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It is also being put to therapeutic use to treat nightmares, night terrors and even post-traumatic stress disorder.

The problem is that, although everyone dreams, with only the rarest of brain-damaged exceptions, not everyone has the wherewithal to recognize they are dreaming and hold on to this insight for any significant length of time. People can be trained, however, and some are expert, such that they can direct their attention around their own dream world, even bend it to their will.

“Yes, I could have sex with any movie star, yes I could do anything … but the feeling of flying is really cool. I wake up after a flying dream and I feel like just a million bucks,” said Dax Urbszat, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Toronto who says he lucid dreams about once a week and even uses the practice to maintain a personal connection to a long-dead friend.

“It’s very exhilarating. I just want to fly around the city and visit people,” he said Thursday night on the Mississauga campus. He described one of his favourite lucid dreams, in which he was “tumbling, like I’m doing somersaults. I see sky and I see grass, and sky and grass, and I wonder what’s going on. And then all of a sudden I kind of slow down my spin, and I notice, ‘Oh, that’s a baseball diamond down there, a stadium over here.’ I figure it out now. I’m the baseball. I’ve been hit for a home run.”

Dreams can be profound or ridiculous, even both, and they have baffled philosophers and psychologists for as long as they have wondered how our minds work.