Sleep management techniques are simple techniques available to everyone. Managed dreams: methods and advice from a psychologist How to learn to manage dreams in 1 night

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Your actions in dreams can become extremely diverse: you can control people, situations, you can analyze some detail of a dream, enter a specific scene, view a dream in reverse order, or change its plot. Although, the greatest benefit from lucid dreaming can be obtained by controlling not dreams, but your reactions to events in a dream, thus expanding the possibilities and deepening states of awareness in a dream. Then you can experiment with different types of dream control. Paul Toli offers several techniques for controlling lucid dreams: control by intention and self-hypnosis before sleep, by desire, by changing the internal state, by looking, by using verbal formulas, by certain actions, and many other things that take place in a dream. Control by desire is quite convincingly confirmed by the oneironauts, who move about in a dream and change its environment spontaneously. Referring to his own experience, Toli says: "The situation of sleep is largely determined by the internal state of the sleeper. If he is ready to face the danger or the creature threatening him, then, as a rule, this threat disappears, and the creature begins to shrink. On the other On the other hand, if the sleeper has allowed fear to take over, the threat will increase, and the creature itself will increase in size. Gaze control plays an important role in Toli's model of optimal behavior in lucid dreaming. He argues that to get rid of the threat contained in the actions of some of the actors in the dream, one can look directly into their eyes. Sleep control with words is explained as follows: "You can greatly change the appearance and behavior of the characters in a dream by addressing them in an appropriate way. A simple question:" Who are you? "Can, for example, turn strangers into familiar people. Obviously, an internal need to learn something about oneself and the circumstances of a conversation with another person allows ... to achieve the highest level of awareness in a dream: awareness of what this dream symbolizes.

How to get to the right place in a dream

To fully enjoy the benefits of mindfulness, you need to learn how to navigate the dream world. Various uses of lucid dreaming may require a specific location, person, or situation. The strong-willed intention to see a dream on a certain topic can help in this, which is often called a deliberate dream. Thanks to this particular procedure, throughout history, dreams have been considered a source of wisdom in all cultures. In ancient Greece, people visited the temples of dreams in order to find answers to their questions in a dream. Dream temples could certainly help people focus on their task, although they are not currently needed. They were needed in order to fix their desire in the mind before going to bed. You just need to focus on one simple phrase that expresses the meaning of what you want to see. In an effort to achieve a lucid dream, you must combine this phrase with the intention to become aware of yourself in a dream. Use all your mental energy for this. you must go to sleep

Exercise: Deliberate Lucid Dreaming

• State your intention. Before going to bed, formulate one phrase or question about what you want to see, for example, "I want to visit San Francisco." Write this phrase or draw a picture to illustrate it. Remember the phrase and picture (if any). Intending to do something specific in a dream (for example, I want to tell my girlfriend that I love her), formulate this before bedtime. Under the phrase that expresses your goal, write another one, say, "when I dream (phrase), I will remember that I am in a dream."
• Go to bed. Doing nothing else, immediately go to bed and turn off the light.
• Focus on your phrase and your intention to become lucid in your dream. Remember your phrase or picture. Imagine yourself having a dream on a theme of your choice and realizing that you are dreaming. While intending to do something concrete, imagine it. Until you fall asleep, meditate on your phrase and intention to become aware of yourself in a dream. Don't let any extraneous thoughts intrude until you fall asleep. If your attention begins to wander, immediately return to the original formulation.
• Realize your intention in a lucid dream. When you have a lucid dream on a topic you have set, try to fulfill your intention. Formulate a question you have in mind, look for a way to express yourself, change your style of behavior, or analyze the environment in which you are. Pay attention to your feelings and to all the details of the dream.
• Having reached your goal, do not forget to wake up and remember the dream. After receiving a satisfying answer in the dream, wake up using one of the methods discussed above. Immediately write down at least that part of the dream that contains the answer to your question. Even if you think that you did not have time to get an answer to your question (due to the fact that the dream disappeared by itself), wake up and write it down. It may turn out that the answer is disguised, and you did not immediately understand it.

