What are the benefits of lucid dreaming? How can lucid dreaming help you overcome your fears?
Not only is lucid dreaming a unique and fun experience, it can change your life for the better. The benefits of lucid dreaming include learning new skills, solving problems, overcoming your fears, and more.
Keep reading for an in-depth look at the seven benefits of lucid dreaming.
How Lucid Dreaming Can Change Your Life
In waking life, we’re used to having many restrictions, but in lucid dreams, there are no limitations on who we are, where we go, or what we do. Even the laws of physics can be broken. Many people describe their lucid dreams as vivid and exhilarating experiences that bring significant joy and pleasure. Lucid dreams can offer you limitless wish fulfillment—you can travel anywhere, eat anything, and become anyone.
While the authors of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming write that pleasure, fun, and play are valuable for mental and physical health, they argue that the true value of lucid dreaming is the opportunity it can provide for growth and learning. They say that lucid dreaming can help you cultivate mental flexibility, learn new skills, face and overcome your fears, solve difficult problems, and connect to your spirituality. Here are some of the benefits of lucid dreaming.
1. Develop Mental Flexibility
The authors define mental flexibility as your ability to adopt new and different perspectives and to adapt your beliefs and behavior to challenges and changes in your life. They explain that lucid dreams can help you cultivate mental flexibility because they provide you with limitless space to safely and creatively explore, experiment, and play with new ways of thinking and behaving.
Lucid dreams can also expand your perspective of what’s possible for your life and future. The first step in creating the life you want to live is imagining it and believing it’s possible. Lucid dreaming provides a vivid stage for you to envision, enact, and really feel what it would be like to be the person you want to be and have the life you wish for yourself.
2. Gain Control Over Your State of Mind
The authors explain that lucid dreams also give you an opportunity to improve your relationship with your sense of control. Most of us try to control the world outside of us—for example, we try to control other people’s behavior. However, most things outside us are outside of our control, and it would be healthier and more productive to focus on what we can control—our inner experiences and our responses to the world.
Lucid dreaming can help you focus on controlling internal, rather than external, aspects of your world by providing experiences in which you can, without limitations, safely explore your relationship with control. The authors explain that you can experiment with controlling your lucid dream experience in two ways:
- You can influence the details and circumstances of your dream by manipulating any aspect of it with your will.
- You can control your responses to dream scenarios.
The authors recommend focusing on controlling your responses to dream scenarios—slowing down and making intentional decisions about how to respond rather than reacting unconsciously and habitually. If you practice changing your habitual internal reactions in a lucid dream—for example, if you start facing your fears instead of running from them—then the experience becomes a rehearsal for changing your behavior and your beliefs in your waking life.
3. Learn New Skills and Improve Performance
Lucid dreams can be a practice arena for improving your skills and performance in many areas, including athletic training, work performance, exam-taking, and creative pursuits like playing music and dancing. The authors explain that science has already shown that using mental imagery in waking life can improve skills and performance. Therefore, they argue lucid dreaming has the potential to be an even more effective way to improve your skills because the mental images in lucid dreams are much more vivid than your waking imagination.
Mental imagery improves skills and performance because the neurons in your brain that fire when you’re actually practicing something are the same ones that fire when you imagine practicing. When the same neurons fire together repeatedly, the connections between them strengthen over time. This attachment creates an efficient neural pathway that requires less conscious effort to use. Strong, efficient neural pathways lead to expanded and improved skills and better performance.
The more your mental imagery practice feels like the real thing, the more it’ll improve your skills and performance. The authors argue that this is why lucid dreams are the most powerful form of mental imagery practice: They’re totally immersive and engage all our senses, unlike the weak mental images we can create while awake. Additionally, because of the limitless possibilities of lucid dreams, we can push the boundaries of our abilities when we practice inside them.
4. Overcome Your Fears
Lucid dreaming can help you face and overcome fears. Because no actual harm can come to you in a dream, lucid dreams give you a valuable opportunity to safely confront challenging and frightening situations rather than avoid them. When you face your fears in a safe environment like a dream, you learn to recognize when fear is unfounded, build confidence, tap into your strengths and resilience, and eliminate the fears altogether. To do this, right before you fall asleep, decide to dream about what you’re afraid of. The object of your fear will then manifest itself for you to confront.
