in a while was pregnant. Within the dream, she lived in a large white house with a green lawn. It was also formerly a fraternity house.
Each room of the house popped up in my dreamscape as if they were printed photographs. Most of the rooms looked the same except for a bedroom that looked striking familiar. It was my ex’s bedroom. Within the dream, I recalled sleeping over there countless times. Specifically, I remembered the built-in shelves within the white walls and keeping my phone there as it charged overnight. As more details unfolded, I started to panic.
The wild part is that this room was too elegant, too pretty to be real, especially for a frat house in a past life. The dream bedroom wasn’t much at all like the real messy bedroom my ex lived in. In the real version of the room, there wasn’t even a built-in shelf or any quirky fixtures, yet I was fully convinced I’d previously slept in this dream room a handful of times. None of the details in the dream held up to my memories in my waking life.
At one point in my life, I could’ve easily identified this as a dream just as it started — and maybe then, my emotional response might’ve been different.
Growing up, I was fascinated by dreams. As a young child, I had a recurring nightmare the night before every Halloween about a giant, malicious pumpkin eating me. Every year, I’d go to sleep knowing what fate was to come.
This recurring nightmare stopped happening when I was in middle school — or at least I stopped remembering if this nightmare recurred.
It wasn’t until I was 15 when I consciously started paying attention to my dreams again. Around this time, I started my first ever dream journal, documenting every miniscule detail I could recall. During my waking life, I searched the Internet about how to control your dreams and read countless forums of those who’d achieved the ability to lucid dream.
Let’s back up for a second: what is lucid dreaming? For a dream to be lucid, you must maintain some kind of awareness while dreaming. You might not be able to control your dream — although some can — but you definately know you’re asleep. According to 2016 meta-analysis of 50 years of research on lucid dreaming, 55 percent of adults have experienced at least one lucid dream in their lives and 23 percent regularly experience lucid dreams once per month or more.
Now, back to my story — I stumbled upon a long list of things I could do to try to gain more awareness while dreaming. Most of them felt too complicated, like waking up after a specific number of REM cycles have happened.
One tip, though, is what I’d later learn as “reality testing.” Reality testing is a practice of checking your awareness to see if you’re dreaming or awake. Essentially, a reality check proves (or disproves) if you’re dreaming while you’re awake.
In Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, author and journalist Alice Robb describes reality checking as:
Effective reality tests entail reorienting yourself in the world, cultivating a skeptical outlook toward your environment. Is everything as it should be? Look for clues that your surroundings might not be real. Inspect your hands — does each one have the usual number of fingers? Check the clock, and check it again — has a reasonable amount of time elapsed? Find a shiny surface — are you reflected back as you really are, or are you distorted, as though you’re looking in a funhouse mirror? Jump in the air — do you suddenly drop back to the ground, or have you suddenly acquired the ability to fly?
If you routinely practice this mindful habit throughout the day, you’ll eventually (hopefully) start practicing this within the dream realm and have a tool to prove to yourself that you’re dreaming.
Shortly after implementing reality testing into my waking life as a teenager, I was able to successfully lucid dream. Lucid dreaming became a regular practice, a skill I’d picked up seemingly effortlessly. When I told the few friends I had about my new ability, only a couple were genuinely interested (fair enough) and asked me what I’d do in my dreams. Could I fly? Could I finally get with my teenage crush? Was I rich and famous?
I actually hadn’t even though that far. My dreams had actually become mundane and uneventful. I even tried to do some of the cool things my friends suggested, but it never worked.
Looking back, I’d experienced a lot less nightmares during this period in my life. That giant pumpkin never came back to haunt me the night before any Halloweens as a teenager, or at least from what I could recall. The Top Hat Man and other shadow people — more on these characters in a later newsletter — gratefully weren’t anywhere to be found.
My waking life could prove you otherwise. Ages 14 to 17 were among the most stressful and traumatic years of my life. I had many shadows, yet my nightmares were on the decline. I’m not a medical professional or neurological scientist to make any real claims about what was going on in my brain. I can say, through my lived experience, that lucid dreaming was one of the very few healthy coping tools I had as a teenager.
“Dreams play a crucial role in some of our most important emotional and cognitive systems, helping us form memories, solve problems, and maintain our psychological health,” Robb explains in her book. “We dream in order to work through our anxieties and prepare for our days; we rehearse trials and tests, making their real-world counterparts feel more familiar. We confront worst-case scenarios in a no-stakes environment so the actual event feels like a comparative breeze.”
Paying attention to our dreams can help us emotionally and mentally outside of the dream into our waking lives. Even if you’re not lucid dreaming, I’d argue there’s an abundance of clues from our psyche present in the tiny details we recall from our dreams.
This brings me to the larger question to you, dear reader: How can we use dreams, even our nightmares, to our own benefit? For both our individual and collective healing?
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