CONTROL YOUR MIND: A QUICK GUIDE TO LUCID DREAMING by Sophie Latham

CONTROL YOUR MIND: A QUICK GUIDE TO LUCID DREAMING by Sophie Latham

Lucid dreaming is when you are aware you’re dreaming without waking up in real life. You are present within your dream.

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DREAM LUCIDLY?

When you’re dreaming, your entire environment – the people present, your surroundings – is a product of you, and your subconscious rules over it all. It’s a great way to learn about yourself, but most importantly, lucid dreaming enables you to control what happens in your dreams. Those who suffer from frequent nightmares turn to lucid dreaming to confront them. Most of the time, people want to learn this technique to be able to do something which is impossible in real life. For example, most want to fly and defy gravity. Some do it to speak with a dead relative or even with their past selves to come to terms with issues they may have. It can be a very useful tool to get into your own mind, but the three step process requires dedication for it to work.

STEP 1: JOURNALING

The first step to lucid dreaming is recording your dreams, and teaching yourself to remember them. Try putting reminders around your room and keeping a notebook by your bedside table. As soon as you wake up, before moving – as this will shift your surroundings and the dream will slip away from you – write down everything you can remember about your dream, any details you can think of. Focus on your senses: what could you see, hear, taste, smell and feel? Mentally walk through what happened, one event at a time. Who was there? What was your prevailing emotion (joy, humiliation, panic, frustration, paralysis, anger, confusion…)?

As you keep this journal, read your past dreams every once in a while: you should start to notice recurring patterns which could be people, elements, feelings, or places that are always present. These are your “dream signs”.

STEP 2: REALITY CHECKS

As soon as you identify your “dream signs”, you’ll know what to watch out for so that you can tell you are dreaming. In order to remember to do “reality checks” in dreams, you need to establish a habit of doing reality checks in real life (when you walk through a doorway, when you check the time) to get used to them. Reality checks are quick tests that aim to check the reality of your surroundings. The easiest and most popular checks are:

- Looking at your hands: whilst you are dreaming, anatomy becomes quite fluid and so you are likely to notice something abnormal, such as having an incorrect number of fingers. If you regularly stare at your hands and count your fingers you will train yourself to test your surroundings, and eventually, you will do it whilst you’re dreaming and realize you aren’t awake.

- Checking the time: in dreams, time is very difficult to read and it doesn’t flow as it should. When a clock isn’t displaying properly, or when the time changes unusually if you glance away and look back, you are dreaming.

- Reading a sign: the same principle applies to printed writing. In dreams, words and letters seem to dance around the page and it is very difficult to make any sense of them. Checking a sign - or anything with writing on it - when you encounter your “dream signs” will ensure you do this while you are actually dreaming.

- Testing gravity: If you jump, do you float down or drop? Gravity is arbitrary in dreams, so a weightless feeling will indicate you aren’t conscious.

STEP 3: STAY IN THE DREAM

The most difficult part of lucid dreaming is staying in the dream once you’ve realised you are dreaming. For the majority of people, the excitement of becoming lucid wakes them up in real life.

The best advice to avoid waking up after becoming lucid is to focus strongly on one thing in your dream (preferably something close up e.g. your fingertips) or to start spinning, in order to keep dreaming through the ‘swooping’ feeling. Once this fades, you are dreaming lucidly and can do anything you wish!

Sophie Latham

The Self : The Greatest Illusion

The Self: The Greatest Illusion

What is your self?

Oxford dictionary defines the self as “a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action”. You. 

The self is basically considered to be the essence of you. 

It is your past,your future, your personality, your thoughts, your memories. 

As you lie in bed each morning, just woken up, with your eyes straining to make sense of your

surroundings and the nighttime’s haze slowly lifting from your mind, the first-person observer of reality reassembles itself to take on the new day. That first-person observer is your self.

Your self is many things indeed. But one thing it might not be is real.

The claim that the self does not exist seems erroneous, and even ludicrous. If your self isn’t real, who are you? Isn’t the doubt of the existence of the self, proof enough that the self does indeed exist?

