The other day I was listening to a podcast interview with Matt Walker, PhD. He is a scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and he’s a highly well-known public intellectual focused on the subject of sleep.
In the interview, he discussed lucid dreaming (the ability to become aware that you are dreaming while being in a dream state). This was once considered to be quite a “woo-woo” subject, but has since become recognized as a legitimate skill that people can develop.
From my understanding, it is quite difficult to learn how to lucid dream, and it requires a significant amount of preparation and practice during your waking hours to make it possible. However, there are a few things that you can do to get started:
There are of course other techniques involved if you really want to take it seriously, but these are just a few steps to get started. I don’t really have much interest in learning how to lucid dream, but I do find dreaming in general completely fascinating.
When I was in high school, I had to do a project where I had to analyze the dreams I had. Over the course of a week or two, I kept a dream journal, writing down diligently every dream that I could remember upon waking. Even after only a week, it became much easier to remember my dreams. It’s as if the moment you write them down, they somehow become more permanent in your brain, but if you don’t write them down, they vanish from your mind forever.
So why do we dream?
In this clip, Matt Walker breaks down the main benefits of dreaming. The first is that it’s used for creativity; when we dream, we have an enhanced ability to solve next-day world problems. He gives the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle: we go to bed with the pieces of the puzzle, and the next day we’re able to solve the puzzle more easily.
The second benefit is emotional first-aid; dreaming is—in a way—a form of overnight therapy. Walker explains that when people go through a traumatic experience and are dreaming about that event, they are more likely to go on to gain resolution or therapy for their depression (relative to people who did not dream about the traumatic event).
When considering the impact of dreaming from this perspective, keeping a dream journal suddenly seems like an extremely valuable habit. The irony is that everyone has become so obsessed with being productive and filling their days to the absolute brim, but in reality, the mind is better able to process certain information when it is at rest.
You don’t have to go to the trouble to learn how to lucid dream, but if you’re going through something emotionally heavy right now, consider keeping a dream journal. You might be surprised what you’re able to uncover.
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The other day I was listening to a podcast interview with Matt Walker, PhD. He is a scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and he’s a highly well-known public intellectual focused on the subject of sleep.
In the interview, he discussed lucid dreaming (the ability to become aware that you are dreaming while being in a dream state). This was once considered to be quite a “woo-woo” subject, but has since become recognized as a legitimate skill that people can develop.
From my understanding, it is quite difficult to learn how to lucid dream, and it requires a significant amount of preparation and practice during your waking hours to make it possible. However, there are a few things that you can do to get started:
There are of course other techniques involved if you really want to take it seriously, but these are just a few steps to get started. I don’t really have much interest in learning how to lucid dream, but I do find dreaming in general completely fascinating.
When I was in high school, I had to do a project where I had to analyze the dreams I had. Over the course of a week or two, I kept a dream journal, writing down diligently every dream that I could remember upon waking. Even after only a week, it became much easier to remember my dreams. It’s as if the moment you write them down, they somehow become more permanent in your brain, but if you don’t write them down, they vanish from your mind forever.
So why do we dream?
In this clip, Matt Walker breaks down the main benefits of dreaming. The first is that it’s used for creativity; when we dream, we have an enhanced ability to solve next-day world problems. He gives the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle: we go to bed with the pieces of the puzzle, and the next day we’re able to solve the puzzle more easily.
The second benefit is emotional first-aid; dreaming is—in a way—a form of overnight therapy. Walker explains that when people go through a traumatic experience and are dreaming about that event, they are more likely to go on to gain resolution or therapy for their depression (relative to people who did not dream about the traumatic event).
When considering the impact of dreaming from this perspective, keeping a dream journal suddenly seems like an extremely valuable habit. The irony is that everyone has become so obsessed with being productive and filling their days to the absolute brim, but in reality, the mind is better able to process certain information when it is at rest.
You don’t have to go to the trouble to learn how to lucid dream, but if you’re going through something emotionally heavy right now, consider keeping a dream journal. You might be surprised what you’re able to uncover.
