On the back of a whale in the middle of an impossibly blue ocean, I was riding high, slapping high fives with the fins of great white sharks and taunting a giant squid. It was an amazing dream.Yet moments before, I’d been locked in a recurring 
childhood nightmare, the one in which I tumbled into the jaws of the sharks. This time everything was different: Still asleep, I realized I was dreaming and turned the scary dream into something beautiful. I awoke exuberantnd the nightmare never came back.
That was the first time I experienced a lucid dream: a dream in which the dreamer is aware of being asleep and can control the script. Lucid dreaming, also known as dream yoga, is gaining attention in the West. But the practice has been refined over the centuries by Tibetan Buddhists and Taoists, who use it as a tool for reaching enlightenment. Yogis, believing that the “dream body” is better able to feel subtle channels and chakra, have also used lucid dreaming to perform physical yoga and meditation, and to communicate with spiritual teachers. But the main point is to help you see that “reality” is like a dreamonstructed in the mind. If you can see through the illusion of your dreams, you can more easily see through the illusion of reality, too.
Now that scientists in the West have begun to study dream yoga, they’re discovering it has many practical applications. Research and testimony from practitioners suggest that lucid dreaming can help people boost creativity, shed addictions, transcend phobias, and improve performance in sports and at work. Sleep researchers say the method probably works something like creative visualization doesnly more powerfully, because dreams feel more real and thus have a more profound effect on the body and mind.
Lucid dreaming can be particularly useful for breaking through negative emotions. For example, if you interpret a nightmare about a monster to be, say, fear about a relationship, making that mental association can be therapeutic. But in a lucid dream, you can confront or change the monster itself.
“When you escape from a nightmare by waking up, you haven’t dealt with the problem,” says Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist who directs the Internet-based Lucidity Institute. “But staying with the nightmare and accepting its challenge, as lucidity makes possible, allows you to resolve the dream problem in a way that leaves you healthier than before.”
LaBerge can take credit for many discoveries about lucid dreaming. In the late 1970s, it was his research at Stanford University that showed lucid dreaming to be both a common phenomenon and a teachable skill. “Yogis never needed any knowledge about neurology to do this,” he says. “But it’s important that we do the scientific research so we can talk to Westerners about it in their own language.”
LaBerge has found that parts of the brain used in waking life can also be stimulated by dreams. For example, one of his studies at Stanford showed that subjects who had an orgasm in a dream had physiological reactions similar to those of a waking orgasm. It’s that basic principle, says LaBerge, that makes dreams feel so real and makes lucid dreaming such an effective tool for creative visualization.
