Lucid Dreaming and Effects on the Real World

Brian Murray
Mr. Cruikshank
Psychology Honors
9 March 2015

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Dreaming is a common thing for most people to experience while sleeping. All dreaming is, is a series of images, ideas, emotions, or sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Some people can become aware that they are dreaming, and that is called
Lucid Dreaming. While lucid dreaming the dreamer has a chance to control or manipulate the imaginary experiences that are occurring. Most people that experience lucid dreaming wake up immediately after they realize that they are dreaming. Lucid dreaming can be practiced meaning the you can learn to have more control over your dream. This will allow the dreamer to choose how they want to respond to the dream. One will be able to transform the dream from a terrifying, helpless, life threatening experience, to whatever they want. These people on the other hand lose all fear which can affect on the real world. They won't be afraid of death in their dream because they know that it is not real life. People can also learn to master their dreams and create their own worlds with whatever they want to happen in them. Lucid dreaming for some people can change their real world. People that don't like their real world life can develop their own world inside of their dreams and these people will prefer to be in these dreams over their normal lives. Lucid Dreams can cause people to day dream making it hard for those people to stay in reality. In many cases people with bad social lives would rather just keep dreaming then face the reality of the world. This helps develop the question, how does lucid dreaming have an affect on your real world? Many studies have been created to answer this question.
Lucid dreaming can take over some peoples lives. People can forget if they are actually in the real world or not because they have lucid dreams so often. Some people became afraid of doing things because they think they might mistake the waking world as still part of the dream.
People become addicted to dreaming because it pleases them. This can be dangerous because it

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can be unhealthy to become addicted to sleeping because you will lose the benefits of living in the real world. People use this to escape their waking life and end up losing connections in the real world. All social normalities can be lost and forgotten. Dr. Stephen LaBerge's developed a device called the Dream Light that helps monitor and encourage lucid dreaming. (Stephen
LaBerge 17) It monitors sleep and when it detects REM sleep it gives a cue, a flashing light that enters the dream to remind the dreamer to become lucid. During this study LaBerge found that the people in the dreams became different. They acted completely different than how they would in reality. The changes in personality that were created were negative and it caused those people to become someone who they were not. (Stephen LaBerge 39) When these people lost sight of reality they became a person that they would have never wanted to be. They acted like they never left their dream making them feel like they are in control of everything that goes on in the real world. The addiction lucid dreaming causes can hurt a person and make them unstable because they lose sight of the real world.
Lucid dreams can be scary to think about especially if they cause you to lose emotions or feelings. People that can dream lucidly can feel invincible and if they confuse their dream with reality those people can put themselves into extreme situations of harm. (Psychology
Today)Studies that have received information directly from lucid dreamers have found that these people that experience lucid dreams lose the feeling of fear because they can't tell that things maybe real or not anymore. In the dreams people can give themselves superpowers but because