A free way to alleviate trauma?
Lucid dreaming – the art of becoming aware that you’re dreaming, enabling you to determine what happens next – may once have been the preserve of your eccentric uncle’s dinner table rhapsodies. But the esoteric practice is being increasingly examined as a potential intervention for trauma. So, it’s with mental wellbeing in mind that we take a closer look
Jennifer is in a dark, dank room. It’s sparsely furnished, save a wrought-iron bed on bare wooden floorboards. Outside, wind and rain rage, shattering a window. Water drips from the ceiling, becoming more persistent as it crashes through the timber, filling the space. As it rises, the room shakes. Through the chaos, a shadowy figure – face obscured – appears. Fear contracts her veins. ‘I’m scared,’ says the voice in her head – ‘leave me alone.’ ‘We’ll meet again,’ comes the gentle response. So gentle, her fear becomes accented with curiosity. Jennifer wakes up with a jolt. Except she’s not bundled underneath her duvet at home. She’s in that sparse, rain soaked room – rattling, more violently now. ‘Do you trust me?’ the figure asks. At that moment, Jennifer realises she is still asleep – and has been, all along. That she is, in fact, lucid dreaming. She understands that her internal state has shifted – that she feels safe now, rather than scared. ‘I trust you,’ she says. Now, the figure places their hands on her shoulders, as she leans, trust-fall style, into their arms. Light surges from her pelvis to the top of her head in glinting rainbow colours spanning shimmering violet to buttercup yellow.
In a lucid dream, you become aware that you’re dreaming, giving you the ability to control what occurs next as you wander through the nocturnal world. If this calls to mind Leonardo DiCaprio in the mind-bending 2010 blockbuster Inception, then you’re on the right lines. But rather than a thief infiltrating the subconscious of his targets, Jennifer is a 38-yearold psychotherapist based in Scotland, who has learned how to disrupt her dreams to process debilitating trauma symptoms. These stem both from childhood experiences (which, she believes, meet the criteria for complex PTSD) alongside the physical shock of acute liver failure, resulting in a life-saving transplant during the pandemic.
Her recovery included eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, accessed via the NHS. She endorses the practice for trauma, alongside the integrative psychotherapy she offers clients. But the ongoing practice of lucid dreaming, she says, allowed her to access deeper levels of trauma integration, following that sudden hospitalisation and shaky journey back to physical health. It was as if accessing a space unbound by the laws of physics via her lucid dreams (ie, if she pushes her hand through a wall it appears on the ot
