Lucid Dreaming: Asleep And Aware

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change. There
are usually pauses in breathing and changes in heart rate. The amount of
brain activity is more heightened than that of a regular dream, but less
than when waking. It has also been observed that a person having a lucid
dream shows more brain activity than a waking person under the influence of
hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (Lucid Dreaming 364).
A lucid dream is usually provoked by an earlier day of heightened
stress or anxiety (Lucid Dreaming 364). They usually occur at the end of
an eight or nine hour sleep (Horgan 50).
Several methods have been developed for inducing lucid dreams. The
simplest and most common method is known as the MILD method, or Mnemonic
Induction of Lucid Dreaming. This method consists of waking in the early
morning from a dream and remembering what the dream was about. Then as the
dreamer returns to sleep he or she should remind themselves that the dream
is not real as they return to the original dream (Lucid Dreaming 366).
The second ...

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When a person falls asleep, all their
muscles are paralyzed except for the eyes and internal organs. By moving
the eyes from left to right a predetermined number times, a person can
signal things to the outside world. Keith Hearne first discovered this in
1978 and used it to prove that lucid dreams are real and happen in REM
sleep. He used a polygraph to determine that when his subject moved his
eyes left to right eight times, he was indeed in REM sleep, and aware of
the fact. A person can also signal that they are dreaming by breathing
rapidly (Blackmore 366).
With the ability to communicate while dreaming and being able to
control the dream, many questions that have remained ...

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