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lucid dreaming Thank you in advance for the help! And from Aristotle down to Freud, dreams have captivated the attention of mankind for thousands of years

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lucid dreaming Thank you in advance for the help! And from Aristotle down to Freud, dreams have captivated the attention of mankind for thousands of years. But even Freud recognized a certain kind of special dream, one wherein the dreamer has the capability to actively shape and manipulate the content of the experience.

Traditional conceptions of a dream were, and still are, of a passive state of semi-conscious, partial awareness during a time when the mind’s connection to the outside world is temporarily severed. Lucid dreams defy this traditional conception in that they are not “semi-conscious”, they are not “partial”, and they most certainly are not “passive”. In fact, a “lucid dream” is a conjunction of two aspects: “a dream in which the dreamer” (a) “becomes aware that he or she is dreaming”, and (b), “achieves a degree of control over the content and direction of the dream” (McElroy, 2007: 3). Thus, there seems to be a logical incongruity at work here: in what sense can we call a “lucid dream”, an experience which is fully, consciously active, a “dream”? In order to answer this question and the corresponding logical inconsistency, we will have to reformulate the conventionalist definition of a “dream” and then perform comparative analysis based on this definition between lucid dreams and non-lucid dreams. In the end, it shall be concluded that a lucid dream is different not in kind but by degree from a non-lucid dream in that both are in some sense conscious and in some sense active.

Firstly, what is a “dream”? A dream simply appears to be “a series of mental images and emotions occurring during sleep”, but what is a dream really? Historically, to Jung, a dream was a compensation mechanism for one-sided attitudes held in waking consciousness (Jung, 2001), and to Freud, a dream was a process whereby the brain, through bad dreams, gains control over emotions resulting from distressing experiences (Carskadon, 1993). More recent psychological investigations reveal that illogical brain activity may force the brain to solidify semantic memories. During sleep, such change could happen because the information exchange between the neocortex and the hippocampus is reduced (Stickgold, Hobson, Fosse, & Fosse, 2001).