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Sleep your way to the top

There’s a knack to lucid dreaming, and once you can control your dreams, you can revolutionise your life

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Anita Chaudhuri

You know that feeling when you’re having the most delicious, blissful experience ever – you’re on a tropical beach, kissing a handsome stranger, or just about to take a bite out of a luscious chocolate cake – when, suddenly, grrr, the alarm goes off? If only you could have willed yourself to keep dreaming for five more minutes. Alas, dreams are beyond our control – or are they?

Sleep scientists are waking up to the idea that it is possible to programme the subconscious mind so we can choose what we dream about, a practice known as lucid dreaming. This obscure phenomenon is about to become far better known with the release early next year of The Good Night, directed by Jake Paltrow and starring his sister, Gwyneth. The film features a troubled man who is determined to escape his depressing reality by mastering the art of directing his own dreams. Soon, he has created a sensual parallel universe with a gorgeous new girlfriend and can have dreams to order like other people rent DVDs.

“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible,” says Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist and expert on lucid dreaming. “Fly, dream, sex. That’s what everybody likes to do. There’s also the possibility of creative problem-solving, overcoming nightmares and anxieties, learning more about yourself.” With practice, you can train yourself to have any experience you like while your brain is on night shift, from having dinner with Johnny Depp to singing on stage with Razorlight. Although the concept of programming the subconscious may sound a bit wacky, it is actually straightforward. What it involves is focusing the mind on a particular question or topic that you want to dream about just before you drift off to sleep.

In order to influence the dreaming mind, it is helpful to understand what happens to the body when it is asleep. “Most dreaming – 80% – takes place during what’s known as REM sleep,” explains Mark Blagrove, director of the sleep laboratory at Swansea University. “This is a state characterised by bouts of irregular breathing and an increased heart rate, as well as rapid eye movement, when the eyes appear to follow events in a dream.” In this state, the body is paralysed from the neck down, nature’s way of preventing injury. While we sleep, we typically switch between REM and a deeper, usually dreamless state. As the night wears on, our dreams become longer and more emotional, which is why we’re more likely to be enjoying a vivid dream when the alarm goes off.

“When we dream, the brain goes into a special state where part of the frontal lobe, the bit to do with emotions, is very active,” Blagrove says. “Meanwhile, another area of the brain, governing critical judgment, is turned off, and the bit of the cortex to do with imagery and vision is turned on. That’s why, in dreams, we get these incredibly bizarre things happening that we simply don’t question.”

Nobody knows exactly why we dream, except that it allows the brain to rehearse different life scenarios in a risk-free environment. One thing that is known is that everybody does it, usually for about 100 minutes a night, and those who claim they don’t simply have poor dream recall.

Eric Maisel, a psychiatrist and the author of Sleep Thinking, believes it doesn’t really matter whether you remember the details of what you dreamt when you wake up. “What’s far more important is that the moment you awake, even if it’s the middle of the night, you jot down any feelings, emotions, colours, thoughts and pictures that come to mind.” He suggests that a person decides on a burning question shortly before drifting off to sleep. “It’s important that you go to bed wondering rather than worrying – there is a difference. One prompt I often give people is: ‘I wonder, where do I go next with X?’ During waking hours the question may be anxiety-provoking, but during sleep, the pressure is off. I’ve had blocked writers produce entire screenplays while sleeping, usually in dreams, and I’ve had painters adopt a whole new style of work. But sleep thinking works for mundane problems, too.”

Clare, for example, had been getting stressed about finding a new nursery for her son. Several nights running, before she drifted off, she asked herself the question, “I wonder where would be a good place.” Each night, she kept dreaming of her son playing in a park near her office. Finally the penny dropped: there was a nursery five minutes’ walk from that place, but she had never considered looking for a nursery near work. Her son is now happily ensconced there.

Jane, an events organiser, used the sleep-thinking approach when she wanted to find a new job. “I was sceptical, but I’d tried everything, from headhunters to websites, and still hadn’t found my dream job. For three nights in a row, I asked myself, ‘How can I find a great new job?’ Then I dreamt about Carla, a woman I’d worked with years ago. Intrigued, I decided to give her a call. Not only did we have a lovely catchup, but she told me that her firm was looking to hire someone with just my experience. Within a month, I had the job.”

HOW TO PROGRAM A DREAM

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The psychologist Gayle Delaney, author of Living Your Dreams, suggests the following steps if you want to dream on a certain issue.

1 Before going to sleep, write down three or four lines about what you did and felt during the day. What were the emotional highlights? This will clear your mind, relax you and help you to recall your dreams. Avoid alcohol – it inhibits REM sleep.

2 Write down the issue you want to dream about as a one-line question such as: “What’s really going on between X and me?”

3 Focus on the question as you drift off to sleep. (It’s best to pick a topic that doesn’t stir up anxiety or strong emotions the first few times – otherwise, you may never get to sleep.)

4 Record in detail everything in your mind the moment you wake up, even if it doesn’t make sense or you don’t remember your dreams. Make no judgments at this point regarding the relevance to your question. Include any feelings, thoughts, songs or fantasies that come up. Try to reexperience the whole dream.

5 Later in the day, conduct a “dream interview” with yourself. First, describe your dream in detail. Then, ask yourself, does the dream remind me of any person, place or issue in my life?

Bear in mind that dreams work in personal symbols and metaphors; they are rarely literal. For one person, a dream about pizza might symbolise a trip to Italy, and could be their subconscious alerting them to the need to take a holiday. For another, pizza could signify a guilty conscience about breaking a diet.

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