Lucid dreaming

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Lucid dreaming is the conscious perception of one's state while dreaming, resulting in a much clearer ("lucid") experience and usually enabling direct control over the content of the dream. The complete experience from start to finish is called a lucid dream. Stephen LaBerge, a popular author and experimenter on the subject, has defined it as "dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming." [1]

There are many unanswered questions about lucid dreaming, and about dreaming itself. LaBerge and his associates have called people who purposely explore the possibilities of lucid dreaming oneironauts (literally from the Greek meaning "dream explorers"). The topic attracts the attention of a diverse and eclectic group, namely psychologists, self-help authors, New Age groups, mystics, occultists, and artists. This list is by no means exhaustive nor does interest in lucid dreaming apply necessarily to each group. Clear and consistent knowledge about lucid dreaming is difficult to find amongst the many interpretations of the experience, especially considering its highly subjective nature. It may be classified as a protoscience, pending an increase in scientific knowledge about the subject. Researchers such as Allan Hobson with his neurophysiological approach to dreaming have helped to push the understanding of lucid dreaming into a less speculative realm.

Lucid dreamers regularly describe their dreams as exciting, colourful, and fantastic. Many compare it to a spiritual experience and say that it changed their lives or their perception of the world. Some have even reported lucid dreams that take on a hyperreality, seemingly "more real than real", where all the elements of reality are amplified. Lucid dreams are prodigiously more memorable than other kinds of dreaming, even nightmares, which may be why they are often prescribed as a means of ridding one's self of troubling dreams.

There is a substantial cottage industry based around the technique of lucid dreaming, with an array of induction devices (usually based around flickering light arrays) commercially available to allegedly allow induction of lucid dreams. Their proponents also sometimes claim that these devices help achieve a higher level of spiritual consciousness, and associate it with other New Age concepts such as astral travel or dream sharing. Some proponents of the technique claim they can use symbolic methods to research, program, and modify their nervous system itself. Memory management, creative solution generation, accelerated healing, autoinduced priapism, and ecstatic envelopment of one's body are among the various claimed techniques. Regardless of these claims' validity, lucid dreaming as a scientifically verified phenomenon is well-established.

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Scientific research

A number of universities (notably Stanford) conduct continued research into the techniques and effects of lucid dreaming, as do some independent agencies such as LaBerge's The Lucidity Institute. At present, there are no known cases where lucid dreaming has caused damage on either a psychological or physiological level. However, it would be very hard to determine whether some form of lucid dreaming might prevent one from receiving a benefit from normal dreaming. Jungian psychology seems to indicate that non-lucid (or partly lucid) dreaming is a way to achieve self-understanding.

The first book on lucid dreams to recognise their uniqueness and scientific potential was Celia Green's 1968 study Lucid Dreams. Reviewing the past literature, as well as new data from subjects of her own, Green analysed the main characteristics of such dreams, and concluded that they were a category of experience quite distinct from ordinary dreams. She predicted that they would turn out to be associated with REM sleep. Green was also the first to link lucid dreams to the phenomenon of false awakenings.

The first scientific proof of lucid dreaming came in the late 1970s from the efforts of a British Parapsychologist Keith Hearne, and a volunteer named Alan Worsley, who used eye movement signals on a polygraph machine to signal the onset of lucidity. Philosopher Norman Malcolm's 1959 text Dreaming argued against the possibility of checking the accuracy of dream reports in this way, however this experiment proved that actions agreed upon during waking life could be recalled and performed once lucid in a dream. Similar experiments were duplicated by Stephen LaBerge at Stanford University for his doctoral dissertation some years later. Interestingly, LaBerge had no knowledge of Hearne and Worsley's previous experiments at that time, probably due to the lack of publication of Hearne's work.

During the 1980s, further scientific evidence to confirm the existence of lucid dreaming was produced [2], and lucid dreamers were able to demonstrate to researchers that they were consciously aware of being in a dream state (usually again by using eye movement signals [3]). Additionally, techniques were developed which have been experimentally proven to enhance the likelihood of achieving this state [4].

One outstanding question on the neurophysiological nature of lucid dreaming concerns the electrical activity in the frontal cortex, which is generally reduced during normal sleep [5]. The behavior of the frontal cortex has not at present been crucially analyzed with respect to lucid dreaming.

There are thought to be some insights into the workings of the brain that can be found by lucid dreaming. In particular, in surveying the experiences of lucid dreams, many have noticed that the brain, at least while in dreaming, has the feature whereby it is possible for a single individual thought, memory, definition, belief, etc. to be incorrect while the rest of the mind appears to be working normally.
This is contrary to normal experience of brain malfunctions, which are usually more general, such as wholesale memory loss, or broad emotional imbalance. It is helpful to propose a construct of consciousness that is more on a continuum and that certain functions (such as reflective awareness) might be selectively activated. This is a fluid process, moment to moment, in the context of the lucid dream, and it is experienced as discontinuities. Template:Citation needed

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Earlier mentions of lucid dreaming

Even though it has only come to the attention of the general public in the last few decades, lucid dreaming is not a modern discovery.

