If you can’t do something in real life, then you either play video games or dream about it. For dreamers, consciously controlling your dreams is called lucid dreaming. It’s the kind of dream where you can move yourself and make your own decisions, instead of watching from a 3rd-person point of view or feeling controlled by a puppeteer. You can tell that you have a lucid dream if in your dream, you say to yourself: “I must be dreaming!”
Lucid dreaming is a great experience to be able to do anything that’s not physically or mentally possible in the real world. Sure, video games allow you to shoot people, fly, or grow huge, but those are all from a third-person point of view and you’re not in the video game. With dreams, you don’t need a video game controller. Besides, lucid dreaming does not have any negative health benefits. It can actually make a person happier.
The first step to achieving lucidity in your dreams is to recognize that you’re in a dream. Most people wake up from a dream and go “oh, it was just a dream”, but that’s not lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is when you recognize, in the dream, that you are in the dream. Doing this seems conceptually easy, because dreams often involve crazy events, such as clocks ticking backwards, color changing, people going through walls. Before you go to sleep, repeat over and over “I’m in a dream”. This will increase your chances of you actually recognizing the dream.
After you recognize that you’re in a dream, try doing stuff you can’t do in real life. I’ve been in dreams where I’ve been consciously flying through the air, going through walls, or smashing windows. Explore your dream world. You can’t get in trouble in real life for doing so.
When you wake up, you’ll remember your dream much more vividly as you were part of it and you were able to control yourself.
