Sueños Lúcidos

September 7th, 2011
Camila Cadavid
English
Bernardo Murillo

Lucid Dreams

I. What is a lucid dream?
II. About lucid dreaming
A. Scientific and cultural history
B. Real experiences
C. Training your brain to lucid dream
III. Conclusion

Are you dreaming? This seems like one question with one obvious answer, no. But how can we really know? Dreaming is one of themost mysterious and interesting a state of mind human brain has. Through time lots of theories have been proposed by scientists trying to explain how do dreams work and, the most difficult question without a certain answer, why do we dream?
Even though this is, in most ways an enigma, scientists want to take this topic to another level. Now imagine you could control your dreaming and have thatbrand new Ferrari you’ve always wanted but obviously you’ll never have? What if no boy or girl was out of your reach for one night? Or if only you could fly and really feel the air hitting your face? Well, welcome to the amazing world of lucid dreaming.
A lucid dream is how it’s called a dream in which you are aware that you are dreaming; sometimes we can actually wake up inside a dream withoutactually waking up in real life. When one realizes one is in a dream, the dreamer can manipulate his mind making appear things, people and even situations in the making them seem real, and then, have a vivid dream.
The term “Lucid Dream” was proposed for the first time by a Dutch psychiatrist and writer Frederik Willem van Eeden . After adapting this term in science, in 1968 Celia Green wrote abook in which she analyzed deeply this phenomena. She associated lucid dreaming with REM (Rapid eye movement). She concluded lucid dreaming was a totally different experience that was a level beyond of ordinary dreams, and made a relation between them and the phenomena of “false awakening”. Lots of scientists have exposed their thesis trying to explain how they work, but as the majority of ourunconsciousness, it still unknown.
There’s two types of lucid dreams: DILD (dream-initiated lucid dream) It is a dream that begins as an ordinary dream and the dreamer realizes is inside a dream and starts manipulating it; WILD (wake-initiated lucid dream) is when one is dreaming that one wakes up in the morning as every single day and passes from a normal state to a dreaming state, in other words,you realize what you were living in that day was all a dream, even if you remember you woke up.
In cultural history lucid dreams have appeared since the Greek mythology where there’s a lot of evidence. Lucid dreams appear as a phenomenon that records certain cultural base, at least in the imagination. Homer, for example, created characters that were aware of their dreaming. Aristotle made thefirst explicit mention by saying a dreamer can be conscious about their state.
Even though lucid dreaming is an enigma, we can be totally sure it happens because of the testimonies of people. Those testimonies were the main impulse of science to start studying this mysterious state of mind.  Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. and Howard Rheingold wrote a book about the experiences they stumbled with duringtheir studding of lucid dreaming, called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming.
“I had a fear of death, but cured it through a lucid dream. I was walking through a Hell-like environment and realized that this could not be, as I was asleep in my bed. At that instant, I was stabbed in the back. “Feeling" the pain, I decided to see what "dying" would be like. I felt myself in a catatonic state. Iwilled my dream "soul" to depart from my dream "body." It was a strange feeling to see my dream "body" beneath me. I also had a sense of all-pervading peace and calm. I said to myself that if this is what dying is like, it isn't so bad. From that day forward, I have had no fear of dying. I even remain calm in life-threatening situations.” (Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. K.D., Lauderhill,...