  • In the Old Testament in the Song of Solomon 5:2, there is some debate as to whether lucid dreaming is mentioned. The New Living Translation of this verse reads as follows: "One night as I was sleeping, my heart awakened in a dream. I heard the voice of my lover. He was knocking at my bedroom door...". Other translations are more literal. The Revised Standard Version of the same passage states only that "I slept, but my heart was awake ...". Even this is a matter of interpretation; the original Hebrew reads "אני ישנה ולבי ער קול דודי דופק" and a very literal translation would be "I [am] asleep and my heart [is] awake; the voice of my beloved [is]knocking". Whilst the RSV's interpretation of "and" as "but" is entirely reasonable, it remains an interpretation only. From this it is not at all clear whether the narrating woman is relating a dreamstate.
  • It is in the fifth century that we have one of the earliest written examples of a lucid dream — in a letter written by St. Augustine of Hippo in 415 A.D. And even as early as the eighth century, the Tibetan Buddhists were practising a form of yoga supposed to maintain full waking consciousness while in the dream state.
  • An early recorded lucid dreamer was the philosopher and physician Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682). Browne was fascinated by the world of dreams and stated of his own ability to lucid dream in his Religio Medici: "... yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests and laugh my self awake at the conceits thereof;" (R.M. Part 2:11).
  • Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys was probably the first person to argue that it is possible for anyone to learn to dream consciously. In 1867, he published his book Dreams and how to Guide Them, in which he documented more than twenty years of his own research into dreams.
  • The term "lucid dreaming" was coined by Dutch author and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in his 1913 book A Study of Dreams (originally published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 26, 1913) [6]. This book was highly anecdotal and not embraced by the scientific community. The term itself is considered by some to be a misnomer because it means much more than just "clear or vivid" dreaming [7]. A better term might have been "conscious dreaming".
  • The Senoi hunter-gatherers of Malaysia have been reported to make use of lucid dreaming extensively to ensure mental health.
  • Many believe The Dreaming of Australian Aboriginal mythology is largely concerned with lucid dreaming, particularly refering to "all-at-once" time experiences and accounts that bear strong resemblance to modern conceptions of lucid dreaming.
  • The enthusiastic endorsement of lucid dreaming during the 1970s by New Age proponents such as Carlos Castaneda did little to enhance its scientific credibility.
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Achieving and recognizing lucid dreams

Many people report having experienced a lucid dream during their lives, often in childhood. However, even with training, achieving lucid dreams on a regular basis can be difficult and is uncommon. Despite this difficulty, techniques have been developed to achieve a lucid dreaming state intentionally.

The most important aspect in lucid dreaming is to recognize that one is dreaming. Any time that a person recognizes a dream sign, or anything that is out of the ordinary, they should perform a reality test as stated below.

Dream recall, the ability to remember one's dreams, is very important to lucid dreamers because it is usually desired that the lucid dreamer be able to remember lucid dreams. Improvement of dream recall is usually the first step people take to learn to have lucid dreams. A common practice used to increase dream recall is to keep a dream journal, or a notebook of dreams. The dream journal should be kept right next to the bed so that dreams can be written down as soon as a person wakes up. This is important because waiting until later in the day to write dreams down will usually cause one to forget most of their content. After waking up, it is often helpful to keep your eyes closed while trying to remember a dream.

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Ability

The ability to experience lucid dreams depends on many factors:

  • Some naturals have lucid dreams more often and more easily than others.
  • Meditation, and involvement in consciousness focusing activities can strengthen the ability to experience lucid dreams.
  • Children seem to have lucid dreams more easily than adults do. (The ability to sleep appears to decrease when people get older. [8])
  • Induction techniques can help much in becoming lucid.
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Common techniques

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Reality Testing

Reality testing is a common method that people use to determine whether or not they are dreaming. This method involves performing an action with results that are difficult to re-create in a dream. Examples of reality tests include:

  • To read some text, look away, and read it again, or to look at your watch and remember the time, then look away and look back. Observers have found that, in a dream, the text or time will often have changed. In the real world, the text will not change and the time will not change by more than one minute.
  • Flipping a light switch or looking into a mirror. Light switches rarely work in dreams, and reflections from a mirror often appear to be blurred or distorted.
  • Covering your nose and seeing if you can still breathe.

Another form of reality testing involves identifying one's dream signs, clues that one is dreaming. These can be anything, such as a pink elephant on parade or a talking dog. Dream signs are often categorized as follows:

  • Action — The dreamer, another dream character, or a thing does something unusual or impossible in waking life, such as photos in a magazine or newspaper becoming 3-dimensional with full movement.
  • Context — The place or situation in the dream is strange.
  • Form — The dreamer, another character, or a thing changes shape, or is oddly formed or transforms; this may include the presence of unusual clothing or hair, or a third person view of the dreamer.
  • Awareness — A peculiar thought, a strong emotion, an unusual sensation, or altered perceptions. In some cases when moving one's head from side to side, one may notice a strange stuttering or 'strobing' of the image.