As we try to make sense of it all, getting a grip on the true notion of the self is tricky. Thankfully scientists have amalgamated three fundamental beliefs about the self. First: the self is unchanging and continuous. Second: the self is the “unifier” of the world around us. Third: the self is an agent, meaning it thinks and acts. Two different models of the self, based on these three fundamental beliefs, have been determined: that of a string of pearls, and that of a rope.

According to the first model, the self is a continuous and constant element that runs through our life like a thread runs through the string of pearls. It is present at every moment of our lives yet is always unchanging. Our mood fluctuations, changes of opinions or tastes, symbolized by the pearls, have no effect on this thread of self.

However,the empirical evidence scientists claim so far on the self points towards the second model. Presumably, just as a rope is made up of a sequence of overlapping short fibres, the self would be a continuity of overlapping mental events.

Regardless of the chosen model, it is clear that the sense of self is an effortless, intuitive and axiomatic human experience. But it is nothing more than an intricate illusion.

The Buddhists were the first to assert that there is no unique individual self, by stating that everything is impermanent and the self is an illusion. In Buddhism, “suffering comes from craving, and the idea of the self is a craving for immortality”.

For the less religious, there is also empirical evidence that suggests the sense of self is no more than an illusion, no more than an elaborate construct of the mind.

But it seems to serve us well: the illusion is so anchored in us, and so useful to our reality, that it is impossible- and maybe even dangerous- to shake it off.

The weather

An actual ‘highly’ important problem ? The nerve-racking weather .

Here comes the ‘rain’, toodle doo doo, or is it supposed to be ‘sun’? Honestly we must admit that the current weather, that shifts from blue skies and (proper) spring heat, to damp pavements and cold winds that make you wish you were back under the covers, from a day to another or within a few minutes, has been absolutely unbearable.

For my part, I’m not a fervent believer in global warming, and even though I’m sure most of you could find hundreds of scientifically proven arguments to make me see reason, I believe it to be part of the earth's natural cycle. But after freezing to death for the past weeks, as I persisted in dressing lightly in hope of a warmer tomorrow, I realised that perhaps global warming was much needed here. No one could argue that, our emission of greenhouses gases (C02 and Ch4) has had a highly positive impact on the environnement. It also seems that we will not be the only ones losing square feet, due to the average rise of housing in London, as some adorable polar bears (that aren’t as friendly as they look) will be joining us.

Another problem related to the uncontrollable weather, is clothing. I don’t usually plan what I will wear the morning to come, which explains my constant tardiness, as I never seem to find a matching pair of shoes; but a quick look out the window and I get the general weather forecast for the day. Though lately my predictions haven’t worked out. UGG’s when the rain starts pouring aren't the best option, neither are rubber rain boots when the sun is shining… Trust me, they are both equally disagreeable, especially when you make a hole with your toes through your ‘brand new’ pair of soft Brown UGG’s when the sheepskin stretches.

They are not water resistant, so why are they suitable beachwear according to the suntanned Australian models that parade in them?

So in conclusion, I am constantly either freezing or extremely warm, but I can’t seem to find the right balance. This is of course driving me utterly mad and I doubt I’m the only one. Plus, I can no longer stand the pastel and almost fluorescent summer clothes that invade all the shop windows I pass by, while my damp hair sticks quite unattractively to my face. They only make me wish that we were already enjoying the warm Granada depicted in Garcia Lorca’s poems.

If we look back over the school year, we can see we had a very enjoyable September, with warm days and lunch in the park (which was dreadfully filled at all times), a mild winter with little snow and sun filled days, and a very original April and May. While the month of April suggests ‘showers’, and May suggests spring weather, we got a drought in April and cannot follow this piece of advice: Ne'er cast a clout till May is out' (meaning cover yourself if your not looking for a near death freeze experience).

However, if you choose to adopt a more optimistic point of view, it seems the temperatures will be finally rising and the sun might be making extended appearances. Which also means not being able to go outside as often as you wish, with the upcoming exams that demand revision for those who recuperated from their weekends on Mondays or chatted away in class, informing everyone of whatever came into their absent minds.

Also, remember that if every season can be enjoyed so can the changing weather:

‘Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, and snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.’ ~John Ruskin

Victoria Taittinger (2nde)