For nearly as long as recorded history, the idea of consciously recognizing and controlling our dreams has been woven into the human narrative. From the Hindu Upanishads to Aristotle's On Dreams, people have been puzzling out the mysteries of lucid dreaming for centuries. In 2012, lucid dreaming experienced a massive surge in interest, and there's more information on lucid dreaming, the science behind it, and the modes and methods of experiencing it than there ever has been... yet the average person remains sadly unfamiliar with this fascinating, entertaining, and instructive activity. Lucid Dreaming can be a truly profound experience, but is often difficult to explain to someone who has never done it. Controlling the flow of your dreams is so visceral and ineffable that it can rarely be related in a meaningful way to a non-lucid dreamer.

Put simply, lucidity is knowing that you're dreaming, while you're dreaming. If you consider the fact that you have been dreaming many times a night, every night, for your entire life, it suddenly becomes clear how strange it is that your subconscious experiences these long and often bizarre excursions without any real awareness of it. Your mind simply accepts whatever disjointed data its presented with, pieces the parts together in a diffuse and nonlinear manner, constructs utterly implausible justifications for the impossible details and then plays back the resulting amalgam almost as if you're a character in a movie. Practitioners of lucid dreaming aim to take back this portion of their life, dissatisfied being a simple actor in their dreams, they choose to become the director and author of these nightly narratives.