Lucid Dreaming
Have you ever had a dream where you knew that you were dreaming? This is what Dutch Psychiatrist Frederik Van Eeden (1860-1932) called Lucid Dreaming. This awareness may mean that you have some amount of control in what happens in your dream, making it a much more conscious process. There is a lot of literature on how to make yourself have lucid dreams and even apps which claim to control your dreams. Will listening to the ocean really make you dream of the seaside?
The idea of forced lucid dreaming may seem tempting, who wouldn't want to spend 8 hours a night dreaming of a beach in the Caribbean drinking cocktails? But how achievable is it?
The truth is it is extremely hard to force ourselves to dream something specific and remain lucid enough to make decisions within it. We naturally have lucid dreams occasionally; however these are still only controlled haphazardly. If you aware that you are dreaming and decide to control the dream it is usually through frustration and the need to escape the dream scenario, literally forcing yourself to wake up. This is common practice more so than an enjoyable lucid dream where you would logically choose to remain.
Sleep Paralysis
When you first start to fall asleep you enter a meditative state of lucid dreaming and this is when many people experience sleep paralysis which goes against the theory of being able to control a lucid dream, the reality is in-fact of a complete loss of free will. Occasionally people experience sleep paralysis coupled with frightening phenomenon such as being pinned down to the bed unable to move or the bed shaking. Sufferers also sense or feel ‘someone’ sit down on the bed or linger over them. There is some confusion as to if these experiences are psychic in nature or are an actual medical condition. I have always advised an individual to seek medical expertise in the first instance especially if the experience is persistent and not a one-off incident. This type of phenomenon happens when the astral mind is awake but the physical body is still very much asleep, the link with the psyche cannot be ignored and if you experience this phenomenon.