What is the difference between lucid dreaming and dream control

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I Accept Show Purposes. Table of Contents View All. Table of Contents. History of Lucid Dreaming. How to Experience a Lucid Dream. Potential Pitfalls. Why Do People Dream? Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles.

Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. Related Articles. Gackenbach measured the bizarreness of LD and non-LD on 21 elements, whereas the bizarreness scores of non-LD were only significantly higher than that of LD on 3 kinds of elements. In our study, we used a within-subject design to balance the effects of individual differences.

It may explain the difference between our results. Ogilvie et al. However, there are also many strange elements in non-LD, and individuals cannot recognize them. Hobson believed that bizarreness or inconsistency is often unable to be recognized in the dream state.

Therefore, there is no necessary relationship between having LD and noticing bizarre elements. Another possible explanation is suggested by our result: For an individual, the higher level of metacognition in LD may allow him or her to realize the sleeping state.

In other words, dream bizarreness may not be the cause of LD emergence, but the result of metacognition level changes followed by LD state. Furthermore, we also explored the relationships between metacognition traits and dream bizarreness. Our results suggested that metacognition traits are not only reflected in waking, but also in dreaming; not only reflected in non-LD, but also in LD. Metacognitive activity is often inhibited in dreams, but this kind of reduction is also different among different individuals.

Individuals with higher metacognition traits would still have more metacognition activities in dreams and lower dream bizarreness values. There has always been a controversy between continuity and discontinuity in the field of dream research. The continuity hypothesis is based on overlaps of dream and wakefulness e. Sometimes what people have in their dreams are also reflected in their waking life. In contrast, the discontinuity hypothesis focuses on the differences between waking and dreaming eg.

Although the metacognition function in LD we found is far better preserved than in non-LD, it is still incomplete compared with the waking state.

Most lucid dreams are not that lucid in general. Individuals in LD still cannot fully have memories of the past and future or maintain the awareness of their own state. Nevertheless, the interruption of self-consciousness is not only a characteristic of dream cognition but also a characteristic of waking cognition Horton, For example, a person may mistake the date of the previous day for today when he or she is awake.

There are many things in common between waking and dreaming. Partly due to the memory consolidation process in the sleeping state, contents of dreaming are not continuous with waking-life experiences Horton and Malinowski, Nevertheless, Stumbrys proposed that the lucidity in dreams, like mindfulness in wakefulness, presents a possible continuity in the self-consciousness across the sleep-wake cycle.

The results of our study confirmed this opinion. We found that higher self-reflection and insight traits are related to less dream bizarreness. Participants showed consistency in LD, non-LD, and waking, which supported the continuity hypothesis of waking and dreaming.

Self-reflection and insight traits extend from waking life to dreams. First of all, participants were all college students in the present study. The university student sample was used by most of the existing research on LD prevalence. However, there are age differences in the prevalence and frequency of LD Voss et al. Future research could expand the group of participants and take demographic information into account.

Mota et al. LD may have very different meanings for normal people and psychiatric patients. Therefore, psychiatric patients should also be taken into consideration in the future. Secondly, the present study found that LD prevalence in China is very similar to that in some western countries.

Individual differences like mindfulness, which is associated with the LD prevalence, are sometimes strongly different in different cultures Stumbrys et al. LD prevalence may also vary within a culture at different times. Therefore, in order to explore the degree of the relationship between LD prevalence and culture, LD prevalence across cultures and at different times within a culture are planned to be investigated.

Thus, LD characteristics like awareness and control should also be investigated separately. Thirdly, the two judges, although not knowing the research hypothesis, could easily tell whether a dream was lucid or not from its content.

Although the scoring had objective criteria and there were two independent judges to improve reliability, it would be meaningful to explore the influence of knowing lucidity on dream bizarreness scoring in the future.

In this study, we only preliminarily explored the bizarreness difference between LD and non-LD. In order to explore more detailed changes in the bizarreness of LD, future research may divide LD into different stages e. Besides, LD is particularly susceptible to suggestion before sleep. Therefore, this study only collected already happened dreams, using the most recent dream paradigm to ask each participant to report a most recent LD. However, errors may still occur because of memory bias and the fact that only one lucid dream is collected from each person.

In future research, it would be better to ask subjects to keep a long-term dream diary without telling them about LD to get enough lucid dreams from each subject. And then identify lucid dreams and analyze these dreams together.

In addition, this present study is correlational, so no causal inference can be made. Other metacognition aspects like reality monitoring are also closely related to LD Corlett et al. Dopamine can mediate metacognitive activities, such as self-awareness and reality monitoring Schnider et al. On the premise of not harming the health of subjects, drugs that promote dopamine secretion can be used to see the changes of dream bizarreness in future studies.

Considering LD prevalence was rarely studied and related results were controversial in Asian countries, we first investigated the LD frequency of China in a standardized way. We found that the prevalence of LD in China is similar to findings in western countries.

To the best of our knowledge, our present study is the first study to compare dream bizarreness of LD and non-LD contents within subjects. We found that the bizarreness of LD is lower than that of non-LD, which also proved that LD is not as strange as usually considered.

In general, dream bizarreness is related to individual differences in metacognition traits, and subjects with higher self-reflection and insight would have lower dream bizarreness. The results of this study revealed that there is a kind of continuous self-consciousness across waking, LD, and non-LD state. As a special consciousness state, LD may shed light on the research of consciousness and dream continuity hypothesis.

Based on our findings, future research is suggested to treat dream bizarreness in a more general way. Dream types, individual differences in metacognition should be taken into consideration. The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

CY designed this research and finished it. HS contributed to the manuscript submitting and provided the language help. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to the editor and the reviewers for their careful work and thoughtful suggestions.

In addition, we thank heartily Brian Feldman for checking the English in the manuscript. Aviram, L. Lucid dreaming: intensity, but not frequency, is inversely related to psychopathology. Blagrove, M. Dream Res. Blanke, O. The out-of-body experience: disturbed self-processing at the temporo-parietal junction. Neuroscientist 11, 16— Bradley, L. Reflection during REM dreaming. Dreaming 2, — Corlett, P.

Dreams, reality and memory: confabulations in lucid dreamers implicate reality-monitoring dysfunction in dream consciousness. Neuropsychiatry 19, — Domhoff, G. Emotions, Personality, and Psychotherapy. Google Scholar. Dresler, M. Volitional components of consciousness vary across wakefulness, dreaming, and lucid dreaming. Sleep 35, — Neural correlates of insight in dreaming and psychosis.

Your doctor can determine if therapy with lucid dreaming is right for you. It occurs during REM sleep. When used in therapy, lucid dreaming can help treat conditions like recurring nightmares and PTSD. Researchers think it might also aid physical rehabilitation. These methods can train your mind to be conscious of your consciousness during sleep. By blocking blue light in the evening, you can prevent the disruption in the natural sleep-wake cycle caused by artificial lighting and electronics.

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