A waking dream: what are hypnagogic hallucinations in children and adults

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Daria Polevaya

Practicing general practitioner with 7 years of experience. I love my job and try to constantly improve my skills.

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A waking dream is a dream that appears to be reality. Not everyone falls into this state, and you can enter it consciously. But why does it occur, is it dangerous, and how does it affect the psyche? You will get answers to these questions from the article.

What is this

A dream as if in reality - what does this mean? It is a borderline state between wakefulness and drowsiness (falling asleep). Muscle tone is reduced, the body is as relaxed as possible, the brain is already falling asleep, but is still active and reacts to external stimuli. The surrounding reality is still perceived by consciousness, but it is distorted and takes on a different color: the subconscious is involved, drawing pictures and images that usually appear in dreams.

During waking dreams, the eyes can remain open: the person falling asleep sees what is happening around him. But the brain is already switched off and works differently; pictures drawn by the subconscious are connected to reality. They are imaginary, but perceived as realistic. The person does not realize that he is already asleep, which is why he may feel anxious and frightened.

For your information! Many people are interested in: if you have a dream in reality, how long does it take? The transitional state between wakefulness and drowsiness does not last long: its duration is from a few seconds to 3-5 minutes. Then the person either completely falls asleep or wakes up if the dream was frightening. But usually the brain perceives waking dreams as part of a night's rest, so awakening does not occur.

What is a waking dream

The phenomenon of a waking dream is well described by Jack London in the novel Straitjacket. Agronomy professor Darrel Standing, sentenced to death, is subjected to regular torture in a straitjacket, with the help of which he eventually learns to travel through time and the world in a transformation between a sleepy state and reality.

There are many practitioners who try to practice this state. A waking dream is the line between reality and sleep, when the body seems to be already asleep, but the brain still gives all the signals characteristic of wakefulness. The state in a dream and in reality differs in that in a dream the brain is already completely asleep. How to induce a waking dream?

To avoid headaches after waking up, you need to learn some safety rules:

How to induce a waking dream

This is a very interesting and unusual experiment.

Source

Hypnagogic hallucinations

A waking dream in the practice of psychiatry or medicine can be called hypnagogic hallucinations, which are deceptions of perception that occur in the late evening or at night before falling asleep. This is the period of half-sleep, the border between wakefulness and drowsiness.

Such hallucinations are classified as pseudohallucinations, and not true ones, since the person is not in a state of full wakefulness, and contact with reality is lost. The environment is distorted by consciousness and perceived differently.

Hallucinations during sleep are called Lhermitte's syndrome, but a simplified name is more common - waking dream. There is no clear definition and no separate scientific or medical term, so many people confuse the condition with sleep paralysis, true hallucinations, and lucid dreams. The phenomenon of waking dreams refers specifically to hypnagogic visions and was discovered by the French-born neurologist Lhermitte in 1922.

There are hallucinations that appear after awakening, and they are called hypnopompic. But the general concept of “hypnagogic hallucinations” is usually used, although waking dreams arise precisely when falling asleep. After waking up, sleep paralysis develops (read more about it in the article “Sleep paralysis”).

How to learn to lucid dream?

Learning to lucid dream is fairly easy, although it does take some time. Learning this skill took me about a month of not very hard training.

The most important thing for lucid dreaming is to hold the intention to learn lucid dreams for several weeks. In other words, think about lucid dreams as much as possible. To do this, you can intentionally create an environment or rituals that will bring you back to the idea of lucid dreams. For example, read books about operating systems every day.

The second thing you should pay close attention to is remembering and recording your dreams. I propose to solve the problem: if a person dreams 5% of lucid dreams, and he can remember 0% of his dreams, then how many lucid dreams can he remember? Answer: 0. Therefore, it is extremely important to develop the skill of remembering dreams. To do this, just put a notepad and pen next to your bed and every night write down all the dreams that you can remember.

The third and final thing to consider is to develop critical thinking to periodically ask yourself whether this is a dream or reality. Problem: if a person asked himself in reality 0 times during the course of a month whether he was sleeping or not, then what is the probability that he will ask himself this question during sleep? Almost zero. In fact, there are special exercises for this (for example, in the book “The World of Lucid Dreaming”).

So, to learn to lucid dream, you need to:

• Think a lot about lucid dreams;
• Write down your dreams;
• Do reality testing exercises.

Types of waking dreams

There are two types of waking dreams: visual and auditory. The emergence or predominance of one or another variety depends on the degree of development and characteristics of human perception. If he is prone to visualization, that is, evaluates everything with his eyes, then visual (visual) hallucinations occur. If a person is an auditory person who perceives information better by ear, then auditory dreams in reality will be observed more often. Both types are discussed in detail below.

Visual hallucinations

This phrase refers to visual images: static or dynamic (moving), realistic or having reduced (increased) dimensions.

Visual hallucinations are:

Single. One image appears.
Multiple. In a waking dream several images come to mind.
Scene-like, that is, moving according to a certain scenario (the image has a plot).
Kaleidoscopic. Several images appear adjacent to each other, moving in space or changing outlines and shapes (as if in a kaleidoscope).

Visual images are able to maintain a static position, but more often they move, move in space, change rapidly and perform actions. The sleeper is assigned the role of a contemplator: he observes what is happening, as if watching a movie. But he does not take part in it, although characters can interact with him: move towards him, touch him, try to cause harm.

The attitude towards what is happening can be critical or realistic. In the latter case, a waking dream that occurs for the first time or suddenly is perceived as a frightening reality or an unknown strange state that causes fear and anxiety. If the person falling asleep encounters hypnagogic hallucinations again or realizes their unreality, then he understands the impossibility of what is happening.