But what if the dream you’re in is already a nightmare? The authors say that when you become lucid in a nightmare, you can transform it into a meaningful and valuable experience. A lucid nightmare gives you an opportunity to face what you fear most. You can choose to wake up from nightmares, but escaping from them will leave you with unresolved internal conflicts that will likely revisit you in your sleep soon. It’s better to stay in the dream and face the fear.
Nightmares often feature a frightening figure—a person, animal, or entity that’s threatening in some way. The authors say you can confront a hostile dream figure in several ways: You can fight it, change it into something non-threatening, or face it and calmly interact with it. Of these choices, the authors recommend the third option in most cases. This is because when you turn to face a frightening figure with an attitude of peace and reconciliation, the figure may offer you valuable insights and naturally transform into something friendly.
When you turn to face a hostile figure, the authors recommend you begin a dialogue with it. Speaking with these nightmare figures can transform and pacify them as well as provide you with valuable insights. The authors suggest asking questions such as: “Who are you?”, “Why are you here?”, and “What do you have to tell me?”
However, the authors write that if a hostile dream figure is someone you’ve been harmed by in real life, the best and most empowering approach may be to fight, destroy, or overpower the figure rather than opening yourself up to a dialogue with them.
5. Solve Problems and Make Decisions
In lucid dreams, you can work through problems by experimenting without limitations, which can help you come up with creative solutions and better decisions. Even non-lucid dreams are powerful problem-solving playgrounds for our minds: Throughout history, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, writers, and artists of all varieties have been making important creative and intellectual breakthroughs in their dreams. Lucid dreams tap into the problem-solving potential of dreams and amplify this potential by giving you the agency to decide what to focus on.
Another reason lucid dreaming can produce breakthrough creative solutions is because you have greater access to your subconscious mind while you dream, which, the authors explain, stores a lot more information and wisdom than we realize. Lucid dreams provide greater access to that information and wisdom because the conscious mind is less active during sleep.
You can make more informed decisions in lucid dreams by acting out the different paths or scenarios that you’re faced with in waking life. By experiencing the consequences of each decision as they could happen in waking life, you’ll be more prepared to choose what is best for you and those around you.
6. Better Understand Your Identity
The authors explain that lucid dreams can help you understand yourself better and develop a healthy relationship with your ego. Your ego, according to the authors, is a part of who you are, but it isn’t all of who you are—it represents aspects of your true nature, much like a written song score represents music but it isn’t the music itself. The authors write that it’s easy for us to mistake our egos for our true selves and to identify with them. But to have a healthy relationship with your ego, you must stop identifying with it.
Lucid dreams can help you see your ego for what it is and understand that your true self encompasses more than your ego. The authors explain that when you’re in a lucid dream, you can plainly see that your dream self is not your real self—it’s simply a representation of you that your mind has created in the dream state. Your ego is the same thing in your waking state. When you understand that your ego is just a mental representation, you can more easily work with it, instead of struggling against it, and you’re on your way to better understanding the entirety of who you are.
7. Explore Your Spirituality
According to LaBerge’s research, many people who have lucid dreams report having powerful spiritual experiences that change their understanding of themselves and reality. They visit other dimensions, commune with angels, or encounter God. Lucid dreaming can, therefore, offer a glimpse of magic and a sense of a much larger, mysterious reality beyond your everyday experiences.
Lucid dreams give you a degree of control that isn’t possible in waking life, but according to the authors, they can also lead you to profound spiritual experiences by allowing you to surrender that control completely. To do this, you let go of any agenda you may have and forfeit all control to something bigger than yourself. This can be any concept that appeals to you and doesn’t need to be tied to any one religion’s ideas about God—for example, your higher self, the collective unconscious, or the universe itself.
To experience what surrender can offer you, the authors recommend doing the following: When you find yourself in a challenging, confusing, or overwhelming lucid dream scenario, stop any actions and open yourself up to whatever spiritual experience is meant for you in that moment. According to the authors, many people report that their dreams suddenly transform and they have transcendent experiences such as feeling at one with the universe, sensing their sense of self expand, and encountering mystical realities such as heaven, Nirvana, and the Void.
The authors explain that you can also take a more directive approach when seeking spiritual experiences in lucid dreams. They suggest you reflect on what your ultimate spiritual goal is and choose a phrase to repeat in your lucid dreams which represents your aspiration. For example, you could say, “I am seeking God,” “I want to understand my true self,” or “What is my purpose in life?” Once you’re in a lucid dream and repeating your chosen phrase, the authors recommend you open yourself up to whatever experiences unfold and try to not predict or control the outcome.
