What are the benefits of learning how to control your mind? How can lucid dreaming help you achieve that goal?
While pleasure, fun, and play are valuable for mental and physical health, the true value of lucid dreaming is the opportunity it can provide for growth and learning. Lucid dreaming can help you control your mind, and therefore your life.
Continue reading to learn how to gain better control of your mind.
Gain Control Over Your State of Mind
The authors of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming 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. Here’s how to control your mind with lucid dreaming.
(Shortform note: Some self-help experts suggest that focusing on things you can control, like your behavior, is a positive approach to life that can lead to greater happiness. In The Courage to Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga argue that focusing on controlling others, like trying to manage how they perceive you, can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction. They suggest that happiness comes from controlling your mind by living in the present, setting healthy boundaries in your relationships, and focusing on what you can do to engage positively with your community.)
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.
(Shortform note: Being able to control the content and narrative of your lucid dreams isn’t necessarily a built-in feature of the experience, as the authors imply. Some lucid dream experts, like the authors, include an element of dream control in their definition of lucid dreaming, but many view dream control as a separate, supplementary feature distinct from simply being aware that you’re dreaming. According to these experts, attempting to control your dreams for specific outcomes, such as solving problems or altering nightmares, can be challenging and unreliable, and it requires practice. With this in mind, it’s possible that you’ll have to learn dream control, even once you’ve mastered lucidity.)
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.
(Shortform note: In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains why shifting your focus of control inward can help you change your habitual reactions: Unconscious, habitual reactions are driven by strong emotions, and refocusing internally helps you become more aware of your emotions. With more awareness of your emotional states and their patterns, you can better manage them because you can step back and choose how to respond rather than reacting impulsively. According to Goleman, greater awareness also allows you to be more certain of what your boundaries are, maintain a more positive attitude about challenging circumstances, and shift out of bad moods faster.)
