Pink unicorns and other monsters used to chase Tony Campbell in his dreams, but today he can control them by giving himself superpowers.

Campbell, Overland Park junior, suffered from intense recurring nightmares as a child. With practice, he could tell he was in a dream and control what was going on in his dreams. He could make things appear, rewind a dream and change a dream entirely. Eventually, he learned to do this consistently.

“All my dreams are whatever I want,” Campbell says.

This ability is called lucid dreaming.

“When we’re dreaming, the circuits of the brain that give us consciousness, the frontal cortex, are offline, so normally we have a perception the dream is happening to us,” says Steve Ilardi, associate professor of clinical psychology. “When we transition from sleep to wakefulness, the frontal cortex comes online.”

Some people’s front cortex comes online before they are awake, Ilardi says, and this allows them to be conscious in their dreams. Ilardi says there is a small portion of people who can lucid dream naturally and others who can lucid dream with practice. Some people, however, cannot lucid dream.

Paul Atchley, associate professor of psychology, is a lucid dreamer.

“When I do lucid dream, I usually choose to fly because it’s cool,” Atchley says.

Atchley taught himself to lucid dream by first assessing his dreams and keeping a diary of them. Then, he gained a greater sense of consciousness in his dreams and he was able to subtly change them.

Rob Waggoner, author of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, says there are other ways you can lucid dream.

Waggoner says you can make a suggestion to yourself before you go to sleep that you will be conscious in your dreams. Waggoner says he looks at his hands while he tells himself, “Tonight in my dreams, I will see my hands and realize that I am dreaming.”

When he sees his hands in his dream, then he knows he is in a dream because he has associated seeing his hands with being in a dream.

Waggoner says another method of making yourself lucid dream is mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD), which was developed by Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist who pioneered the study of lucid dreaming. This method requires you to wake up in the night, recall your last dream and then imagine yourself becoming conscious at some point in that dream. Before you fall back to sleep, you tell yourself, “In the next dream, I will realize that I am dreaming and become consciously aware.” Waggoner says this method gave him significantly more dreams, but required more work and repeatedly waking up in the middle of the night.

Yet another path to lucid dreaming, Waggoner says, is developing a “lucid mind.” This method requires you to have a “more aware awareness,” in that you should ask yourself throughout the day, “Am I dreaming this?”

“By actively questioning the current reality, a person is more likely to bring that same questioning awareness into their dreaming,” Waggoner says.

You can test if you are in a dream by doing something you can’t do in reality, Waggoner says, such as putting your hand through a wall or levitating.

Ilardi says having your frontal cortex online when you are dreaming allows you to do these “reality tests.”

“When someone is lucid dreaming, they can say, ‘This makes no sense,’” Ilardi says.

One of the challenges of lucid dreaming, Waggoner says, is staying lucid. If you lose your awareness, then you will lose control of the dream. Also, if you become too emotional or stare at an object for too long, then your dream will collapse, Waggoner says.

Lucid dreaming isn’t just for flying around like Superman. It can be useful for testing out things you are too afraid to do in real life.

Alicia Lopez, Topeka sophomore, wanted to have a dream about a guy she liked so she could tell him about her feelings for him. When she finally had a dream with him in it, she was able to tell him. This gave her some confidence to tell him in real life, and they are together after a year.

Ilardi says what Lopez did in her dream is like when successful athletes visualize a victory. When you put yourself through a positive narrative, then you are reinforcing the notion that you can succeed. JP