Auditory hallucinations when falling asleep

When falling into sleep, they appear separately (separately) or simultaneously with visual ones, supplementing them with loud or quiet sounds (this is a kind of soundtrack). A voice or several voices are heard in the form of individual words, specific phrases or slurred incoherent speech, noise, musical passages or fragments of songs, tones, various sounds or letters.

Auditory hallucinations can be caused by real environmental sounds that are interpreted by the conscious mind. While the clock is ticking, the person falling asleep will hear the sound of rain or footsteps. The noises coming from the window will seem like voices in which individual phrases are caught. The occurrence of dominant (predominant or constantly appearing) auditory hallucinations is likely after stressful situations, real terrible events or psychological trauma: those who have lost loved ones hear the voices of the deceased after their death.

Waking dreams: how to learn to manage your dreams

"Unsolved Mysteries": The Riddle of Dreams

Every night, falling asleep, we find ourselves in one of the most mysterious worlds - the world of dreams. In an era of incredible scientific discoveries, we still know very little about our own dreams.

What does an unborn child dream about? How to decipher the secret meaning of dreams? And is it possible to control dreams? For hundreds of years, people have been dreaming of solving this mystery and understanding what happens to us every night? The Moscow Trust TV channel prepared a special report.

What is sleep

Attempts to understand what sleep is and what happens to the body while we sleep have been made by scientists since the 19th century. For a long time it was believed that sleep is needed to rest the brain.

“This point of view was abandoned very quickly after they learned to record the activity of neurons in the cerebral cortex of animals during sleep and wakefulness. And it was shown that during sleep, brain neurons not only do not rest, but, as a rule, on the contrary, they begin to work much more actively than they did while awake,” says the chief researcher at the Institute for Problems of Information Transmission named after A.A. Kharkevich RAS Ivan Pigarev.

Neurons are brain cells that form complex electrical impulses and control the activities of the entire body. During the day, they analyze the signals we receive through our senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch.

But what do they do at night? This question has puzzled sleep researchers. We close our eyes and the image stops coming. We choose a quiet and comfortable place and are not bothered by loud noises. But that's not all.

“There are special devices in the brain that additionally block the transmission of signals from the outside world to the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex turns out to be completely devoid of signals from the outside world. And at the same time, the neurons of the brain continue to work, continue to work actively, and, in general, no less than they did while awake,” says Ivan Pigarev.

Today, there are several theories explaining what our brain is doing during sleep. According to one of them, he analyzes the information received over the past day. This is precisely what explains the appearance of certain images that take shape in dreams.

“Dreams are a kind of free analysis of what happened during the day. Moreover, this is not an actual presentation of information, but, as a rule, some kind of subconscious analysis of images. Moreover, such free associations arise. That is, we can fly in our sleep - and this does not bother us at all.

“Yes, we can move in space, we don’t have the inner feeling that this is impossible. That is, everything is possible there, right? - says Roman Buzunov, head of the sleep medicine department at the Barvikha sanatorium, “And the brain, perhaps, looks at information differently and thinks what to do with it: analyze, forget, save. This is, you know, translated into modern language, cleaning the hard drive is unique. That is, “depositing” into long-term memory, erasing RAM. In the morning, the brain is again ready to perceive information"

In addition to this theory, there is another, developed by Russian scientists quite recently and confirmed, unlike all the others, by a number of successful experiments. According to it, brain neurons that analyze information coming from the outside world during the day switch to checking the state of our internal organs at night.

Honore Daumier. "Second class carriage"

“We selected neurons that, in vigor, were classical visual neurons that respond to visual stimulation. And when the cat fell asleep, we stimulated the intestines, and discovered that these same neurons, which literally 10 minutes earlier responded to vision, visual inputs, began to respond to stimulation of the intestines and stomach. Or they began to work in the rhythm of breathing or in the riBlock, which is a switch that stands on the path to consciousness - it’s a chemical switch. This is not a switch that turns off and on. These are chemical synapses that do not shut down completely. They change the threshold. But if the signal is very strong, it can jump above this threshold. And now very strong signals jump over these thresholds and fly into the area of our consciousness. They flew in there somewhere and excited a certain neuron there. And this neuron, if excited, can only be associated with those objects, those symbols, those concepts with which we operate in cheerfulness. Therefore, dreams are always an unprecedented combination of experienced things,” says Ivan Pigarev.

Regularity or coincidence?

Scientists believe that signals that manage to overcome all obstacles and enter the area of our consciousness activate the most excited neurons, that is, those that were among the last to work. That is why most often we dream about the events of the past day, the problems that bothered us before going to bed, or the people we thought about the day before.

And yet: why do we have specific dreams with specific plots? How, among all the information that we receive during the day, does the brain absorb exactly what it sends to us in dreams? These questions still remain open.

“As for the physiology of dreams. This is still a rather dark side of the planet, so to speak. Unfortunately, we cannot record the dream. Take a VCR, disk, flash drive, record the dream and play it back as a video. That is, we cannot touch it, we cannot evaluate it scientifically.

And in fact, everything that a person simply tells us, we must take his word for it. Do you know how many storytellers we have who say that they have prophetic dreams and so on?” says Roman Buzunov.

And at the same time, it was prophetic dreams, if you believe history, that more than once changed the course of events. Thus, Napoleon’s marshal, Viceroy of Italy, Prince Eugene Beauharnais, in 1812, with French troops, came very close to Moscow, and became a camp near a monastery.

That night he dreamed of an old man with a gray beard, in long black clothes, and said that if the prince saved the monastery and the church from being plundered by soldiers, no misfortune could overcome him and he would return home safe and sound.

