Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume - 4, issue 9 1 March 2020 | Page 35

From overcoming fears and developing new skills to healing your inner child
and discovering the meaning of your life, lucid dreaming has amazing
potential.
As mentioned in the previous section, lucid dreaming is the practice of
becoming consciously aware during the dream state. So if we spend one-third
of our life dreaming, how can we make the best use of this time in the dream
world?  You’ll find some amazing possibilities below:
1. Lucid dreaming improves real-life skills …
Lucid dreaming has been used by many people as a rehearsal for living.
Using your dreams to improve your skills in real life can be effective in a
number of ways:
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Lucid dreams provide the most vivid kind of visualisation. They offer a
more effective form of mental imagery and mental rehearsal than in
waking life.
Lucid dreams can enhance your motor skills. It’s been proven that new
skills can be learned by simply thinking about them. Lucid dreaming
creates new neural pathways for real-life rehearsal.
You can perfect routines and high-risk actions in your dreams – risk-
free!  Sport researcher Paul Tholey claims that lucid dreams help
improve the psychological state of athletes by changing person-
orientated focus to situation-orientated focus.
Performance anxiety and low self-confidence can be worked on and
changed in lucid dreams – and all while you’re aware that there’s no
threat and you’re in control!
Basically, the idea is that we can program patterns of behavior in our dreams
that will alter the way we act in waking life, positively.
Here’s a simple lucid dreaming exercise for practicing and mastering a new
skill: