Physiology suggests that “seeing is believing” to the brain during any mental state. Even waking consciousness is liable to accept discontinuous or illogical experience as real if presented as such to the brain. Dream consciousness is similar to that of a hallucinating awake subject.
Facts:
- Dream memory and waking life memory are stored in the same place and therefore they give you the same sensations when you access them. That’s one of the reasons why lucid dreaming feels so real.
- We have at least 5 dreams every night but most of us just forget about them. Some even say that they don’t have dreams.
- During dreaming the body paralysis itself as a protection mechanism to prevent the movements which occur in the dream from causing our physical body to move. However, it is possible for this mechanism to be triggered before, during, or after normal sleep while the conscious brain awakens. This can lead to a state where you are lying in your bed unable to move! It can be a pretty frightening and experience for some people.
- The rate that time passes while lucid dreaming is the same with the one in walking life. Now there are few exceptions, you can actually live a full life in a dream.
- The emotions we feel in our dreams are stronger then the ones we feel in the walking life because the part of our brain that filters emotions is actually not working.
5 stages of sleep:
|
Effects |
Brainwave Frequencies (HZ) |
|
| Stage 1 | IN between sleep and normal walking consciousness. If woken up during this stage you would think that you didn’t sleep. |
4 to 8 |
| Stage 2 | Really similar to stage 1, but you are a bit more into sleeping and less conscious. |
8 to 15 |
| Stage 3 | Full body relaxation, body and mind are partially shut down. Stage of deep sleep, it is really hard to wake up in this stage and if you get woken up you will feel really really tired. In this stage our body muscles are partially shut down to prevent us from acting out our dreams in the real world and getting hurt. |
2 to 4 |
| Stage 4 | Basically the same as Stage 3. |
0.5 to 2 |
| Stage 5 (REM) | IN this stage the brain and body get active and we start dreaming. Eyes are rapidly moving. In this stage we experience most vivid dreams. And this is where you will be experiencing most of your lucid dreams. Also, the body enters a full sleep paralysis and if you got suddenly woken up during this stage you won’t be able to move your body for 4-10 seconds, you will also find it easy to remember what you were dreaming. |
15-30 (The frequency of normal walking consciousness is: 15-50) |
A complete sleep circle from stage 1 to stage 5 – REM takes about 90 – 110 minutes. The fist REM stage is around 90 minutes after falling asleep and lasts about 10-20 minutes. However, after each sleep cycle the first 4 stages of sleep are getting shorter and the REM stage is getting longer, so the the last REM stage in a 8 hour sleep lasts around a hour.
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