EDIT DESK: What Dreams are Made Of

In the last year I have teleported, walked through walls and swum freely into the sky. Everybody can make their wildest dreams come true, and they do not even need to get out of bed. All they need to do is learn to lucid dream.

Lucid dreaming is when you become aware that you are dreaming inside a dream. When one develops a consciousness of this, they can learn to control every aspect of their dream experience. Since all that surrounds you in a dream is a projection of your own self-conscious, exploring the world inside a dream is taking an in-depth tour of your own mind. Talk to the dream people you find, see what it feels like to stick your hand through glass, sit in a field and meditate and observe that all the experiences you just had came from somewhere in your head.

Once you know a little bit more about how your mind works, the dream environment becomes malleable. A dreamer can manipulate the world around him or herself to be whatever he or she wants. Get rid of gravity, slow down time, find extraterrestrial life or create your dream house (literally). I have not been able to stay lucid long enough to do all this yet, but it blows my mind to know that, every time people go to sleep, they have the chance to change their world. Some people have the best experiences of their lives in their dreams. Although that sounds pretty sad and, of course, people should make the most of their actual lives, we can create even more awesome experiences that are contingent to the waking world by lucid dreaming.

There are a number of different techniques to become lucid inside a dream. My favorite technique, and the one which has induced most of my lucid dreams, is called a reality check. Take your index finger — do it right now — and try to stick it through the palm of your other hand. If you are awake, this will hopefully be impossible, but in a dream, your finger will go right through. If someone can remember to perform this reality check maybe 10 times a day, they will eventually start doing it in their dreams.

You might not even need all the techniques yet, though, because a lot of people have their first lucid dream right after hearing about them.

I was a camp counselor this past summer, and one day at lunch, I told my campers all about lucid dreaming. The next week, three of them came in and told me they’d had a lucid dream. One of them told her sister about it, and she had a lucid dream. I told my dad about the campers’ lucid dreams, and the next day, he had a lucid dream. I have not been able to have a lucid dream in a while, but just by reading this, there is a good chance that you will.

People can wait around their whole lives for a few fleeting chances to do something awesome. But really, they can do amazing things every night inside their heads. The average person spends about 6 years of their life dreaming. Use it!