Vincent Van Gogh. "Afternoon, or siesta, imitation of Millet"

The next morning, the marshal called the army and forbade them to enter the monastery. He himself went to inspect the local church. Imagine his surprise when, upon entering the temple, he saw the tomb and the image of that same old man. It turned out to be Saint Sava, the founder of the monastery.

The prince took part in all the battles of the Napoleonic Wars, but was not even wounded in any of them. And as the elder predicted, he returned to his homeland alive. Even after the fall of Napoleon, all adversity passed him by, although other marshals of Bonaparte's army died.

It is difficult for scientists to give a scientific explanation for such dreams, but it was the inexplicable facts that at one time forced them to study this mysterious phenomenon in detail.

When do we start dreaming? Research has shown: even before birth. It turns out that the fetus sleeps most of the time in the womb. But what information can an unborn person analyze?

“As soon as the fetus has formed a brain in the womb, it begins to see. At the very least, there are brain changes that are characteristic of a child dreaming. What does he see there? One of the theories, genetic, is that genes, as it were, reproduce information; he watches the same cartoons and is educated. Why do they sometimes say that people remember something that they almost certainly could not have encountered in their lives? Perhaps the information that he saw in the form of cartoons there in his mother’s womb emerges. But this, of course, is not a very proven reasoning. We cannot ask a newborn child: “Well, what did you dream about?” says Roman Buzunov.

Most scientists believe that absolutely everyone dreams. It's just that not everyone remembers them. This depends, first of all, on what phase of sleep a person wakes up in. Sleep is divided into two phases: fast and slow sleep.

“And this phase of sleep with rapid eye movement, or rapid eye movement sleep, as we call it in Russian, which occurs at the end of each sleep cycle (and we sleep in cycles, each cycle takes 1.5 hours), every 1.5 hours ends with a period of REM sleep, with these periods increasing from evening to morning. That is, the most powerful periods of REM sleep, when the most intense dreams occur, occur in the morning,” says the chief researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Ecology named after A.N. Severtsov RAS Vladimir Kovalzon.

Why are dreams needed?

The REM sleep phase alternates with the NREM sleep phase. On average, this alternation is repeated four to six times per night. This means that every night we see an average of five dreams. If we are woken up during REM sleep, the dream will be remembered. If you wake up during slow-wave sleep, you will most likely be sure that you were not dreaming.

For a long time, scientists adhered to this theory. Indeed, in the REM sleep phase, the eyeballs make different movements, as if the sleeper is watching some scene. This led researchers to the idea that it is at this moment that we see dreams and monitor what is happening in the same way as we would do in reality. But this theory was shattered by new facts that scientists discovered after a series of experiments.

“We conducted special experiments and recorded eye movements, carefully, with high resolution, in cats and monkeys during REM sleep, these movements. And it immediately became clear that the eye movements during REM sleep have nothing in common with the eye movements that these animals use in wakefulness to examine the visual scene. And above all, the movements of the right and left eyes in REM sleep are not synchronized. Our right eye can go up, our left eye can go down, our right eye can jump, and our left eye can crawl. And, in general, these are absolutely two independent objects that can walk in different directions at different speeds. That is, it is absolutely clear that it is impossible to imagine such a visual scene that anyone viewed with the help of such eye movements,” says Ivan Pigarev.

According to another version, dreams visit us only twice during sleep: when we fall asleep and when we wake up.

Pierre Cecile Puvis de Chavannes. "Dream"

If we all see dreams every night, then the question arises: why are they needed? Do they convey any important information? Can they be decrypted? And if so, how?

“Even the smallest dream carries very important information for a person. Dreams are the signals that inform us about what is happening to us now: with our body, with our emotional life and, in general, what is happening in our lives,” - Professor of the Department of Nervous Diseases of the First Moscow State Medical University named after I.M. Sechenova Elena Korabelnikova.

It turns out that dreams are not just an inexplicable illusory world into which we plunge every night. For example, in dreams the body warns of impending diseases when it is not yet possible to diagnose them. For the first time, large-scale research on this topic was carried out by the Soviet psychoneurologist Vasily Nikolaevich Kasatkin. The scientist devoted 30 years to collecting dreams and deducing patterns.

He abandoned mystical symbols, replacing them with scientifically based facts. It turns out that our body can signal an impending disease long before its first symptoms appear. And he sends these signals through dreams.

“There are specific signs that can appear in dreams with this or that pathology, with this or that disease. And further research, in fact, confirmed this. The fact that, for example, diseases of the cardiovascular system have their own markers that will make one suspect that something is wrong with the person’s heart. If this is a disease of the respiratory system, then these are its own markers,” says Elena Korabelnikova.

According to research, very often people with digestive problems dream that they eat spoiled foods. In case of respiratory diseases - a scene of suffocation.

“But this does not mean that dreams are a diagnostic panacea, that dreams can be used to make a diagnosis. This is absolutely not true. Dreams are one of the methods, this is a help that, together with other research methods, will allow us to look at the problem more fully, more broadly,” says Elena Korabelnikova.

But sometimes the analysis of a patient’s dreams becomes a truly significant part of medical observation and treatment.

“As studies of cancer patients have shown, dreams show improvement and deterioration when the machines do not yet show. And this means that it is necessary to prescribe the same chemotherapy in time or cancel it in time so that there is no overdose,” says Maria Volkova, candidate of philosophical sciences.

Message from above

But what about so-called prophetic dreams? How to explain creative dreams when inspiration or a sudden solution to complex problems comes at night? They definitely have nothing to do with diseases. History knows hundreds of cases when the greatest discoveries occurred in a dream.

