Dream Cycles
A night's sleep
consists of several cycles that have four phases measured on an EEG
plus one more phase of REM for a total of five phases each. An EEG is
an instrument that measures the electrical activity of the brain. The
hypnagogic state occurs during the first phase, the next three phases
consist of deeper and deeper levels of sleep. Dreaming does not normally
take place during these phases. The fifth phase is REM, which is where
most of the dreaming occurs. One cycle of sleep that contains all five
of these phases takes about 90 minutes to complete. If one sleeps 7
1/2 to 8 hours during the night, there will be five cycles of REM sleep
with the last REM period lasting the longest. This is one of the reasons
why we are most likely to remember the morning dreams.
Interpreting
Your Own Dream
This
is by far, the best way of going about your journery. Often times, the
first thing that comes to your mind when you review your dream is a
huge clue to what the meaning of tha dream is. Try a simple exercise
of writing down your dream and immediately tracking the words, phrases,
emotions, memories, and ideas that come to mind.
Dream Incubation
Hold a thought
in your mind until you dream of it. Meditation helps with discipline
needed for this exercise. You can also find some answers or interesting
relationships from one question to another by doing this. The simplest
way of doing this is to try and make the thought the
last thought you think of before falling asleep by continuing to think
that thought. Writing down the thought, idea, image, question, or dream
scenario can also be very effective. Read it before sleeping and even
give yourself some post-hypnotic suggestions of what you will dream.
Convince or fool yourself into believing that you will have this dream.
It can be a lead into lucid dreaming allowing you the control over your
environment.
Hypnagogic
Dreams
These are the images
that occur just before falling asleep. They can be somewhat frightening,
but also very entertaining and insightful. The best way to catch these
dreams is to have intent on recording them and to do it immediately.
If this kind of dream happens, and you fall asleep before writing it
down, chances are that it will be forgotten in the morning. So unless
you have a problem with insomnia it is worth waking up enough to make
some brief notes on what the image is. The more you do this, the more
you will dicover that there is a distinctive difference between these
dreams and the dreams that happen later in the night or early morning.
The hypnagogic dreams have tremendous potential and can even hold answers
to the questions posed by your REM dreams.
Lucid Dreaming
This is becoming
aware that you are dreaming when you are dreaming. Stephen LaBerge is
one of the scientists who did a lot of break through work on this one.
He watched the motion of his finger in a lucid dream and his eye movement
was observed. It is an interesting concept to prove something like this
because proving what happens in the mind of another is tricky business.
There are countless
ways of inducing lucid dreams. The only "right" way of doing
this is learning what works for you. Some of these methods include:
sleep incubation, starting habits during waking life such as looking
at the hands often, asking yourself if you are dreaming during you own
special trigger moments (like the switching on and off of light switches),
reading about lucid dreaming, talking about lucid dreaming with others,
contemplating what reality is, and many other methods. Sometimes the
very act of seeking out how to achieve this will make it happen.
Astral
Projection
A great deal of
work has been done with this field; examples of this art can be seen
in almost every religion and culture. It is believed that during astral
projection, one can view the Akashic records that are the records of
every action, thought, and creation that has ever occurred. When practicing
astral projection it is easy for the astral body to fall asleep so it
is important to make the journeys short at first until you have learned
how to re-enter the body with the memory still intact.
There is a belief
that when dreaming, the astral body is traveling around doing things
and only in the physical body in part. When the astral body travels
during dreams, many spiritual philosophies of dreaming and healing come
into play. Shamans are known for using this skill to a very refined
degree. Edgar Cayce is one of the most famous people known for his diagnosis
during astral journeys. These are examples of how we can learn to heal
others and ourselves through dreamwork.
