Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge Ph.D. & Howard Rheingold

Author:Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. & Howard Rheingold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Lucid dreaming
Published: 2014-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

8

Rehearsal for Living

Lucid Dreaming and Peak Performance

It was the night before my first 10 km road run and I was apprehensive. It was my first such race, the course was hilly, and I had never run on a hill in my life; all my training had been on an indoor track. That night I dreamed of running on hills using techniques I'd only read about. I remember knowing I was dreaming during the dream and remarking to myself that this would give me a chance to learn how to run hills. It worked. During the actual run the techniques I'd practiced in my dreams felt exactly the same and worked just as well in reality. B. E., Alexandria, Virginia)

When I was about twelve years old, my mother made my sister and me take tennis lessons one summer. Toward the end of the four weeks of lessons I found out there would be a tournament and a trophy for the winner. That night in my dream I realized I was dreaming and I decided to master the game of tennis. I took what I had seen on TV, on other people's tennis games and tried to remember the way they hit and served, etc. By the end of the dream I was doing pretty good on swinging and incredibly on serving, because with serving the ball, once you have the technique down it's really very basic and repetitious.

When it came to the tournament I beat everyone and walked away with the trophy. The teacher couldn't believe how well I played, and neither could I. (B. Z., Salt Lake City, Utah)

Authors Charles Garfield and Hal Bennett popularized the term "peak performance," referring to those extraordinary moments when body and mind seem to operate together at the very top of their capacity. Research on how to cultivate peak performance suggests that lucid dreaming may prove to be an ideal training ground, not only for athletics, but also for any area in which skill can be developed.

Garfield, president of the Peak Performance Center, interviewed hundreds of successful athletes about those moments when they performed extraordinarily well. He identified mental conditions that seemed to characterize personal peaks for the majority of athletes. Peak performers, he found, were relaxed, confident, optimistic, focused on the present, highly energized, extremely aware of the environment, in control, and completely in touch with their powers and skills. 1 The athletes were mentally, as well as physically, prepared to perform.

Interest in peak performance has spread from sports psychology to business. Businesses have discovered that mental practice can boost performance levels on the job as well as on the playing field. Yoga, breathing, and meditation have been successfully employed for both material and spiritual achievement. Even greater improvements in performance have resulted from the use of controlled mental imagery and mental rehearsal. 2

Lucid dreaming is a very powerful type of mental imagery. Waking mental images are weak sensory impressions that resemble actual experience but are generally not as vivid. For example, imagine an apple in front of you.

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