Creating a new setting

Another way to see what you want in a dream is to find or call it already in a lucid dream. A volitional change in the environment of a dream can also help you feel power over the illusion that surrounds you. Watching a party in Manhattan turn into Martian canals at your will is much more effective than reading that the dream world is a creation of your mind. By learning to control the dream at will, you can travel the dream world without fear. Your possibilities directly depend on your imagination. Only through your desire can you repeat the sunset, find yourself on another planet or in the garden of Eden. Below are some exercises that should help you manage your dreams. The best way to change the scene in a dream is not yet known, so consider these exercises as tips from which you can develop your own method.

Exercise: spinning a new dream plot

• Choose a target. Before going to bed, imagine the person, time, and place you would like to meet in your lucid dream. All this can be both real and fictional, and also belong to the past, present or future. For example, "Padmasambhava, Tibet, 850", or "Boris Yeltsin, Moscow, now" (no need to explain what to do after that), or "my granddaughter, at home, 2050".
• Set yourself up to achieve your goal. Try to remember and for this write down a phrase that concludes your intention. After that, imagine yourself having achieved the goal and firmly decide to repeat it in today's dream.
• Unwind your goal in a lucid dream. It is possible that only one intention will be enough for you to achieve your goal, as in an ordinary dream. However, a more reliable way is to first become aware of the dream state, and only then look for the goal. With a fading dream picture in a lucid dream, when you feel awakening approaching, spin around repeating your target phrase until you get into a new dream - let it be the dream you had in mind.

Exercise: 3D TV

Change your surroundings at will without moving to another location. Start with small details and gradually move on to more significant ones. Your attempts to change the environment should be slow and subtle at first, and then more pronounced. You can view the environment as infinitely plastic material for mental modeling.

Do the impossible

In real life, we have many prohibitions. There are rules for everything: how to do it, how not to do it, how to do something in the best way. One of the main delights of lucid dreaming is its immense, incomparable freedom. A person, realizing that he is sleeping, often for the first time in his life, suddenly feels that he is not limited by anything. He can do or feel whatever he wants. In dreams, we may experience sensations or fantastic events that are impossible in the waking state. In a dream, you can not only meet a fantastic character, but also become one. Dreamers are not limited by their body shell. You can turn into a beautiful garden or a flower. Alan Worsley did amazing experiments, like splitting himself in two and putting his hands together at the head. Many oneironauts walk through walls, breathe in water, fly and travel through space. Drop the usual criteria, try to realize what can only be in a dream.

I decided to diversify the subject of the blog with one of my hobbies - psychology. Hopefully this won't be too much of a burden to regular readers. After all, it’s not every day to write about something. Therefore, today I will tell you a little about what lucid dreams are and how you can learn to control your dreams.

Lucid dreaming- this is a state of consciousness in which a person understands that he is dreaming and can control it to a certain extent. This phenomenon was officially confirmed by scientists in the 19th century. Now many researchers are working in this direction, but Japanese scientists have achieved the greatest success.

Application

A big plus of lucid dreams is that you can participate in events and perform actions that are impossible in real life (for example: flight, transformation, etc.). A person is able to analyze his actions in such dreams and benefit from this analysis in the formation of personality outside of sleep. Learning to control your actions in lucid dreams is not very difficult. In addition, you can get practical benefits from this. Replacing a fall with a flight in a dream, controlling the course of events, influencing the plot of what is happening, a person gains self-confidence. This can be beneficial in getting rid of some phobias in life.

Learning to manage your dreams takes practice. Training attention and remembering the moment of falling asleep will contribute to this. You can also use exercises that affect the subconscious. By controlling the mind at the moment of falling asleep, one can continue to be aware of the surrounding reality while fully immersed in the sleep of the body. At this point, the person may experience hallucinations. For example, the appearance of certain visual images, an altered perception of space and time.

