Lucid dreaming can be used as a powerful escapism technique and you can easily feel better by having a good lucid dream..
But before you get too excited, and think that lucid dreaming can be used to sweep all your problems under the rug, think again.
Nothing you do in the world of dreams can act as a Band-Aid that fixes all your problems at once, HOWEVER, with some practice and a little discernment, you can learn how to effectively use your lucid dreaming practice to escape from mundane pressures and “real world” problems.
While lucid dreaming is a tremendously effective panacea for what ails you, it requires dedication and hard work to get to a level that will help you solve problems in your waking life.
What do I mean by this?
Being able to achieve lucidity in a dream to begin with is hard work and often takes most people a while to get into the swing of it.
In fact, when most people start off on their quest to achieve lucidity, they often become discouraged and give up before they have the chance to experience how truly awesome and life-affirming lucid dreaming can be.
Perseverance is KEY and it is only those with faith and dedication to their lucid dreaming practice that will be able to reap its benefits.
You can’t simply decide that you have problems that you wish to escape from and then hope to have a lucid dream that allows you to “escape from it all.” In short: this means that lucid dreaming isn’t like sitting down in front of a video game with a bunch of mates and a takeaway pizza.
Paradoxically, when it comes to lucid dreaming, self-awareness is what you need in order to eventually learn how you can “escape from it all.”
While taking drugs, drinking and using things like shopping, food and video games helps anesthetize people so they can escape from their humdrum realities, the “fix” that they crave is always temporary.
Activities such as these are an attempt to numb the pain in a desperate attempt to become “un self-aware.” Not the case with lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreaming makes you more aware
The very nature of lucid dreaming is to help you become aware, or, lucid. Once you have mastered your own mind (so that you become truly lucid in your dreams), you can then use that same lucidity to forge a new relationship with what it means to be self-aware.
Self-awareness doesn’t have to mean depression, pain, frustration or boredom and by tapping into the constructive and life-affirming power of your own inner world you can change what it means to be self-aware.
How do you do this? By tapping into the rich reservoir of creative potential that you have inside of you instead. You can literally do anything you wish and become anyone you want when you are lucid dreaming and so this makes it the perfect time to experiment with “wishful thinking” scenarios.
Because lucid dreams feel so intensely real and visceral, you can imagine and create your wildest fantasies while you’re asleep and still feel the positive effects in your waking life.
Cultivating the Butterfly Effect
The positive experiences that you create for yourself while you are in the lucid state will have such a pleasant knock-on effect in your waking life that it won’t be long before your everyday existence may start to resemble the life that you have created for yourself in your dreams.
Think about it. When you wake up from a regular, non-lucid dream you can’t help but feel happy and elated for the rest of the day. Now imagine that feeling ten-fold.
That’s what it’s like to wake up from a beautiful lucid dream. Since you are able to actively control the dream state and since you have created the content of your dream, you can wake up feeling like this every day.
This will make you feel amazing over time and you’ll find that you will no longer have a waking life that you wish to escape from.
Since you are in complete control of your environment, you can use this time to dream a “new you” into creation. Much like “the butterfly effect,” the positive awareness that you cultivate in your lucid dreams will then pass over into your waking life.
Depression and Lucid Dreaming
Depression often springs from feelings of hopelessness, frustration and feeling like you are not in control of your life, however, with lucid dreaming, you are the writer, director and actor and your inner world needn’t reflect a reality that isn’t less than perfect.
Instead of feeling insignificant and hopeless, your modus operandi can be one of joy, love, gratitude and inner peace. Instead of a world that is coloured by self-doubt and self-loathing, imagine what it would be like if you could consciously choose to eradicate these feelings and replace them with joy.
As mentioned above, the natural high you will experience upon waking may help you deal with the uncomfortable feelings that you have been trying so hard to escape from.
Lucid dreaming and escapism
In order to escape from your problems by using lucid dreaming, you have to have enough self-awareness to acknowledge that you have problems that you wish to escape from in the first place.
So as you can see, lucid dreaming cannot be used as a replacement for long winter nights slumped down in front of Netflix. You must work hard to achieve lucidity in the first place and then use that lucid awareness to create a beautiful, ideal world that makes it fun to escape to every night.
