HOW DOES LUCID DREAMING WORK?

Aside from all of the basic knowledge associated with dreaming, lucid dreams involve a different part of

the brain. It has been discussed that dreaming takes place during REM sleep, lasting only about 10

minutes to half an hour, but occurring more than a few times over the duration of your sleep (considering

that you are sleeping for a decent amount of time.) This is hard to believe, especially since when actually

recalling dreams, it seems as though they took place over such a long period of time. When one goes to

sleep, a lot of the parts of the brain shut down.


Have you ever wondered what keeps you from "laughing during a funeral" or


"turing our momentary desire to throttle an annoying person 


into an actual murder?" (Willett, Ed). The prefrontal cortex controls all of your

impulses. It allows you to make rational choices, furthermore providing you with a sense of self-


discipline.

During REM sleep, the prefrontal cortex is inactive. Since the prefrontal cortex controls

our common sense pretty much, this explains why you can do the impossible while 


dreaming. The prefrontal cortex, when active, forces you to stay within the realms of reality. While

lucidly dreaming, the inactive prefrontal cortex cannot control your actions anymore, therefore allowing

lucid dreamers to fly or scale a 60 story building or morph into a shark and stay underwater for the rest of

their life.

Sources Used:

Willett, Ed. "Lucid Dreaming Lets You Be in Charge." Leader-post (Regina) 2870th ser. 0839 (2001):

D.4. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 26 Oct. 2011.