To achieve only physical sleep, sports are enough. Go to the rocking chair during the day. And after you get home, go to bed. In addition, you can try to fall asleep in the morning, immediately after waking up. Another entry into lucid dreams is possible after you wake up in the middle of the night, when consciousness is on the verge of sleep and wakefulness. The most important aspect of this practice: you must want to control sleep. Quite often, people become aware of themselves in a dream and without any training. But starting to think about all the possibilities that open up to the dreamer during lucid dreams, they almost always wake up.

Hypnosis or self-hypnosis works great. To realize the fact of sleep, you can come up with some kind of conditioned signal, when you see it in a dream, you will understand that you are dreaming. To simplify, you can use audio recordings before bedtime. When self-hypnosis is recommended to use the following technique:

1. Lie down comfortably in bed and try to relax completely;
2. Imagine a staircase with 10 steps;
3. Count the steps slowly as you do so, suggesting to yourself that you can control your dreams;
4. Be sure to set the goal for which you want to control the dream in order to try to program the plot of the future dream.

How to recognize a dream

The main problem with dream management is to recognize that you are already dreaming. Try to take off in a dream or pierce the wall of a building with your finger. If you succeed, you will know that this is a dream. If it doesn't work the first time, try again. Scientists advise the following actions to determine sleep:

• Cover your mouth and nose with your hands. If you can still breathe, then it is a dream.
• Look for differences in what surrounds you from the real world.
• Find and read some inscription several times in a row. If the text changes, you are asleep.
• Look at the clock.
• Remember what you did a few minutes ago. If you can’t remember, you are in a dream.
• Turn the lights on or off. Such actions in a dream often give rise to strange phenomena not inherent in real life.
• Look at your hands for a while. In a dream, they will change.

There are cases when a person realizes that he is sleeping, manages sleep, but at a certain point in time loses control over events. In order not to get lost in such situations, begin to carefully consider the things around you, focusing on the details.

In Russia, the study of lucid dreams is mainly carried out by enthusiasts. And on the net you can find communities in which people share their successes in the field of dream control.

Sleep is one of the most interesting and unexplored phenomena. Someone sees bright color images, and someone sees black and white. It used to be thought that dreaming was just resting of the brain. However, later researchers from the University of Chicago found that during the night, for several minutes, sleep turns into an active process.

Have you ever heard that you can manage this process? Do you think this idea is just fantastic? In vain! It turns out you can learn to manage your dreams. How can you manage your sleep? Today we will talk about it.

It is useful to control dreams

Being in this state, we receive a lot of information from our subconscious. The brain sorts this information and remembers the useful.

Lucid dreams allow us to go anywhere, experience moments that we cannot experience in real life. And these are endless possibilities, because we can work out the skill of communicating with a foreigner or consolidate our knowledge about driving a car. Imagine now how useful it is to manage sleep.

Can this be learned?

How can you learn to control sleep? Here is a guide to help:

• how to fall asleep to control sleep? First you need to feel yourself in a dream. That is, it is necessary, as it were, to wake up there, to understand - you are not awake;
• then you have to learn to concentrate on objects or beings. As soon as the picture begins to blur, you need to look at another object, and then return to the original subject again. Gradually you will learn to focus your gaze;
• the next step is to memorize everything. Often a person remembers that he dreamed of something, but he cannot specifically tell. So this is what you need to learn;
• the moment of awakening is very important. It is necessary to lie down for some more time, to feel where you are - is it reality or dreams;
• notebook. Get yourself a notebook or notepad where you will write down everything you remember: events, feelings and emotions;
• during the day, remember your feelings and compare them with reality.

In order to manage your dreams, you have to train a lot. When you learn how to do the above exercises correctly, move on to the next, more difficult ones.

