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Science Verifies Lucid Dreaming Technique

Lucid dreaming is the ability to control dreams

Lucid dreaming is a state in which a person is aware that they are dreaming and can control the dreams.

A technique to induce lucid dreaming has been verified for the first time, and it has a record breaking success rate.

Once believed to me nothing more than myth and exaggeration, science has proved that lucid dreams exist, and have now found a method to induce them without external intervention.

However, techniques vary and some of the required advanced equipment, making it hard for many to access.

Dr. Denholm Aspy of the University of Adelaide set out to find whether or not combining different methods would yield better success rates.

Aspy tested his theory by instructing 169 participants on two different lucid dreaming techniques. The first, ‘Reality Testing’, involves people regularly checking whether they are awake, while the other, Mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD), had them set alarms to wake up after 5 hours and recite “the next time I am dreaming, I will remember that I’m dreaming” before going back to sleep.

While reality testing failed on its own, trials were more successful after the two techniques were combined. Aspy reports, in the journal Dreaming, that 53 percent of the participants had a lucid dream during the trials, while 17 percent had them every night.

The reason Aspy believes that ‘Reality Testing’ had played a role and MILD wasn’t the only factor, is that MILD didn’t give similar results when tested on its own.

Almost half of all people experience a lucid dream at least once in their lifetime. However, most of us either don’t remember them or mistake them for nightmares.

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