Can i control what i dream about

A window, a brick wall, a rock face—these things are only illusions, projections from your mind. They are not physical. Objects may feel solid when you touch them, but they feel solid only because you expect them to feel that way.

Think of the object as air, and you will pass through it effortlessly. In a lucid dream, you can create anything. Nothing is off-limits—no object, creature or contraption is out of reach. Your creation can be as large as a mountain or as complicated as a living organism. If you could create the impossible, what would you make? After a few lucid dreams, many people experience a drastic alteration of their perspectives—they realize that there is much more to reality than they currently understand.

Dreams often alert us to our problems, and guide us toward a resolution. Read over your dream-journal entries and ask yourself, "Do any of these dreams contain advice on how I can be happier and more whole? Sometimes, however, interpreting our dream journals can be tough. It's not always possible to know exactly what your subconscious is communicating. This is where lucid dreaming comes in. You can find lost parts of yourself while actively exploring your inner world.

Subscribe to the live your best life newsletter Sign up for the oprah. Get more inspiration like this delivered to your inbox. Please accept the Oprah. More Inspiration. Often, he explained to us, these are the individuals who have less trouble remembering what they have dreamed about during the night. Some factors that influence dream recall include the amount of time you spend sleeping, the amount of time and energy you spend trying to recall your dreams this can be improved with practice , and your diet.

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Written by Maria Cohut, Ph. Share on Pinterest Lucid dreaming allows people to take control of their dreams. There's one school of thought that this rhythmic firing is the sole cause of dreaming and all the upper cortical activity is a simple response to that. It just doesn't look that way. It looks like the lower brain stem activity wakes the cortex up and then the cortex does a lot of organized, meaningful thinking once it's activated.

The thing that is very frustratingly not neat and clean is that every once in awhile when you wake somebody out of a non-REM period, they report something that looks pretty much like the elaborate narrative of a dream.

This is especially common in people who have big traumas and shift workers who have their sleep disrupted , so it may be that it happens mainly when something isn't operating completely properly with the regular sleep cycle. During dreams, are certain regions more active than others or does that depend on what you're dreaming about? It's sort of halfway in between the extreme version of either of those.

On average, there are several areas that are more active than they would be during the waking state. Those are parts of the visual cortex, parts of the motor cortex and certain motion-sensing areas deeper in the brain.

That's probably related to why dreams are so very visual compared to other sensory modes or types of content and also why they have a lot of motion and action in them relative to our waking experience. The parts of the brain stem that fire those bursts of activity are also active.

There are other areas that are less active on average during REM sleep. Those are the prefrontal areas, which have to do with the fine points of logical reasoning and also where you might say censorship resides. That's not only for censorship of things that are socially inappropriate, what Freud would have meant by censorship of sexual and aggressive impulses, but also the impulses that say, "that's not the logical way to do things. Given that there's higher-level thinking going on in our dreams, to what extent can we control them?

That we can control our own dreams is quite true and really much more so than people seem to know or realize. The details of how to do it are very different depending on whether you're trying to induce lucid dreams, whether you're trying to dream about particular content or whether you're trying to dream a solution to a particular personal or objective problem.

Another really common application has been influencing nightmares, especially recurring post-traumatic nightmares—either to stop them or turn them into some sort of mastery dream. So how can you problem-solve in a dream? Although any kind of problem can make a breakthrough in a dream, the two categories that really crop up a lot are things where the solution benefits from being represented visually, because the dreams are so vivid in their visual-spatial imagery, and when you're stuck because the conventional wisdom is just plain wrong.

He was thinking that in all nonchemical molecules, the atoms were lined up in some kind of straight line with degree side chains coming off it. Once he knew the atoms in benzene, he was trying to come up with arrangements of them that were straight lines with side chains and it just wasn't working. Then he dreamt of the atoms forming as a snake, eventually reaching around with the snake's tail in its mouth.

It seems exactly related to the fact that the prefrontal lobes that control censorship are, on average, much less active during dreams. If you want to problem-solve in a dream, you should first of all think of the problem before bed , and if it lends itself to an image, hold it in your mind and let it be the last thing in your mind before falling asleep. For extra credit assemble something on your bedside table that makes an image of the problem. If it's a personal problem, it might be the person you have the conflict with.

If you're an artist, it might be a blank canvas. If you're a scientist, the device you're working on that's half assembled or a mathematical proof you've been writing through versions of. Equally important, don't jump out of bed when you wake up—almost half of dream content is lost if you get distracted. Lie there, don't do anything else. If you don't recall a dream immediately, see if you feel a particular emotion—the whole dream would come flooding back.

What about if you want to, say, dream of a certain person or about a particular experience—how can you do that? If you're just trying to dream about an issue or you want to dream of a person who's deceased or you haven't seen in a long time, you'd use very similar bedtime incubation suggestions as you would for problem solving: a concise verbal statement of what you want to dream about or a visual image of it to look at.

Very often it's a person someone wants to dream of, and just a simple photo is an ideal trigger. If you used to have flying dreams and you haven't had one in a long time and you miss them, find a photo of a human flying. Image-rehearsal therapy has gotten attention as a strategy to overcome nightmares. How does this technique work, and is it effective? Different people mean different things by that. The details are different but the techniques are very similar—they all grow out of the observation that when people are having bad, repetitive post-traumatic nightmares, a certain proportion seem to move on to having some kind of mastery dream spontaneously.