Translator: Peter van de Ven Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Do you ever wonder
what it would be like if you could fly?
Just take off
and fly away
to another country, to the beach.
Or just fly straight into space,
leave the atmosphere, and you could breathe in space,
and you'd pass planets and stars.
Wouldn't that be cool?
I do it quite often.
I do it all the time.
"Sure, in your dreams!"
That's right, in my dreams.
But this isn't just ordinary dreaming.
They call it lucid dreaming.
A lucid dream is a dream in which you know you are dreaming.
You are absolutely aware of the fact
that the world you are in is one you're dreaming up
and that you're actually just lying in your bed asleep.
There's probably a number of you that already do this.
It is said that most people
are not even aware that they dream at all.
Lucid dreaming is really, really cool.
(Laughter)
My first lucid dream - or one of the first anyway -
started when I dreamt that I walked into a McDonald's.
I was just about to order something
when all of a sudden, floating right next to me,
a giant chunk of cheese.
(Laughter)
Right!
So I thought, "Yeah, wait a minute. This can't be true.
This is a dream."
And that's when the fun started.
I took right off
and shot up into the sky, really high,
above the clouds.
I was checking out the clouds, marveling at how cool they were.
It felt really weird,
and as I was racing over the clouds, I decided to fly to Spain.
So off to Spain, and I remember well
looking down on the Bay of Biscay beneath me -
which made me think of Sinterklaas.
But all the time, I was fully aware that it was all a dream
and that I was actually asleep in bed.
So I went to Spain,
and I arrived at a beach there.
It all looks a little different -
it's actually my idea of Spain, beautiful and warm though.
There were nice people and music,
and I just had a great party there.
Isn't that great?
But apart from it being great fun,
lucid dreaming can be quite helpful too.
It can be really useful.
You can learn all kinds of things in a lucid dream.
To your mind, there is no difference whether you do something in real life
or in a vision
or in a visualization or in a dream.
To your mind, it's all one and the same experience.
So being a dancer, what I do -
In my shows, I often have to do somersaults,
but if I don't practice them regularly, my skills fade.
So what do I do in my dreams? Practice somersaults.
And sometimes 200 times in a row.
In reality, I couldn't do that. That would be way too exhausting.
But in your dream, you don't get tired.
In fact, in my dream I can even decide
how slow I do them or how fast
or what to pay attention to.
So I'd do a somersault in slow motion, and I'd study how it goes:
hmm, maybe I should keep my knees in a bit more.
And all these experiences are internalized,
and when I do a somersault in real life again,
it is very easy to do,
just like I'd practiced really hard at it.
It works.
There's lots of other people that use this:
athletes,
music composers.
It seems there's been a lot of people in the past
who have used this to spark their creativity,
to practice things and also to learn new things.
Another great aspect of lucid dreaming
is that you can take it one step further
and use it to get to know yourself better.
There's even something today called lucid dreaming therapy -
a way to help you to fight your traumas, to understand your nightmares
and to find out what causes them.
That is something that will probably continue to grow,
and something I think I'd like to learn to do myself.
But you know what is so great?
Everybody can learn to do it.
Literally everybody.
It's a well-known fact -
even scientists assure us -
that everybody dreams,
even blind people.
And if everybody dreams, we can all learn lucid dreaming too.
It's just that most people don't remember their dreams,
but dream they do.
And that's the first step towards lucid dreaming:
make sure you remember your dreams.
One technique is to keep a dream diary.
Write down your dreams, everything you can remember.
When you wake up,
not only in the morning but also if you wake up at night,
write them down -
if you're into it, if you like the idea, of course.
But then -
to learn lucid dreaming, the best method by far
is with reality checks.
Look, dreams can be awkward, really bizarre sometimes -
you are being chased by funny creatures, monsters;
you experience strange things;
you have to work your way around weird houses or something -
dreams can be quite freaky.
And still, you just take them for real.
You never wonder, "How is this possible? Could this be a dream maybe?"
No, you just take it for real and follow the flow of events.
That's because we never question this actual reality.
Just here, now, this, this reality.
We never wonder if this is actually real.
The trick is to start doing that
and on a regular basis.
And if you do that often enough, it will become a habit.
And when you've made it a habit, you will do it in your dreams too.
And then at some time, you'll be dreaming,
and you'll think, "Wow, is this for real?"
And you'll find out that it's not real.
And then you can do what you like - anything.
You name it, you can do it. Your imagination is the limit.
You can talk with animals, breathe under water,
meet aliens.
But how to check reality? Just questioning is not enough.
If I asked you to check if this is reality, what do you do?
You look around, like, "Is this real? Guess so."
"Let me touch this. Well, feels real enough."
But that's not enough.
You really have to take your time with it and use an objective check -
a reality check.
A very simple one is to look at the time.
Look at the clock on your phone or at an actual clock -
a digital clock works well -
because in a dream, you can't tell the time.
If you look at a clock in a dream,
you see something blurry and very confusing.
On a digital clock, you just see weird characters.
So what you do in the daytime
is look at your clock - okay, it's this time -
then you look away, and then you look again.
Does it make sense? Okay, then this is real.
Do it often enough
that it becomes a habit,
and you will do it in your dreams as well.
But there you'll find out: hey, that's not right.
Wow, cool: let's fly!
(Laughter)
Well, at least, that's my first reaction, and I'm not the only one.
And that brings us to a very simple and direct reality check
that works very well for me:
just try to fly.
Just try it right now.
Come on, take off.
Vertical liftoff. Go.
Some people first have to swim.
They can't get off the ground and really have to -
or run very fast and then jump.
Find your way, but try to fly;
try it ten times per day until it really becomes a habit,
until it really becomes part of your system.
That's normally the way I find out I'm dreaming:
I jump and, hey, I'm hanging in midair.
Cool! And off I go ...
(Laughter)
Yes, this is not just cool,
it is actually useful.
And you know what's really cool?
Every time that I have a lucid dream again,
I wake up really recharged.
I get a real kick out of having them.
Oh yeah.
I just want to show you that it really works.
(Applause) (Cheers)