The Psychology Of Lucid Dreaming

Charlie Morley's job is to teach people how to have lucid dreams. So, the first thing is what is a lucid dream? A lucid dream is any dream where you’re actively aware of the fact that you’re dreaming as the dream is happening. So you are still sound asleep, but in the dream, you realize, aha, this is all a dream.

So anyone who is listening and thinks, I’ve had one of those where I was in the dream and then they suddenly realize, Wow, I’m dreaming now. My body is asleep in bed, I’m inside my mind and I’m exploring this three-dimensional hallucination of my psychology. That is a lucid dream. For those who haven’t had that experience, I’d ask them to perhaps think of a nightmare, where in the nightmare, they’ve thought, I’ve got to wake up, I’ve got to wake up. If you’ve ever had that experience, that was actually a lucid dream, too, because the moment you acknowledge the need to wake up, you had indirectly acknowledged you were dreaming. Of course, if anyone ever has had that experience or has that in the future, the first takeaway I’d like to offer is, if you can, don’t wake up.

If you’re in a nightmare, you realize it’s a nightmare and you have that feeling of having to wake up, then don’t wake up. Every time you wake from a nightmare, necessarily, the nightmare has to recur because it’s like a therapy session cut short. In almost all cases, nightmares play a healing role, and every time we wake ourselves from a nightmare, either intentionally or just because the nightmare is so scary, the nightmare recurs. This is why when people say that they don’t have happy dreams that recur, that dream where I had a dinner date with my favorite celebrity for example. Because that was integrated in the moment and it was a wonderful therapy session. But the one where you replayed that trauma or the one where you had a future projection of some threat that may befall you, every time we wake ourselves from one of those, they have to recur, not because the brain hates us, but because it loves us.

It makes me think of when I went to Zoom therapy during lockdown and there were a couple of times when my internet went down in the middle of a session. As soon as the internet went down my therapist, because he loves me, started texting me and emailing me. Not because he is trying to have a go at me but because he wants to get back online so we can finish this wonderful healing discussion we were having. That’s how the nightmares are working.

Anyway, I digress a little bit there but essentially a lucid dream is any dream you’ve had where you know that you’re dreaming as the dream is happening, but you are sound asleep. Then, once you know it’s a dream, you can choose what happens and you realize that if I’m conscious in my unconscious mind, then this is a similar state to hypnosis. It’s like a very, very deep state of hypnosis. You’re right at the bottom of the iceberg in a lucid dream because you can’t get more unconscious than asleep.

So the elevator pitch is that anything you can treat through hypnotherapy, you can also treat through lucid dreaming whether it’s working with confidence, working with PTSD or childhood trauma. Training athletes to be better in their discipline, there is a lot of research on that or whether it’s for spiritual practice. It has a long history in Buddhism, Toltec Shamanism and Sufism. So lucid dreaming is not a new thing at all and it’s got good providence.

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