Basic Meaning of Lucid Dreams
A lucid dream is one in which you notice, while still dreaming, that this is a dream, and the dream goes on anyway. In an ordinary dream your awareness sits back and receives images; in a lucid dream it steps in, takes part in the dream world, and can sometimes reach into the plot itself.
In dream interpretation, a lucid dream marks a state in which the border between conscious and unconscious has grown unusually thin. This is not simply a story about having an interesting dream. It can be read as a scene in which your mind reaches toward a deeper self-knowledge than usual. After a lucid dream, waking hours often bring more attention to your own habits of thought and shifts of feeling, and that reflection folds back into the dream world.
In discussions of sleep, one view holds that lucid dreams arise when the prefrontal cortex becomes more active than usual during REM sleep: you are dreaming, yet the judging brain is half awake. This neurological feature may be consistent with the idea that lucid dreaming and metacognition share the same foundation.
Situation-Specific Interpretations
What you did inside the lucid dream, and how it felt while you did it, changes the meaning a great deal.
- Noticing it is a dream and acting freely: an expression of having taken the initiative in your life back into your own hands. When you can trust your own choices in waking life, this dream returns again and again. It also marks creativity beginning to move.
- Noticing it is a dream but being unable to act: this mirrors a real situation in which the problem is visible yet you cannot move. You may be caught in the bind of knowing and still not being able to change anything.
- Noticing it is a dream and trying to wake up: resistance to escapism. It shows the strength of a will that refuses to linger in the world the unconscious offers and turns back toward reality.
- Flying inside a lucid dream: a strong wish for self-realization laid over the felt sense that it can be reached. It marks a stretch in which inner growth is picking up speed.
- Talking with someone inside a lucid dream: you are exchanging words with a part of the unconscious. The experience comes close to the Active Imagination that Jung practiced, and what the dream figure says carries a message worth taking.
- A lucid dream turning into a nightmare: awareness has touched the darker side of the unconscious. This is a meeting with the Shadow, and facing it without fleeing, frightening as it is, yields substantial psychological growth.
Psychological Background
Jung called the integration of conscious and unconscious Individuation and placed it as the final aim of human psychological maturity. A lucid dream is one of the signs that this process is in motion. Keeping awareness inside a dream means you stand where the symbols and messages that appear there can be received calmly, without being swallowed by the unconscious.
Within Freud's framework, a lucid dream can also be read as a state in which the censoring function has loosened. Normally the wishes of the unconscious pass through dream censorship and reach awareness only in distorted form; in a lucid dream that distortion thins out and the unconscious material becomes more directly available. Dream interpretation reads this state as a sign of the strength to look straight at your own desires and fears.
In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, lucid dreaming and metacognition, the ability to think about your own thinking, have been reported to involve the same brain regions. In a 2015 study reported in the Journal of Neuroscience by Filevich and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, the group with more frequent lucid dreams showed greater gray matter volume in the frontopolar cortex (BA9/10), along with stronger activity in the same region during a thought-monitoring task.
Through a stretch of recurring lucid dreams, the observing self tends to work more readily in waking situations as well. Rather than being swept into an emotion, you can stand where you watch it. That way of keeping distance builds a stance less easily thrown around by turbulence, and it brings a steadier quality to your dealings with others.
Fortune After Lucid Dreams
A lucid dream points to inner waking and growth, so it suggests an upward turn in fortune overall. Above all, your power to open a path by your own will is running high.
In love, your eye for a person's essence is sharp. Rather than drifting after surface appeal, you can tell who genuinely breathes in step with you. If you already have a partner, what you truly want within the relationship takes on a clear outline, and an occasion arrives to tie the bond more deeply again.
For money, intuitive judgment is sharp. Even so, it matters not to get drunk on the sense of control a lucid dream offers and overtrust your own reading. If you keep analysis and intuition in balance, decisions such as reordering your spending priorities or clearing paperwork you had put off come more easily.
At work, creativity and problem-solving are both heightened. Ideas that are not bound to the usual way of doing things surface readily, and the resolve to carry them out comes with them. This is a fitting moment to bring out a presentation or a proposal.
For health, body and mind are in balance. Being able to have a lucid dream is also a modest hint that your sleep rhythm has not fallen badly out of order. Starting a practice of meditation or mindfulness during this stretch should lead toward deeper self-understanding and steadier calm.