So, dreams are given to us not only to inform us about impending illnesses? Scientists do not deny the existence of prophetic dreams, although they are also in no hurry to consider them from a scientific point of view. Psychologists divide prophetic dreams into several categories.

“It sometimes happens that in dreams a person makes very correct, very competent forecasts for future events. A person is able to analyze and compare facts. In general, sleep is an active work of our psyche,” says Elena Korabelnikova.

Playing out controversial situations that concern a person is another supposed function of dreams. The brain tries to calculate all possible scenarios in order to be prepared for any of them in reality. But we do not remember the entire dream.

Most often we remember only short segments of it. And it happens that in reality the situation unfolds in exactly the same way as in that very segment of the dream that we remember - then the feeling of a prophetic dream arises.

“Another category, another example: a person is so impressed by his dream that, completely unconsciously, he begins to build the scenario of his life in such a way that his dream comes true. For example: a person sees in a dream his friend, whom he has not seen for many years. And he's impressed by it. Why did he dream about this friend? And he completely unconsciously begins to visit, go to those places where he and his friend communicated, where he lives, perhaps lived before or lives now, and thus increasing the likelihood that the meeting will happen in reality, and it really does happen,” says Korabelnikova.

Nikifor Krylov. "Sleeping Boy"

Another interesting fact: according to statistics, pleasant dreams come true much less often. Most likely, this is due to the fact that in a dream a person, in principle, experiences mainly negatively “charged” situations.

It has been established that the probability of seeing a prophetic dream is about 1 in 22 thousand. This means that in 60 years you will definitely see at least one dream that will come true. And yet, prophetic dreams, apparently, will forever remain outside of official science. At least until scientists manage to create a device that can read our dreams.

Along with the prophetic dreams of each of us, “under the knife” of scientists comes the famous story about the periodic table seen in a dream and the discovery of Kekule’s formula for benzene.

“As far as I know, there is not a single documentary evidence that Mendeleev had this dream. No one knows where this came from, but the myth lives on,” says Ivan Pigarev.

And yet, researchers cannot completely deny the presence of prophetic dreams in our lives. For example, the artist Konstantin Korovin dreamed of the death of the singer Fyodor Chaliapin. In it, Chaliapin appeared to him and persistently asked him to help him remove the heavy stone that was pressing on his chest.

Korovin tried to help him, but in vain. The stone seemed to be firmly attached to the maestro’s chest. And two weeks later the great bass died in Paris. Korovin himself outlived the great singer and his prophetic dream by only a year.

Famous historical figures used the power of dreams not only for prophetic purposes. Salvador Dali, for example, depicted scenes from his dreams on his canvases. To remember his phantasmagoric dreams, he used a special technique.

“He has this wonderful dream with a key in his hand. You can follow his advice. That is, after a hearty lunch in the summer, when you feel tired, sit on an uncomfortable chair, put some kind of metal container (a bucket or basin), take some metal object in your hand and squeeze it. You start to fall asleep, you get soft, you have a dream, you drop. You wake up - there is a picture. But this, of course, is such a humorous approach, but, nevertheless, it works,” says Maria Volkova.

Nightmares

Another subject of close attention of scientists is nightmares. Researchers have come to an unexpected conclusion: scary dreams are beneficial.

“Very interesting, for example, there are facts that confirm that people who have nightmares are better adapted to life than those who do not have nightmares. And why? Because this is a kind of multimedia playback of situations, assessment, search for a way out, a solution. And if a person, God forbid, then encounters this situation or he has experienced it, for example, then he finds some way out, he finds a solution for himself. And by the way, the situation here is also well known: if a person does not find a way out or a solution, obsessive dreams begin. These are, as a rule, post-traumatic dreams,” says Roman Buzunov.

All scientists agree on one thing: the images that we see in dreams carry some information. And their analysis can greatly facilitate the solution of many life problems. One of the first to raise this topic was Sigmund Freud.

The psychoanalyst's job was to reveal to his patients the true meaning of their dreams. In his opinion, the overwhelming majority of dreams represent desires repressed from consciousness, which, of course, have sexual overtones.

His student Carl Gustav Jung placed much less importance on sexual signals. In his opinion, dreams help reveal features of our personality that may be hidden in reality. Today, dream researchers do not tend to adhere to any one of the classical concepts. But almost everyone agrees that dreams signal us about something important.

Henry Fuseli. "Nightmare"

“Dreams, dream analysis are rather closer to psychoanalysis. This is an absolutely wonderful thing. You can use this. You need to use this. It is successfully used by neurologists who use it for medical purposes. They do not analyze dreams as dreams, they use this dream in order to obtain information about the mental problems of a particular person,” says Ivan Pigarev.

But it's not that simple. The images we see in our dreams can only be deciphered by ourselves. One person will associate joy with one image, while another will associate it with a completely different one. And no specialist, without knowing the person, will ever be able to correctly interpret a dream.

“If a person associates something with danger: some situation, some events, and so on, then the next time the subconscious feeling of danger will manifest itself in this image. Or maybe on the beach, some bandits attacked him, while he was sunbathing in the sun, and they took his wallet, next time the danger will be associated with the fact that he is lying, sunbathing on the beach,” says Roman Burzunov.

People have been analyzing their dreams since time immemorial. The most ancient spiritual practices and religions refer to sleep as a way of self-knowledge and healing. Many tribes that have preserved the traditions of their ancestors still use dreams to solve their problems.