How to manage sleep at home

To learn how to really use those limitless possibilities that we talked about, you need to do the following exercises:

• before falling asleep, set yourself up for a certain plot: to visit a familiar place, for example;
• Think very carefully about what you want to see, whom you will meet, what should be around. The more precisely you think over everything, the easier it will be for you;
• give the installation - why do you want to see these images;
• when you feel that you are falling asleep, feel yourself right there, and then repeat the installation to yourself;
• after waking up, you need to remember everything.

Sleep is a very mysterious phenomenon. For anyone to manage it, you need to work hard. Of course, it won't work the first time. Don't be discouraged, you have to try again and again.

When the exercises are easy, you can try another technique. It is much more difficult than the previous one.

Its essence is to change what is happening there with the help of willpower. That is, you need to wake up, imagine what exactly you want to change and fall asleep again. You must return to the same situation and change it.

Fighting fears

By learning these techniques, you can try to deal with your fears. You can't run away from your fear. You have to meet him face to face. Check it out and get to know him. Try to talk. It's even better if you make friends.

This is how you can get rid of your phobias:

• first think about what you want to see, give yourself an installation;
• if it’s already getting scary, feel that it’s not real and you will feel better;
• find your fear, remembering all the time that it is a fantasy;
• sit next to me, get used to it, understand that you are sleeping and you can leave at any moment;
• talk and see how events develop further.

Perhaps you will find it funny, or maybe you will become best friends with your fear. The main thing is that you will stop being afraid of something, you will become freer.

Try to learn to listen to dreams

When you wake up, you absolutely do not understand what and why these pictures were given to you. However, this is all superficial analysis. You have to be deeper.

First of all, think in pictures. Do not try to fit everything you saw at night into daytime rational frameworks. When you think of nighttime images, focus on inner sensations: where you feel warm during the memories, and where you feel cold and uncomfortable.

Sleep, a state well known to everyone, necessary for the physical body and mind to rest and regenerate. Sleep can be defined as follows.

Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind and body that is characterized by an altered state of consciousness, reduced sensory activity, inhibition of almost all voluntary muscle activity, and reduced interaction with the environment.

Everyone has dreams, whether they remember them or not. A person begins to dream in infancy and continues to dream until death. On average, a person spends a third of his life in sleep, which is from 25 to 30 years.

Every night we find ourselves in an unknown world of dreams. At the same time, in a dream, we can be ourselves or someone completely different. We can see in a dream both familiar places and people, and places and people that we have never seen in the waking state.

And there is hardly a person who, at least once in his life, did not have fantastic or fabulous dreams that he could not come up with in a waking state of consciousness.

Despite the fact that for the last 150 years psychologists, doctors and neuroscientists have been actively trying to unravel the phenomenon of sleep, this state, familiar to every person, is still fraught with many mysteries.

At the same time, the secrets and possibilities that a dream carries have been known since very ancient times. There are many stories in the Bible and other sacred books in which miraculous or prophetic dreams had a great influence on the development of history.

An expression, a prophetic dream, is present in every culture. In ancient times, people capable of interpreting dreams were at every royal or imperial court and were revered on a par with sages.

In the Western tradition, dream work is more related to psychology and is based on the interpretation of the plot and meaning of dreams. In this relatively modern tradition, the nature of sleep itself is rarely explored. At the same time, it is the nature and character of dreams that have a decisive influence on the plot, symbols and meaning of sleep.

At the same time, in Eastern culture and in the traditions of many indigenous tribes of America, shamanic traditions, dreams were used as a very powerful tool for gaining knowledge, personal and spiritual development.

Oriental and Native American traditions have given modern culture knowledge of lucid or controlled dreams. One of the most famous techniques for conscious work with dreams is Tibetan dream yoga and lucid dreaming. And denie in the tradition of the Yaqui Indians. The latter gained its popularity thanks to the books of the famous anthropologist Carlos Castaneda.

