Lucid Deaming

Roughly one-third of our lives are spent sleeping, and a significant amount of this time is spent dreaming. Dreams are the playground of the mind. Anything can happen when one is dreaming. The only limitation is that we rarely realize the freedoms granted to us in our dreams while we have them. Lucid dreaming is the ability to know when one is dreaming, and be able to influence what will be dreamt. It is estimated that around 100,000 people actually possess this skill naturally, rather than learning how to do so themselves. A normal dream is much like passively watching a movie take place in our mind. In a lucid dream, the dreamer is the writer, director, the star of the movie.

The term "Lucid dreaming" was coined by Frederik van Eeden who used the word "Lucid" in the sense of mental clarity (Green). Lucidity usually begins in the midst of a dream, when the dreamer realizes that the experience is not occurring in physical reality, but is just a dream. Often this realization is triggered by a dreamer noticing an impossible or unlikely occurrence in the dream, such as meeting a person who is dead, or flying without wings, for example. Sometimes people become lucid without noticing any particular clue in the dream. Lucid