“There is a Senoi tribe in Malaysia. In the middle of the 20th century, anthropologists and psychologists became very interested in this tribe. Why? Because there are no mental illnesses in this tribe. Well, they still aren’t. We began to study why this happens. And it turned out that Senoi have a special habit: predicting their sleep. They, not that they wish for what they would dream, but their very life, their very position in life... the Senoi do not distinguish reality from dreams. There is no directly clear boundary between these two states. The Senoi tribe begins the morning with all family members getting together and discussing their dream,” says author and dream researcher Olard Dixon.

The elder representative of the tribe explains to the younger ones what the dream could symbolize, what they should pay attention to and what to do next time in a similar situation.

“And in this way a dream is formed, programmed, that inside a dream you can meet your friend, inside a dream you can meet a predator in the forest and defeat him in order to overcome your fear. And many things can be solved within dreams. And this is how programming arises,” says Olard Dixon.

Sleep management

It would seem that the idea of programming dreams, and even more so of controlling them, is from the realm of science fiction. Meanwhile, lucid dreams, or lucid dreams as they are also called, are actively practiced both by doctors and by those simply wishing to experience absolutely incredible sensations upon waking up in their own sleep.

“The practice of lucid dreaming really exists. This is a separate direction. A very interesting direction. Until now, lucid or lucid dreams remain a mystery, despite the fact that some ideas and possible explanations have been proposed. Still, a lot is not clear to us. And therefore, this special area of work of our psyche must be approached with very great caution. Because, for example, there are cases where attempts to practice with lucid dreams aggravated mental pathology, psychosis, and so on,” says Elena Korabelnikova.

The term “lucid dreaming” was introduced at the beginning of the 20th century by the Dutch psychiatrist and writer Frederik Van Eeden. In 1913, he presented a report to the Society for Psychical Research, in which he reported on his 312 lucid dreams: from 1989 to 1912.

Later, in the second half of the 20th century, Carlos Castaneda and psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge wrote about them. To date, scientists cannot distinguish a patient’s lucid dreams from ordinary ones. At the same time, science cannot ignore the very clear and detailed reports about this state from experienced dreamers, including scientists themselves.

“Unfortunately, there are no objective control methods so that we can connect some sensors and say that this is just a dream, but this is a lucid dream. Alas, we cannot do this. Yes, but people tell this, and even experienced it from their own experience. This is a very well known technique. Another thing is that, again, there may be fairy tales, there may be Munchausens and so on, so on, who like to tell stories that actually do not exist,” says Roman Burzunov.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder. "Land of Lazy People"

What is a lucid dream and how to recognize it? Practitioners say that while in a state of lucid dreaming, a person feels exactly the same as in reality, and only a few details can indicate that he is sleeping.

“Lucid dreams are not predicted dreams. This is an even higher level. This is when a person knows for sure that he is dreaming, that he is dreaming of everything that is happening, and is already acting in accordance with this knowledge. This is an even bigger step, it’s even more interesting, when dreams actually cease to be a dream as such, but are already perceived by a person simply as reality, so dense that you can do whatever you want in it, just like in reality,” — says Olard Dixon.

So how do you recognize a dream? How does dream reality differ from waking reality? How do you realize that you have woken up inside your own dream? There are many practices: shamanic, practices of Tibetan yogis, practices developed already in Western society at the end of the 20th century by the same Laberge. But in general they all come down to the same markers.

“Inside a dream, the clock does not work correctly. You cannot tune musical instruments inside a dream. No mechanics work inside a dream. Well, this is how we remember our childhood nightmare: a burglar comes and we want to close the door, but it won’t close. Why? Because there is no lock inside the dream door. There is simply the appearance of a castle, but the castle itself is not there. So you can’t close it,” Dixon explains.

Masters of lucid dreams claim that if you follow clear rules in a dream state, the dreamer will always receive a clear result of his actions. For example, if inside a dream you constantly turn left and go around all obstacles on the left side, it will start to rain or an image of marshy areas, streams, lakes will appear.

If, on the contrary, you turn right all the time, then the person awakens. The further the dreamer goes to the right side, the closer he is to awakening. Experienced dreamers not only keep a dream diary (and this, it must be said, is a prerequisite for training mindfulness and reading the signals of their dreams), but also draw up their own maps.

“If we say: “We dreamed of a grocery store that is located across the street from our house, the dreaming house,” then if we wrote it down (our dream), if we sketched it, where this store is located, in the next dream, when we will end up on the same street, we will see this store in the same place. Why?

Because we stabilized it. Because we described it, we recorded it. We mapped a certain area of space, and it became stable. Stable not only for us, but also stable for others who end up on this street,” says Olard Dixon.

Experts are convinced that absolutely everyone, without exception, is capable of lucid dreaming. You just need to follow simple rules, train your attention, and be aware of the laws by which the world of dreams exists. Lucid dream practitioners call this process “reality testing.”

“Before we turn on the light here, in reality, when we enter our apartment, we touch the switch itself and realize that we are turning it on at all. Just mechanically once - and it turned on. And we realize that we are turning it on.

Literally a second of awareness. And then we press the key and see whether the light turns on or doesn’t turn on. It turns on - very good, which means it’s real, because in reality it most often turns on. But if it doesn’t turn on, we ask ourselves: “Is this a dream?” and we do a reality test in the second subject, for example, looking at the clock and seeing what time it says,” says Olard Dixon.

The technique of lucid dreaming is used not only in spiritual practices with the goal of knowing oneself. It is quite actively used by psychotherapists to treat phobias and addictions. Doctors are confident that dreams can help solve a number of psychological problems, because in dreams we are not afraid of failures and setbacks.