In the Western world, one of the pioneers of the practice of lucid dreaming and non-body travel are Stephen LaBerge and Robert Monroe. We want to talk about the above methods in more detail in our article.

But before proceeding to their description, I would like to dwell in more detail on why you need to pay such attention to sleep at all. For some people, a completely logical question may arise, if sleep is, first of all, rest for the mind and body, then what is the point in continuing to do something in a dream?

Isn't it better to just make sure that sleep is just healthy and sound? Of course, healthy sleep in itself is a great benefit for the human body. But giving 25 years of your life just to unconscious sleep is like keeping all your savings in a bank buried in the yard.

In this way, of course, you will keep your wealth, but you will not be able to increase it. In a sense, this is a talent buried in the ground.

And the truth is that lucid dreaming can not only be used to gain and more effectively use knowledge and skills, but also contribute to better rest and even healing of the body.

Do you want to challenge the philistine view of the world, get an interesting experience of transforming habitual ideas? All you need to do is learn how to manage your sleep. Yes, yes, the same dreams that you have during the night more than once.

There is a point of view that lucid dreams are a journey through the space of options for events that could happen to you, but you turned to the wrong branch of your life.

The authoritative esotericist Vadim Zeland writes about this in great detail in his books. Tibetan monks dealt with a similar problem more than a thousand years ago, and Carlos Castaneda. The pioneer in this area was the Dutch psychiatrist Willem van Eden.

The American scientist S. Laberge did a lot of research on this topic and defended his doctoral dissertation at Stanford University. He gave a scientific explanation of how one can learn to control dreams. If authority figures have been wasting their time and energy on such things, why don't we try to follow in their footsteps?

Why Learn to Manage Lucid Dreaming

No need to think that when we sleep and dream, the brain and body are resting and unable to perceive something. The heart beats, the intestines, lungs work, blood runs through the vessels. They are controlled by our subconscious, which never turns off, so dreams are not a disconnect from reality, they are reality itself. When you realize this, there is an understanding that you are sleeping, and at the same time you can completely freely control your actions.

Learning how to induce lucid dreams is necessary in order to:

• Convince yourself that your own possibilities have no limits, and this is the ability to transfer to reality;
• create various options for a disturbing situation in real life, try models for getting out of it;
• without consequences to exercise their right to make mistakes;
• practice in possession of what is still beyond the bounds of the possible (a prestigious car, your business, talents and abilities);
• overcome your complexes and fears;
• just enjoy the experience.

Inspired by these possibilities, I decided to learn how to induce a lucid dream. I started by trying to figure out how to tell if it was a dream or a reality.

Where I am?

To be honest, I didn't succeed the first time. I just closed my eyes and opened them in the morning. It turns out that you can not start such experiments on managing sleep in a tired state. It is necessary that the body has enough strength for such experimentation. The extreme degree of fatigue, mental and physical, does not allow you to enter a lucid dream.

Here is what I had to do to learn to understand whether these are dreams or I am already in reality:

• In a dream, I tried to turn on and off the light of the lamp.
• I looked at my alarm clock, because when a person is sleeping, the alarm clock shows different times at the same moment.
• I tried to pinch, pull my hair or my finger, scratch my arm or leg, because if we sleep, we do not feel pain.
• I was looking for unusual objects, phenomena, something that is radically different from the usual reality;
• I tried to go where I wanted, in dreams the road to the right place seems to descend, you immediately find yourself where you are striving.
• Tried to do things that I can't do in real life: do the splits, walk on the balance beam, climb the tightrope. The latter is the surest indicator, because in life I am terribly afraid of heights.

What did not work was to follow the popular advice on how to become lucid in a dream - it is recommended to call yourself by name. They say that a person cannot do this when he is sleeping - he immediately wakes up. I just couldn't think of myself while I was sleeping. Unfortunately, I never managed to see myself in the mirror either. Plots where you see your changed appearance in the mirror, or do not see it at all, make it clear that this is a dream.

