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Lucid Dreaming Research Paper

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Being able to control everything around you is only possible by lucid dreaming which is an unusual experience in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep where you are conscious that you are dreaming. In this way, people can control their dreams so to make them by preference. For the sleeper these dreams look real, however the dreamer knows that this is not a reality which makes this a skill that provides hours of enjoyable experience (Susan Blackmore, Lucid Dreaming: Awake in Your Sleep?)
There are four sleep stages: Non-rapid eye movement (NREM) stage one, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) stage two, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) stage three and four, which are grouped together due to the many similarities, and lastly, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. In the first stage we begin to lose self-awareness and muscle tone. In stage two our body is completely relaxed so as not to react to the upcoming dreams. Stages three and four are marked by the loss of senses and reaction to the environment. Finally …show more content…
Documentation for the existence of the lucid dreams is found in the East before 1000 AD from the Upanishads, spiritual Hindu rituals. In the Western Greek civilization, are described by Aristotle in his "On Dreams" where he writes about the existence of something that tells us that we are dreaming. During Middle ages lucid dreams, because of the church, were accepted as demonic. In the 1900s, the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eden used for the first time the word "lucid" in term of mental state. In his research he explained how the complete restoration of the psychic functions to their unified state lead to a full self-awareness of the sleeper, increased attention and the possibility to control the dream. Even though all this, the sleep is deep and unperturbed (Frederik van Eden, Study of Dreams). His and other researchers have just begun to bring back to life this unusual

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