RESEARCH INTO LUCID DREAMING
Lucid dreaming is a state in which you are able to consciously control your dreams, being able to recognize that you are in a dream as your brain is awake throughout the dream. With normal dreams you are normally distant and fuzzy to real life but in a lucid dream everything sense you have is as real as real life.
Positives to lucid dreaming is that it increases problem solving, putting you into situations that you wouldn't expect to be placed into and allows you to work around the problems. Along with the increase of problem solving it also increases your creativity, being able to find creative ways to get out of the problems. Lucid dreams are also known to put you up against your fears, being able to face them and improve your confidence over them. It allows you to explore your conscious mind in a different aspect, being able to control your mind in ways that you may of not experienced before, allowing you to learn more about your mind as a whole and how powerful it can be.
'It doesn't require that you can control anything in your dream, though control is what beginning lucid dreamers often aim at. People get attracted to lucid dreaming because they want to be able to do things they could never do in waking reality, for example, taste fire or fly to the sun.' (Psychology Today, 2012)
As much as there are positives of lucid dreaming there are also many negatives to lucid dreaming. 'One of the best perks of lucid dreams can also be one of the worst pitfalls: realistic feelings. The lucid dream state can offer euphoric feelings of sight, motion, happiness, and even sex, but that means feelings on the other side of the spectrum can happen as well' as said by Life Hacker shows that there are also negatives to lucid dreaming, they continue to say that'there’s also the possibility of “dream claustrophobia,” which is when people become lucid in a dream scenario they are unable to manipulate or awaken from.' Being conscious enough to feel the emotions in your dream can affect you once you wake up, many being said to wake up crying from their dreams or feeling a pain in their side if they have had a bad lucid dream. The worst situation is dream claustrophobia, knowing that you are dreaming but not being able to do anything about the situation, this being the element that I want in my short film.
The concept of my film is that Scott is your traditional everyday human but has a secret power that only comes to life when he falls asleep. He says resolute in his opinion but his friend, Marshall, says otherwise when Scott gets dragged into over the top scenarios when he is in a dream state, putting him in more danger than before. This research was important as Scott is aware of what is happening in his dreams, being able to feel everything that happens when he is another person in his dream. He is able to take over their lives but cannot stop certain things happening, only having partial control of the people in his dreams and the scenarios he is in. I wanted to research into lucid dreaming to be able to understand the elements behind this and to represent it properly into my short film, making it clear and understandable to the audience that Scott suffers with dream claustrophobia, using the tattoo that appears on his arm as the clear indicator for the audience.
This research also allowed me to understand the elements behind lucid dreaming and dream claustrophobia that I didn't know or understand beforehand, allowing me to represent it properly as said before. This is the main context of my film which is why it was important to research this to be able to represent it to the audience in a knowledgeable and understandable context. It is going to be hard to present to the audience which is why I shall be using the tattoo as an indicator but still want to represent this research in the film to make it more realistic and relate-able to the science behind lucid dreaming.
References
Lifehacker.com. (2018). [online] Available at: https://lifehacker.com/the-benefits-and-risks-of-lucid-dreaming-1795735303 [Accessed 5 Mar. 2018].
Psychology Today. (2012). Lucid Dreaming and Self-Realization. [online] Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201212/lucid-dreaming-and-self-realization [Accessed 5 Mar. 2018].
Turner, R. (2018). What is Lucid Dreaming?. [online] World-of-lucid-dreaming.com. Available at: http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/what-is-lucid-dreaming.html [Accessed 5 Mar. 2018].
