Lucid Dreaming isn’t magic, and it isn’t an escape. The phenomenon of becoming consciously aware in the dream world is more than just a temporary vacation to the playground of the dreaming mind. Considering we spend around a third of our lives sleeping, and dreaming, I’d say it’s less of a vacation and more of a full-time job. I used to think lucid dreaming was pretty cool.You mean if I keep a dream journal I can eventually fly or hook up with Mila Kunis? Sign me up. But what if the allure of a world where anything is possible is a cover up?

What if the dream world is a training ground for waking life?Consider this: A baseball player practices in an environment without consequences. In the practice realm there is a real baseball field, real balls, real people and the rules of the game still apply. The game doesn’t change but the consequences do. He can practice his swing over and over again, or field ground balls to perfection so that when a real game is on the line, with real consequences and real opponents, that perfection may still be there.

Why do we dream? For Fun? Sometimes.We practice sports for fun sometimes too, but our biological bodies don’t do anything for fun. We are animals programmed to survive and thrive in our environment which is why dreaming is much more than a game of pickup.It’s a simulation of people, and situations that could be encountered in the real world.It offers the mind a chance to practice life without the consequences of life.

While our human consciousness just wants to play pick up, our unconscious knows there’s more at stake. It cares about winning the game. While winning may mean something completely different for everyone, using dreams as life practice is a way to become better. Whether you suck at love, are socially awkward, or want to find God, the answer can be found in the malleable dream world. The beauty of dreaming is that, if you get good enough, and go deep enough, the lines begin to blur and it becomes increasingly obvious that the two worlds come from the same source. The unconscious doesn’t discriminate between sleeping and waking, and neither should you.

1. Brain Waves

Before we get to the real fun let’s talk science.You’re pretty much awake when you dream. Segmented into four stages, well five if you include being awake, sleep is essentially the slow descent of brain wave frequency until you reach deep sleep, or slow wave sleep. This is the stage of sleep that we associate with being restorative. When someone maybe says they had a dreamless slumber they’re talking about stage four, slow wave sleep, where the frequency is so low that the brain is essentially in off mode, while the body is almost paralyzed. However, after slow wave sleep, the brain breaks the trend by rocketing back up to a frequency that resembles wakefulness as the body goes into complete paralysis.

This is called REM sleep, where dreams happen. Essentially the brain is awake while the body sleeps, meaning that all of our waking faculties are present in the dream world. From our five senses to our emotions, the dreaming brain cannot distinguish between waking and sleeping because for the brain, there is no difference. Becoming lucid in a dream is so tricky because the brain waves between waking and dreaming are so similar. The mind doesn’t know the difference and only once the body wakes up, do we kick ourselves for not realizing we’d been in a dream the whole time.

2. Dream Figures, Expectations and Intentions

I’m not very good at making personal connections. It’s not social anxiety per se. I just have a bad habit of socially isolating myself so interacting with people in my lucid dreams is particularly rewarding. Once the connection between dreaming and reality and the translational benefits of improving the dream-self became clear to me, my lucid dreaming efforts went straight into interacting with my dream figures. Take one of my own lucid dreams as an example:

I am in a creaky old mansion. It’s dark and stormy outside.I think it’s on a cliff on the ocean. Real eerie. There are a few people in the mansion talking to me. They are talking in riddles and giggling menacingly.They seem to know things I don’t and are laughing at me for it. Suddenly I become aware that I’m dreaming but instead of changing the situation I try to engage it.

I don’t remember exactly what I said but, knowing it was a dream, I wasn’t afraid, just curious about the origin of the people and this place. Did all this really come out of my head? I calmly ask the figures what’s up and they seem stunned. They almost seem afraid of me, or at least surprised by my sudden awareness.They go away, I see the sun start to rise over the ocean and as the house lights up, I realize it is my parent’s house. My parents and sister are eating breakfast and I intuitively know that they are the people who were laughing at me earlier.They are still laughing but now they beckon me over to the table to eat with them.

In comparing real people and dream figures I found that they’re not that different.Well, it’s not even so much THEM as it is YOU. I learned that running away from fear by trying to change it may work temporarily but the monster would still be there. Ever seen Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban?You know the part with the Boggart where Neville addresses his fear of Professor Snape by mentally dressing him up in his grandmother’s clothes.

Only once I engaged the situation from a distance did the situation itself change.In reality, we see in people what we see in ourselves. In a bad mood, we see the bad in people and in a good one we see the best in others, but when we ditch the good and bad and just see, we find the truth. We find that we are loved, and that we’re being laughed with not at. People aren’t inherently scary, funny, nice, happy, or sad. We see the world not as it is but through a lens of our own subjective emotions and expectations. You can’t change people, but you can change the lens.

3. The Architect, the Self, and the "I"

Magic is just a word we use to describe something with no explanation, which is where my interest in dreaming has led me. Take this dream:

I was set to be executed by beheading-- more like sacrificed. I was cool with it because I intuitively knew that I was going somewhere. It wouldn’t just be darkness but another realm of existence. Heaven, Valhalla, Starbucks, whatever it was I knew I was going somewhere. I just really didn’t want my head cut off. The pain and the act itself scared me. The dream goes dark and now I’m at a table in a medieval looking tavern. There are a couple rugged guys with beards at the table with me. One man asked how I liked it here, saying that I’d already been executed and this was a lucid dream, a common dream shared by those who’d been sacrificed. He seemed like he’d been there a while.

Now lucid, I went about jumping 30 feet in the air, flying, and generally doing whatever I wanted, when the idea came to me to test the limits of my dream. I closed my eyes and spun around.I addressed the dream itself, asking it to produce a new environment. With no intentions or expectations I opened my eyes to a vast meadow with towering snowcapped mountains. The man with the beard was still there which I thought was peculiar so I told him, “You know you’re just a part of my dream right?” He smiled and said, “No, I’m dreaming, and you’re in mine.” The dream shattered and I woke up.

It hit me. I experience my dream, and through expectations and intentions I can even influence it but I don’t control it.If I had no setting in mind, where did the meadow and mountains come from? Why did the bearded man start acting on his own volition?Up until then I had assumed that the dream world was my world. That it was my own little arena where I could explore myself.

However, even the dream world is out of my control.I realized that the “I” that I had thought was so important was just a fraction of my mind. It went so much deeper. Yes I had conscious control of the part of my brain that I call “myself.” But what part of my brain was the bearded man, and who designed the dream world for me?

Sure I could influence my surroundings but what created those surroundings? were parts of my mind acting on their own free will. All I could control was that little “I.” It was freeing actually. In fact, that realization is what prompted this article. Yes, expectation and intention go a long way in the dream world and in reality. In both, you have the ability to change everything by changing your lens.

However, control is an illusion. Dreaming has lead me to question what I am. What aspects of myself belong to ME, and what are aspects out of my control? Anger, fear, happiness, sadness, jealousy, ecstasy; maybe those are the dream figures. Maybe the spontaneous emotions that I take responsibility for are the dream figures. And maybe instead of controlling them, it’s the conversations with them that matter. Only the observer that we identify with and call our “self” can be controlled, and through that observer, we have the power to experience our relationship to the mind and the world through any lens of our choosing.