A friend told me about a dream he woke up from two days ago. He said it was so buck-wild, that he could not believe it was so real. When he said it, my first thought was lucid dreams and there was a high chance he knew it was a lucid dream himself.
To understand Lucid Dreams, let's go back to Sigmund Freud who was born in 1856 and refered to as the father of psychoanalysis and also given the credit for Oedipus complex. Upon reading about Freud, i saw that he wrote a lot about dreams and these writing where the foundation for much of psychology, most of his theories were wrong. For instance, his paper titled "On Coca" were he compared coca to alcohol saying it was a more potent and less harmful stimulant to alcohol which was wrong.
While he is refered to as the father of dreams, he was not the first to write theories about dream, but what made his different was how he was able to create theories on how dreams could inform our conscious live. He theory argued that every dream would be a senseful psychological structure which could be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state, saying dreams can be interpreted.
Since this period, understanding why we sleep has become a major part of psychology and the answer isn't found yet because physiologically it doesn't serve any purpose. According to an article which I saw titled "The possible functions of REM sleep and dreaming" showed that deprivation of REM sleep in humans for about two week do not have effect on behavior. Also antidepressant can affect REM sleep and people who take this medication do not show effects as a result of not undergoing this sleep dream phase even after taking the medication for months or years.
According to the study I wrote about above, not dreaming doesn't affect us in any way but then, there is a theory to why we dream and the popular one is Activation Synthesis Theory and i found this in a paper titled "REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness" where the argument says that dreams are byproduct of our brains lower functions which is then decode as visual and auditory hallucination when sleeping.
When it comes to lucid dreaming, there are a lot of definitions to it and psychiatrist Frederik Van Eeden even explained it as one of the 9 types of dreams but I am not discussing dreams in general so let's continue with lucid dreams. he identified a lucid dream as one in which reintegration of the psychic function is complete thereby allowing the dreamer to remember both day life and his own condition so much so that the person dreaming is aware and has control over the dream.
With lucid dream, even when you are awake, you are able to control your brain function thereby allowing you to control your dreams the way you want it. Imaging wanting to be Avatar in your dream and you are able to control the four element. I would use water so much so I can swim as I want. in recent years, LRLR signaling is being used to communicate between the lucid dreamer and researchers.
Some researchers say that lucid dream is something that can be learned and developed by training and induction strategies such as prospective memory techniques (Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreaming technique) where the dreamer repeats the words that will ensure they have a lucid dream, external sensory cues, and sleep interruption with small periods of wakes.
Reference
https://www.heretical.com/freudian/coca1884.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2716
http://www.dreamscience.ca/en/documents/New%20content/lucid%20dreaming%20pdfs/vanEeden_PSPR_26_1-12_1913.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11121/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6874013/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6451677/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6517539/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6451677/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082533/#!po=13.1579
