A lucid dream, also known as a conscious dream, is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. During lucid dreams, it is possible to exert conscious control over the dream characters and environment and have them perform feats which would be physically impossible in the waking world. Lucid dreams can be extremely real and vivid depending on a person’s level of self-awareness during the lucid dream.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream

Lucid dreams are something that I find very interesting.  After reading a blog post about dreams and nightmares on my good friend Amanda’s blog, my mind really started thinking about the subconscious and how mystical it is.  Everything that happens in a dream is happening in our head, yet we know so little about them.  Dreams can be amazingly powerful too.  I know that my mood for the rest of the day can be affected by a dream I had because it seemed so real.  No matter how strange a dream is, it can still have very strong emotional feelings attached to it.

The ability to control what happens in our dreams seems like it would be one of the most amazing experiences ever.  Just think, you could do anything you want.  You want to fly by flapping your arms?  No problem.  Want to breathe underwater?  Sure thing.  I think the ability for complete control over everything and everyone is a guilty pleasure of the human mind on the subconscious level, no matter how moral of a person you are.  This is especially true when all you have to do to erase everything you did is open your eyes and wake up.  I guess the other guilty pleasure of the subconscious mind would be the ability to have actions without consequences.

Thinking back on dreams, it seems that there are two different ways to look at them.  There is the overall impression of the dream, which sometimes can be an elaborate story that makes sense, however more times than not, is usually a jumpy, convoluted story that contains many events with only a couple things in common such as a person that appears throughout most of the dream.  I guess the best thing to call this would be the “long-term” memory of the dream.  The other way, as you probably guessed would be the “short-term” view of the dream where you think back on only specific events or short moments in time.  Usually, when thought about in these little segments, each little part of the dream makes sense, no matter how one part transitioned to the next.  Sure sometimes someone or something very strange can be going on, but when thought about on a small enough time frame, you don’t have the issue of your location changing spontaneously or people suddenly appearing in your dream out of nowhere. I’ve had times where I had dreams that take place over over a very long time and made sense, for the most part, from start to finish. When I woke up, I felt as if years should have gone by when in fact, only 7 or 8 hours have passed. I even had one night where I had trouble sleeping, so I managed to experience 3 completely separate dreams in one night, and I remembered them all in the morning. Talk about a brain workout.

This really makes me think about how the subconscious works because during the dream, it seems perfectly normal for things to spontaneously change around you.  You could be in your house one moment, and halfway around the world in the next.  The strange thing when this happens though, is that it usually takes me awhile to realize that I’m not in the same place I was before.  This is a little bit of a weird analogy, but its almost as if dreams are fluid and things can shift around smoothly, no matter how different or random it is, and the change is so smooth that it takes awhile to notice the change.

Ultimately, I wish there was some way to record dreams exactly how we see and experience them, no matter how strange or confusing they may be.  I’m sure if we were able to watch our dreams while we were awake, we’d basically be saying “what the hell?” for most of the time, but it would still be interesting to study.  I know a lot of times stuff that has happened to me recently, or even just stuff that has been on my mind lately, can be reflected in my dreams in very interesting, and sometimes subtle, ways.  I really hope we make some breakthroughs into understanding the subconscious part of the human brain as I would love to learn more about it.