How to Prepare for Lucid Dreaming

You can increase your chances of having a controlled dream. Before you go to bed, you need to sit down, try to relax and free your mind from the load accumulated during the day. Breathing exercises help me. The exercises are very simple:

• slow breathing with a delay between inhalation and exhalation,
• inhale and exhale while simultaneously counting to five.

The atmosphere should be calm, you can light candles, make a soothing massage. A hot bath with aromatic salts or a handful of ground ginger works great for relaxation to cleanse the aura.

In preparation for lucid dreaming, I did a great exercise. It came to us from the Tantric tradition of India. Here are the detailed instructions:

1. Sit in a comfortable position with your eyes closed.
2. Slowly review the events that happened to you today in reverse order. Start in the evening and end with your feelings at the moment of awakening in the morning.
3. Keep detachment, do not analyze either your own or others' behavior.
4. Fill an imaginary bottle with the events of the day and toss them into an imaginary ocean. The second option is to fill a balloon with impressions and into its stratosphere ...
5. As a result, you will definitely get high-quality dreams and an excellent memory.

You can put a bouquet of dried thyme, rosemary, lavender under the pillow for relaxation. The essential oil, selected according to your taste, has the same effect.

Learning to Induce Lucid Dreams

Absolutely everyone can get into the controlled world of night dreams, take control of their dreams. This skill does not depend on temperament or individual characteristics. The main thing for this is to maintain for several weeks the desire to learn how to enter a lucid dream. With perseverance, you can master this skill very quickly. I learned to have such dreams in about a month.

It helped a lot to keep my intention, the desire to collect information on this topic, to read literature, articles on various sites, to take part in forums. You can quickly get into meaningful dreams if you write down what you dreamed about. I put a notepad and pen on my bedside table and started writing down the dreams I could remember. The very presence of the notebook helped me to remember that I was learning to control my dreams.

I was able to get into my first dream, as it seemed to me, only for a few seconds. I remember exactly that there I passed through the wall. By the end of the month, I was able to control my dreams within minutes. Here is the result of my experiment - in order to have dreams where you are not an extra, but the master of the situation, you need

• Spend a lot of time in your thoughts,
• Check the reality of a dream
• Write down every time what you dreamed about.

Most of these dreams can be quickly caught during a false awakening, where you dream that you are awake and getting out of bed. At least that's how it worked for me the first time. Having made a “dreams or reality” check, I ended up where I wanted to go - in lucid dreams. I really like to manage sleep, where I can do magic, apparently subconsciously haunted by the glory of Harry Potter.

The acquired abilities help to quickly get out of nightmares, which, although rare, do happen. Or rather, I don’t go out anywhere, I just understand that no one can harm me. The denial of danger helps to turn your nightmare into a hilarious entertainment, or just a funny farce. Learning to manage nightmares helps the ability to tell myself in time that I'm sleeping now.

And is it dangerous?

Those who have decided to apply the control of their own dreams often ask questions: is it possible to leave your body and not return? Authoritative researchers answer that dream control is not an exit to the astral plane, and not an exit of the soul from its body. A person who controls dreams does not go anywhere and does not return to his brain from anywhere. There is no need to be afraid that a person will not wake up if he is awakened at a time when he indulges in lucid dreams.

This phenomenon is based on the physiology of the human brain. The soul does not leave its home, no matter how tempting landscapes spread in the mind of a sleeping person. You should not be afraid that being carried away by such dreams, a person deprives the brain of the nightly rest that is due to him. On the contrary, after positive impressions, freshness and a surge of strength are felt. The mood after such an experience remains elated all day, the state of health is excellent.

Managing dreams, getting interesting experiences cannot make you turn away from real life, no matter how bright and pleasant they are. On the contrary, reality begins to change for the better, because a person's self-confidence increases. And the positive qualities experienced in a dream and not previously existing in reality gradually begin to appear in the waking state.