Weird Training Ideas Part 2: Training in your Sleep

"To sleep, perchance to dream..." - Shakespeare (Hamlet, III, i, 65-68)

On average most people spend about 7 hours a night asleep.  That's 49 hours a week (one hour over 2 full days) about 196 hours a month (a little over 8 days) and 2,352 hours a year (98 days, 14 weeks or about 3 and a half months).  If you live to be 90, and your life expectancy ought to be above average as a martial artist, you'll have spent roughly 211,680 hours asleep.  That means you'll have slept for a full 8,820 days.  That's over 24 years of your life spent sleeping.  When you quantify it like that, it really sounds like a lot of time.  I don't know about everyone else, but thinking of spending 24 years just lying there not doing anything productive other than secreting growth hormone and doing general repairs on my body seems kind of like a waste.

So what can we do about it?  Sleep deprivation is a nasty thing, and is totally not worth it.  So pulling an all-nighter every now and again to get back some of that time for training isn't recommended.  It's not like we can train and sleep at the same time though, right?

Well, it turns out it may actually be possible.  Of course this article, like all of the Weird Training Ideas series, is largely speculative.  These are all things that seem plausible, but would need some experimentation to see if they pan out.  Regardless, I have found a way that would appear to allow you to train in your sleep or, more accurately, in your dreams - Lucid Dreaming.

What's Lucid Dreaming?

The basic explanation is that lucid dreaming is being conscious, or lucid, whilst in the middle of a dream.  I can't fully attest to how well this works, although I'm interested in giving it a try.  It seems to be fairly well documented, with a lot of people having attested to being able to do it, countless books published on the topic and more websites than I can count explaining how it works.  That being said, you could probably say the same thing about telekinesis, so I don't know how much it's worth.

One particularly interesting sounding experiment asked several people who claimed to be able to gain consciousness while dreaming to perform certain tasks with their eyes in a certain order once they were dreaming (roll your eyes, look to the left then the right, etc.) while they were hooked up to electroencephalographs.  All but one, after entering REM sleep and the Theta brainwave pattern, was recorded as carrying out the task with their eyes exactly as instructed.

That would lead me to believe it's possible, but I'm not about to say definitively without some thorough personal experimentation first.

How Would Lucid Dreaming Help?

Neuromuscular Facilitation - a couple of big fancy words for what most people call muscle memory.  As a martial artist you may already be fairly familiar with muscle memory.  The basic idea is that as you perform a movement your body makes new connections along the neural pathways (essentially your body's electrical wiring) required for that movement as well as reinforcing old ones.  This makes each subsequent performance of that action easier, more consistent and more reflexive.  Ever do something so many times that you think you could do it in your sleep, or have a kata you can run through without thinking about it at all? That's what we're talking about.

Now, the development of these neural pathways through the repetition of an action is well-documented.  Slightly more controversial is the idea that these same neural pathways can be formed just by visualizing performing the action.  I say controversial because, even though you can find people everywhere saying it happens, and that there have been all these studies on it I have not been able to find evidence of the actual "studies" that are so often quoted.  It's always a third party report.  Now, I'm not about to spread more hearsay, so while I will put the idea out there you should know I can't actually find any studies proving it.  That doesn't make it inherently false, it would just need to be tested.

The most frequent "study" I hear people talk about is one done by an often unnamed University. This study supposedly had three groups run basketball freethrow tests to establish their baseline freethrow average.  The first group was then told to physically practice freethrows for an hour every day for one week, the second group was told to spend one hour every week visualizing practicing their freethrows and the last group, the control, was told to not do anything.  At the retest at the end of the study, the researchers found that the group who had done the visualization had improved the most, with the group that physically practiced also improving and the control group actually getting worse on average.

Supposedly, this teaches us that visualizing is just as important as practicing, an that strong visualizations of an action can be as beneficial as actual physical repetitions of it. Now, through lucid dreaming, you gain the ability to do anything you want in your dreams.  You are, in essence, omnipotent since you are experiencing a universe encapsulated in your own mind that you are creating as you experience it.  If both theories are true then, dreams being one of the most vivid and intense visualizations available to us, if you practiced your art in your dreams, you would be building the neural pathways for those particular movements and gaining as much benefit from it as if you were training physically.

Is it kind of a stretch?  Sure.  It relies on both principles, neither of which have much more than anecdotal evidence, to be true.  This isn't part of the Everyday Mundane Training Ideas series though, so keep an open mind.

How Would I Try This?

I'm not going to go into all the different ways to induce lucid dreaming, since there are tons of websites out there devoted entirely to the subject.  A Google search will fill you in more than I can.  I will give you a brief primer though.  The basic method is to get your dream recall up as much as possible.  That means that you should be remembering every dream you have when you wake up on a consistent basis.  The way most often suggested to up your dream recall if you never remember your dreams is by keeping a dream journal.

Once your dream recall is at a good level, a common way to break into lucidity is to do frequent 'reality checks' throughout the day.  An example would be stopping and thinking, "Am I dreaming right now?" and then doing something to prove you aren't.  This can be anything from trying to poke a finger through your hand, trying to levitate, or trying to turn your hand into a wedge of cheese or something.  Once you find you can't do any of that, you can think "Ok, I must not be dreaming."

The idea here is, at some point if you do it often enough and make it relatively habitual, you will dream about doing one of these dream checks.  In the dream, however, you probably will levitate, poke a finger through your hand, or find that you can transmogrify yourself into Gouda or a nice Camembert.  When this happens, your brain will hopefully go, 'Hey, I am dreaming!' and snap into lucidity.

Again, who knows if this would actually work.  I would be interested in testing it out though.  After all, 24 years of my life is a lot of dreaming that could be spent doing other things.

Has anyone actually tried any of this?  Do you think it would work, or do you think it's all just lunacy?  Do you have any other ideas for unconventional or just plain weird ways to train?  Share them with us in the comments.

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