Here we can play out any situation that worries us and consider it from all possible sides. Some psychotherapists go beyond the conventional use of lucid dreams and use a similar technique to train athletic skills.

“German psychotherapist Paul Toley - he specifically went to work for the German sports team, where the level of injuries is highest. This is ski jumping from a springboard, even when they do somersaults. He taught athletes how to lucid dream so that they could perform tricks in their sleep. The quality has improved, the number of injuries has dropped sharply,” says Maria Volkova.

From dreams to reality

But no matter how attractive the idea of conscious existence in the world of dreams may be, scientists and masters of spiritual practices claim: for an unprepared person, a lucid dream is fraught with as many dangers as miracles.

“I never understood why this was, but it was absolutely clear that after some time of using this practice of lucid dreaming, patients are guaranteed to develop, first of all, gastrointestinal problems, stomach ulcers and all the other delights of the gastrointestinal tract. intestinal.

Then the next one is cardiovascular disorders, because this system is the most complex and most affected by sleep deprivation. Well, God forbid that some woman starts to engage in this nonsense, because if then she suddenly becomes pregnant, then the likelihood that she will give birth to a freak is very high,” says Ivan Pigarev.

In addition, experts say that lucid dreams can cause psychological dependence. In some cases, they lead to a complete disconnect from reality. It becomes much more interesting for a person to exist in the world of dreams than in our everyday life.

“Another thing is that Laberge advertises this as a kind of tool for healthy people. This is a kind of drug addiction without a drug. You can get hooked on this. And this is very dangerous, because, again, I’m not a doctor, but after consultation with neurologists and psychiatrists, they all loudly declare that a lot of people with schizoid tendencies (these are healthy people, it’s just their personality type) – they can have this lead to irreversible mental disorders, that is, to put it simply, “the roof will move off and will not return,” says Vladimir Kovalzon.

Antonio Pereda. "The Knight's Dream"

“And I had to consult several times with such patients who actually live only in their sleep. It's practically like drug addicts. He doesn't care about the day. He, I don’t know, sits like some kind of security guard all day and stares blankly at the passing stream, and at night he’s a superhero: Superman, Spider-Man or something like that. And this is absolutely clear, clear, how these sensations are perceived in life,” says Roman Burzunov.

In various cultures, only trained people who have studied all possible ways of working with their consciousness and subconscious, and are well acquainted with the state of deep meditation, have been allowed to engage in such practices at all times.

“Now in the Western world and in Russia, we most often study dreams without any yoga, without any practice. A person simply comes into awareness with what he is. Because awareness itself does not make it better or worse. It allows (lucidity within the dream) to be realized. And a person with negative thoughts begins to realize these negative thoughts. Here the law does not allow him to do this. He has free hands there.

For our brain, it doesn’t matter at all where we do this: inside a dream we are engaged in destruction or here. Why? Because serious pathological changes occur in the brain of this person, because the person has already allowed himself to do this. He has already allowed himself to be killed. Inside the dream, if he allowed himself to kill, then this is already a skill,” says Olard Dixon.

While for many the idea of lucid dreaming is still fantasy, businessmen and scientists are putting dreams into practice. For several years now, devices have been on sale that allow, if not mastering lucid dreams, then certainly ordering the dream that a person wants to see.

“Now such research on inducing dreams is underway. They are based mainly on some kind of, say, the formation of conditioned reflexes. That is, for example, you think about some situation that you want to dream about, and at this time the device emits, say, some sound or light, or smell. And accordingly, a certain conditioned reflex arises that connects this sound, color or smell with what you want to dream about. And then the device, during a dream (and it can, in principle, be tracked by certain motor activity there, and so on), sends these signals to the person. And they work as a kind of trigger that causes what you were thinking about. Although this is also not a 100% result. This is also like a kind of training,” explains Roman Burzunov.

Scientists do not stop at the possibility of programming the brain for given dreams. There is already incredible research going on. Scientists are trying to develop a program that can read the images that our brain receives. The first successful results have already been obtained in California.

Neuroscientists were able to recreate the visual images that arose in the head while watching randomly selected videos. This means that the day is not far off when we will be able to record our dreams as if on film, and watch them during the day and analyze the information that our body sends us.

Who has waking dreams?

Healthy people have waking dreams: according to statistics, everyone has seen them once in their life. Some people experience sleep-induced hallucinations more frequently, and there may be several episodes per year, periods during which such dreams are more common.

Daydreaming often occurs in adolescents during puberty, due to the influence of hormones and the endocrine system on the functioning of the nervous system and brain. Older people are prone to hypnagogic hallucinations: in older people, the condition is accompanied by other parasomnias (sleep disorders), for example, insomnia. Waking dreams are not uncommon for suspicious, vulnerable and tender individuals who have a wild imagination and developed imagination.

The frequent occurrence of waking dreams is provoked by the influence of certain factors. The reasons are as follows:

mental illnesses and disorders: schizophrenia, bipolar disorders;
nervous or emotional disorders: neuroses, severe depression, neurasthenia;
sleep deficiency, chronic lack of sleep;
suffered severe psychological trauma or severe stress;
sleep disorders: insomnia (insomnia), somnambulism (sleepwalking), frequent nightmares;
severe migraine attacks;
symptoms of neurological diseases (narcolepsy, epilepsy);
alcohol abuse, alcohol intoxication, prolonged binge drinking, severe hangover;
altered physical condition: due to increased body temperature, decreased or increased blood pressure;
taking certain medications: neurotropic drugs, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, antidepressants, antipsychotics;
traumatic brain injuries, severe head contusions;
neoplasms localized in the brain, hemorrhages;
use of narcotic or toxic substances, substance abuse or addiction.

