I taught myself to lucid dream. You can too.

"You can make the argument that REM sleep is kind of a neglected resource," says Benjamin Baird, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies human cognition. "What if we could use this state for when people can actually have control over their thoughts and actions and decide what they want to do? The state could potentially be used for entertainment and creative problem--solving, and learning about how memory works, and all kinds of different [neuroscience]." Baird thinks one especially intriguing application for lucid dreaming might be in art. "One technique from the visual artists I've met is that they find an'art gallery' in their lucid dream and look at the painting hanging in the gallery," he says.