Sleep, the only thing you want after a hard day’s work. You try to close your eyes, but all the sudden your body goes numb. You can’t move, but you’re still awake. The body is sleeping, but you’re fully aware. You panic; you don’t know what’s happening. Your senses are dull, except for your sight. You can see things like you’re in a dream, but you’re not dreaming. You see a woman. She’s coming closer and closer to you, but you can’t move. You’re afraid. Face to face, eyes to eyes she’s looking at you, and then you close your eyes. When you open them, it’s morning. You get up thinking it was just a dream, but it wasn’t. It was an experience known as a lucid dream.

A lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. The ability to manipulate our dream worlds goes beyond the science fiction plot of the movie “Inception.” Deirdre Barrett, a dream expert from Harvard University, explains how it works.

“That we can control our own dreams is quite true and really much more so than people seem to know or realize,” Barrett said. “The details of how to do it are very different depending on whether you’re trying to induce lucid dreams, whether you’re trying to dream about particular content or whether you’re trying to dream a solution to a particular personal or objective problem.”

When I first lucid dreamt, I didn’t even know I was doing it. I hit Google to see what it had to say about my surreal incident and I came across lucid dreaming. The information I found made me want to try lucid dreaming once more, but unfortunately, I couldn’t do it again.

After realizing this whole thing was going to take some work, I put in more effort. I now have a dream journal that I write in the morning after a dream. It is said that keeping a dream journal can boost your creativity as well as your ability to lucid dream. If you can, include more ways one can lucid dream

Even though my current attempts to lucid dream have been unsuccessful, I will never forget the way that woman looked at me in my lucid dream. Hopefully, I can go back one day after a lot of practice, concentration, and patience.