The factors described above irritate the reticular formations located in the midbrain and responsible for the transport of nerve signals. And if the transmission is disrupted, the cerebral cortex is activated incorrectly, and information is processed incorrectly.

Fact! Adults, both female and male, have waking dreams.

Hypnagogic hallucinations in children

You can suspect sleep-induced hallucinations in a child by his stories that animals, people and creatures come before bed, and various situations occur that have no relation to reality.

The child's psyche is not fully formed, unstable and vulnerable, and therefore is exposed to adverse factors. A child’s waking dreams arise due to emotional overload, fatigue, intense emotions experienced in the afternoon, active activities, frightening events.

What dreams do you have about love, money, success, failure: description

The dream is about love, money, success.
Our dreams can tell us about what awaits us in the future, so it is important to know what signs in a dream portend good luck and happiness, or vice versa, failure. Below you will find interpretations and descriptions that will help you understand why certain dreams occur.

Fortunately.

A bright sun in a dream means joy and an imminent happy event.
If in a dream you met a white horse and, moreover, allowed itself to be saddled, then the dream foreshadows a profitable acquaintance, the acquisition of wealth and career growth.
For unmarried girls, riding a horse in a dream means finding quick happiness in marriage.
A horse in a dream is generally a good sign, especially when it gallops across a field.

To success.

Falling into mud or manure in a dream means big money that comes unexpectedly.
It is considered a good sign to see a clear sky with bright stars in a dream: this means heavenly protection in all endeavors, the fulfillment of dreams and fulfilled hopes.
Seeing a rainbow in a dream means experiencing joy and pleasure in reality.

To the money.

Seeing cockroaches in a dream means receiving a monetary gift or bonus.
Spiders and other insects also foretell wealth.
Big money is guaranteed if an insect crawls over you in a dream, and when you wake up, you remember this feeling.

To love.

There are sweets in a dream for a quick romantic acquaintance.
If you dream of rings, this means an imminent proposal. Seeing earrings for a girl in a dream is a sign of romantic interest.
If a girl smokes in a dream, it means that she is loved.

To failure.

The signal of impending misfortune is catastrophes. Strong winds, hurricanes, earthquakes, man-made and natural disasters - everything speaks of impending danger. If in such a dream you remain alive, whole and healthy, then failure can be avoided.
If you dreamed that a tooth or many teeth fell out, this indicates impending trouble. If you saw a tooth falling out with blood in a dream, then trouble will happen to your blood relative.
Often a person sees a dream, but when he wakes up, he does not remember it. However, after this, sensations may remain. If they are unpleasant, exciting, alarming, then this is a warning of impending trouble. Try to get rid of such feelings, and then you will be able to avoid failure.

Dreams are especially important if they occur on a full moon, on the night from Thursday to Friday, or on the eve of major church holidays. These days people traditionally used dreams to tell fortunes.

Is it dangerous

For healthy adults, periodic, infrequent hypnagogic hallucinations do not pose a threat. An adequate person is able to distinguish reality from a dream and realize the unreality of visions. But when he begins to hear or see something repetitive, intrusive and frightening, it affects his psyche, emotional inner state and well-being. Haunting images can manifest themselves in the imagination and thoughts while awake, and fear and apprehension gradually develop. After terrible hallucinations, panic, lack of air, and rapid heartbeat are observed.

Daydreams can be dangerous for children. If a child happens to see something scary and frightening, he will become frightened, withdraw into himself, begin to behave strangely, and confuse reality with imaginary images. An altered state of mind will provoke problems in communication with others, in worldview and development.

How to induce waking dreams

You can try to induce a waking dream yourself. Follow the instructions:

Turn off the bright lights, turn on the night light. In complete darkness, disorientation is possible.
Lie down on the floor. When lying on the bed, you are likely to fall asleep quickly, but this is not necessary. Lay out a soft rug or blanket.
Start relaxing your whole body, getting rid of tension and disturbing thoughts, stretching your limbs and feeling a pleasant sleepy bliss.
Breathe evenly, taking three seconds to exhale and inhale. Gradually increase the duration of breathing movements. When breathing deeply and slowly, you should experience slight dizziness, spots or flickering in the eyes.
Imagine inspiring nature or a picturesque landscape: sea waves, rustling green leaves, a babbling waterfall.
Don't move, stay relaxed and calm.
When you manage to catch the moment of falling asleep, open your eyes.
If the scheme worked and you fell into a waking dream, then maintain a sober mind, but you will see unrealistic images.
If you start to wake up after hypnagogic hallucinations, do not get up immediately and abruptly: give your brain time to adapt. If you finally fall asleep, try to reproduce what happened in the morning.

Important! If you are afraid of being scared or feeling bad after seeing scary images, get a helper.

How to recognize a lucid dream?

A person who wants to become aware of a dream asks the main question: “How to determine that this is a dream?” The answer is not simple, but it is possible.

There are methods to help with this:

attempts to pierce your palm with a finger or fly up often work, because in a dream the properties of space and objects can be partially influenced by the intention of the sleeper.

According to some practitioners, they feel a certain elasticity when trying to pierce their palm or a hard object with their finger, sometimes it takes them several attempts.

A counter question also arises: “How can you understand that this is not a dream, but reality?”

American psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge offers many simple techniques to help determine that you are dreaming:

• If you can breathe by closing your mouth and pinching your nose with your fingers,
• The setting of a place in a dream differs from a similar place in reality,
• Read some inscription twice, you are sleeping, if the inscription changes,
• Look at a regular watch with a dial,
• Look at any source of information, it will change,
• Try to scroll through the previous minute, if that doesn’t work, then you’re asleep,
• Using a switch, try to turn the light on or off: the switch may not work at all in your sleep or create the effect that when the light is on it is still dark,
• Look at your own hands for a long time - they change their appearance in a dream,
• If you are unsure whether this is reality or a dream, then you are in a dream - in reality you will not ask yourself this question, and only in a dream are you puzzled by it.
• Large spaces in the unconscious dream are overcome instantly, if you notice this, then you are in a dream. For example, getting into a car for a long trip, the details of the monotony of the road will be missing.
• In a dream, showing willpower and patience, you can do amazing things: change night to day and vice versa.
• Cause-and-effect relationships may not work in a dream: the switch may not fulfill its task, and the inscriptions may change every time you pay attention to them, you get lost in space and time, you cannot understand where you are and why you are in this place .

All these actions do not guarantee that the sleeper understands that he is in a dream: you can take off, see a change in familiar surroundings, find yourself in an unknown city, pierce your palm with your finger, but still not believe that this is a dream. A person has a certain firm conviction that he is in reality; it is not easy to realize oneself in a dream.

How to get rid of annoying hallucinations

What to do to get rid of waking dreams when they interfere with feeling normal? Follow the rules:

Get enough sleep, avoid sleep deficiency.
Follow a routine by going to bed and waking up at the same time.
Avoid overwork in the evening.
Avoid stress, stormy experiences and emotional excitement before bed.

Do not consume alcohol or drugs.
Lead a healthy lifestyle.
Create a favorable environment in the bedroom: ventilate it at night, prepare a comfortable bed.
Don't overeat before bed.
If you have an existing disease, you should undergo treatment.

Attention! If a child suffers from hypnagogic hallucinations, the parents’ task is to calm him down, support him and protect him from all kinds of stress and unpleasant events and news. It is important to do everything to stabilize your mental state.

How to get rid of sleep paralysis

Try to bring your body into action. To do this, use those muscle groups that are amenable to your control: move your eyes, try moving your tongue in your mouth, the thumb of your left or right hand. Repeat the attempts until you feel that control over your body is returning to you.

After night paralysis ends, to prevent it from recurring, normalize your sleep schedule: go to bed at the same time and wake up with an alarm clock. By the way, waking up with an alarm clock completely eliminates the occurrence of sleep paralysis: the latter occurs only with natural awakening.

Do you suffer from sleep disorders? Contact us at the Center, we will help you effectively! Make an appointment by phone: 8-495-635-69-07.8-495-635-69-08.

Should waking dreams be given meaning?

Do dreams come true in reality? Sometimes they carry a certain meaning: if a person thinks or worries about something for a long time, the subconscious draws images for him, and the conscious mind interprets reality taking into account disturbing thoughts. So hallucinations often reflect anxieties or actual events.

What can waking dreams mean? Evaluate what has been learned and extrapolate (transfer) to reality. You will probably see a reflection of events, a sign or a solution to a problem. If you can’t figure it out, study the dream book, which gives interpretations of various dreams, including those in which people begin to fly, breathe under water and do something unnatural.

Dream Interpretation - why do you have dreams, a lot of dreams: meaning

I have dreams, a lot of dreams.
Multiple dreams during the night, whether they are nightmares or just some ordinary situations that could happen in life, warn of changes that may happen soon. Moreover, such life changes can occur both in one person who sees a dream, and in an entire nation.

Here is the detailed meaning of the dream book, what dreams mean, many dreams:

This is a kind of compensation for the lack of emotions in real life. With the help of many dreams, consciousness maintains a person’s mental balance.
If your life is monotonous, then you should not delve into the interpretation of such a dream. It’s better to add emotions to life, make it brighter and more varied.
If, on the contrary, there were a lot of emotions during the day, and then at night you had many different dreams that were remembered, this means that the consciousness is trying to systematize all the information received. Knowledge and experience will be deposited in memory, it will turn out to be a kind of educational film.

In general, many people have up to 5 dreams a night. If there are more of these dreams and you remember them all when you wake up, then your life is either too boring, or, conversely, there are too many impressions. When your waking life changes, so will your multiple dreams.

Interesting Facts

Here is some information about waking dreams:

Often strange creatures and demons appear in waking dreams.
Hypnagogic hallucinations have been described more than once in literary works.
Some believe in the mystical meaning of waking dreams.
Scientists believe that hypnagogic hallucinations appear as a result of inhibition that occurs in the cells of the cerebral cortex during falling asleep: this process disrupts the normal correlation of signaling systems during wakefulness.

Waking dreams are an interesting, unstudied phenomenon. If you happen to encounter them, you know what to do.

Tips for beginning practitioners

• Lucid dreaming is a skill that needs to be learned, and even those people who have lucid dreams regularly only have them 1-2 times a month. Be patient and continue to practice the above techniques and you will gradually increase your chances and frequency of lucid dreaming.
• If you periodically experience “false awakenings” during sleep, get into the habit of doing a reality check (for example, trying to read a book) immediately after waking up. Otherwise, a false awakening can turn a lucid dream into a completely ordinary one.
• When experiencing a lucid dream, consider intentionally waking up a few minutes later. This will increase the chances of remembering the dream.
• Don't drink anything within an hour before bed. Waking up to need to go to the toilet is the last thing you want when successfully experiencing a lucid dream.
• If your sleep is not going as you would like, “close your eyes” while you sleep, and then forcefully open them. Repeat until you wake up.
• If you think you are losing control of your sleep, shout out very loudly what you want to happen next, and do this until you regain control of your sleep or until what you wanted happens.