Dreams. They’re the subconscious areas you travel to at night or day (if you’re an insomniac). You get to escape the real world and travel to a place where reality and imagination meet.

Lucid dreaming is the state of sleep where you are aware that you’re dreaming. I occasionally have experienced this. It was scary at first; but soon after, I learned to have fun with it. After all, you get to control an alternative reality.

The state of lucid dreaming is like experiencing your own virtual world. With practice, you get to control those dreams to do practically whatever you want. You have control over yourself, the environment and others in your dream.

If you’re interested in awakening your lucid dreams, here are some tips you could try to help reach that state of lucid dreaming.

• Reality checks: be aware of your surroundings and repeat them to yourself. If you pass by a classroom everyday, mentally tell yourself a description of the class door, or the environment around it.
• Cold rooms: sleeping in a cold room allows you to fall deeper into sleep. A warm room and the covers gives you the tendency to become uncomfortable and move around.
• Keep a dream journal: right when you wake up write down whatever you remember from your dream, allowing yourself to see a pattern. When you’re dreaming, this pattern will be a tip-off that you are dreaming.

The whole conspiracy behind this state of lucid dreaming is that you are actually in a different dimension; another parallel universe that you created. From the moment you enter REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, you shift into another dimension. Being in the deepest state of sleep, your mind is not conscious enough for you to remember everything, making dreams memories when you wake up.

Often times, REM sleep is also called “paradoxical sleep,” because your brain waves look a lot like the waves emitted when you are awake. This could be a sign that you are awake in a different dimension, but asleep in our world.

Personally, being a believer in spirits, this theory didn’t surprise me. It isn’t physically you that’s  traveling, just your spirit. The patterns in your dreams could be your mind’s way of singling out familiar stuff in the vast midst of something so different.

While lucid dreaming is fun when you’re finding yourself in control, it can have a scary side. Sleep paralysis comes into play. This happens when your mind is conscious but you are unable to move your body. It’s like being in a coma, but your mind is fully aware of your surroundings.

This was probably the scariest, but most interesting, experience of my life. I was only 12 when this occurred to me, so I had no clue what happened, and my mind playing tricks on me with the shadows didn’t help. I ended up going back to sleep by calming myself down, which took me back into a lucid dream.

Often times, this state of dreaming can help you overcome fears. You can face them in your dream, while still having an emotional connection to it. This is because your mind is able to feel the fear and you can control it by providing yourself with alternate solutions.
Lucid dreams can be a sign that you are a part of two dimensions, but don’t know it until you’re dreaming. This subconscious mindset allows you to dream while having control of it and may even be a step into traveling through parallel universes. After all, you have to follow your dreams.