For the average college student, sleeping comes easily. So easily, in fact, it can be hard to control when and where they sleep: nodding off in lecture halls, dozing on the Quad, passed out in the Union. But while controlling sleep patterns is debatable, most sleep researchers agree that there is one thing most people cannot control — their dreams.

Lucid dreaming, or the ability to become aware when one is dreaming and then control the dream, is relatively rare, said Pam Ryan, manager of Christie Clinic at CU Sleep. But, she said, most people will experience at least one lucid dream in their lifetimes, usually triggered by a nightmare.

Dallas Knauer, senior in Media, said she has experienced a handful of lucid dreams since she first learned of their existence in high school. Knauer said she realized that she was dreaming during the dream because “something was off.”

“Something will happen, and I’ll be like, ‘That’s weird, that’s not right,’ and then I’ll realize I’m dreaming,” Knauer said.

Knauer said she had learned that screaming during a dream will wake the person up in reality, and used this technique to wake herself during nightmares.

“Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” Knauer said. “When it doesn’t work, it’s like you’re stuck in this dream, and you know you’re dreaming, but you can’t get out of it. And it’s kind of scary.”

Ryan said people tend to dream the most during REM sleep, the sleep phase in which neuron activity in the brain is most similar to activity during waking hours. During REM sleep, the body undergoes a kind of temporary paralysis everywhere except for the eyelids and fingertips. She said experiments in the early 1980s confirmed the existence of lucid dreams when participants were able to reliably signal they were inside a lucid dream by moving their eyelids back and forth.

She said research for lucid dreaming is compelling for several reasons, but most pertinent to people plagued by chronic nightmares.

“It’s very useful as a nightmare treatment,” she said. “What you can do in a nightmare that is non-lucid, (is) use lucid techniques to pull you out of that.”

Oppositely, she said there are also techniques to induce pleasant lucid dreams. Paolo Cisneros, senior in Media and former Illini Media employee, said he first learned of lucid dreams last year, and actively tried to induce one shortly after.

“One of the interesting things about dreaming is that no matter how absurd the dream is, no matter how bizarre the circumstances, or no matter how nonsensical it is, you don’t realize that until after you wake up,” Cisneros said. “So the point of lucid dreaming is to be able to be aware of that, and to try and manipulate it to learn some things about what’s really happening in someone’s mind.”

Cisneros said he was most interested in being able to master lucid dreaming and tap into an “infinite amount of creative energy” inside the brain.

“If you’re able to understand (dreams) on a deeper level, you get a lot more out of it,” he said. “(Dreaming) liberates the mind from these creative constraints we put on it most of the time.”

Intrigued by the possibilities, Cisneros researched ways to induce lucid dreams, and found himself setting alarms for the middle of the night, keeping a dream journal, and repeating a mental mantra every night before falling asleep that he was going to dream lucidly. He said he tried for months, to no avail.

Then, unexpectedly in August, he said he experienced his first and only lucid dream. After a hot move-in day and “one of the worst nights of sleep of (his) life”, Cisneros drifted into a dreamworld he found he could control.

“My theory as to what happened is that I was switching back and forth between normal waking consciousness and deep REM sleep so frequently and so consistently, that my conscious mind just sort of lost track of where it was,” Cisneros said.

In the dream, Cisneros walked through a wall, recognized it was not normal, and “it clicked” that he was dreaming. Once he finally grasped control of the dream, he said the experience was surreal.

“I remember flying, being able to fly to different places in my life. Back to Chicago and back to Mexico, and kind of flying in between places in the world that were important to me,” Cisneros said.

But like catching a butterfly, lucid dreaming is difficult to do, and even harder to hang on to.

“Once you realize you’re dreaming, there’s a really high risk of losing it (and) waking up at that point. If you spin around in circles, it stabilizes (the dream),” he said.

Cisneros was able to remember this inside his dream, and would spin around every time he felt the dream slipping away and felt consciousness creeping up in his mind.

“Eventually it got to the point where all I was doing was spinning around, and eventually I just lost it,” he said.

After last summer’s blockbuster hit “Inception”, the idea of lucid dreaming made it into mainstream conversations. Cisneros said he saw the movie and liked that it explored different levels of consciousness.

“We’ve got this kind of warped idea that there’s ‘asleep’ and ‘awake’ and those are the only two modes of thinking that our brains are capable of, but I don’t think that’s the case at all.” he said. “I think there’s a whole lot out there in terms of consciousness that we don’t understand.”