Though occurrences like these may seem out of place in waking life, they may seem perfectly normal to a dreaming mind and learning to pick up on these dream signs will help in recognizing that one is dreaming.

Experienced lucid dreamers will often use more advanced techniques, such as those described below, to induce lucid dreams at will.

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Mnemonic induction of lucid dreaming (MILD)

Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming is a common technique used to induce a lucid dream at will by setting an intention, while falling asleep, to remember to recognize that one is dreaming.

The MILD technique was developed by Stephen LaBerge, and is described fully in his book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming.

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Wake Back To Bed induction technique (WBTB)

Wake Back To Bed is often the easiest way to induce a lucid dream. The method involves going to sleep tired and waking up 5 hours later. Then, focusing all thoughts on lucid dreaming, staying awake for an hour and going back to sleep. The odds of having a lucid dream are then much higher. This is because the REM cycles get longer as the night goes on, and this technique takes advantage of the best REM cycle of the night. Also, lucid dreams are usually longer and more vivid at this time.

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Waking induction of lucid dreaming (WILD)

Waking Induction of Lucid Dreaming is one of the most common induction techniques used by lucid dreamers. In this particular technique, a person goes directly from being awake into a lucid dream. The key to this technique is recognizing the hypnagogic stage. This stage is within the border of being awake and being asleep. If a person is successful in staying aware while this stage occurs, they will eventually enter the dream state while being fully aware that it is a dream. Proponents recommend three steps to induce lucid dreaming: relax, stay aware, and enter your dream. There are key times at which this technique is best used; while success at night after being awake for a long time is very difficult, it is relatively easy after being awake for 15 or so minutes and in the afternoon during a nap. Users of this technique often count, envision themselves climbing or descending stairs, chanting to themselves, or any various form of concentration to keep their mind awake, while still being calm enough to let their body sleep. During the actual transition into the dreamstate, one is likely to experience sleep paralysis, including rapid vibrations.

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Cycle adjustment technique (CAT)

Template:Section stub The cycle adjustment technique is an effective way to induce lucid dreaming. It involves adjusting one's sleep cycle to encourage awareness during the latter part of the sleep.

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Aural Focusing technique

The aural focusing technique is not fully understood, but seems to work very well in amateur or casual lucid dreaming. This involves a very simple setup. One must stay awake until sleep is highly desirable, while watching television, or listening to a radio (radio use seems to yield drastically lessened instances of successful lucid dreaming) and then lowering the volume to a point where the sound is just above the noise that is currently occupying the surroundings. The subject then lies down, and focuses all attention on the sound, while imagining climbing infinite stairs. Under this method, the user will sometimes find themselves in a room extensively similar to the room in which they fell asleep in, but upon leaving this room, something will be radically different. An interesting effect of this method is full auditory awareness, usually the subject will hear the television program that is on, but upon inspection of the television screen in the dream state, the subject will find mostly static images, and sometimes scrolling text, with mostly garbage characters, and one or two repeating words, which change when the television is left and returned to. Template:Citation needed

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Other phenomena associated with lucid dreaming

  • False awakenings: In a false awakening, one suddenly dreams of having awakened. If the person was lucid, he/she often believes that he/she is no longer dreaming, and may start exiting their room etc. Since the person is actually still dreaming, this is called a "false awakening". This is often a nemesis in the art of lucid dreaming because it usually causes people to give up their awareness of being in a dream, but it can also cause someone to become lucid if the person does a reality check whenever he/she awakens. People who keep a dream journal and write down their dreams upon awakening sometimes report having to write down the same dream multiple times because of this false awakening phenomenon. Upon waking a second time, the dreamer realizes that the first entry in the journal was actually done in a dream and must be rewritten a second or even third time when the dreamer is actually awake.
  • Rapid eye movement (REM) and communication during sleep: during dreaming sleep the eyes move rapidly. Scientific research in the 1950s found that these eye movements correspond to the direction in which the dreamer is "looking" in his/her dreamscape; extraordinarily, this apparently enabled trained lucid dreamers to communicate the content of their dreams as they were happening to researchers by using eye movement signals. This research produced various results, such as that events in dreams take place in real time rather than going by in a flash.
  • Sleep paralysis: During REM sleep the body is paralyzed by a mechanism in the brain, because otherwise the movements which occur in the dream would actually cause the body to move. However, it is possible for this mechanism to be triggered before, during, or after normal sleep while the brain awakens. This can lead to a state where a person is lying in his or her bed and he or she feels frozen. Hallucinations may occur in this state, especially auditory ones. People also generally report feeling a crushing sensation on their chest (possibly because they try to consciously control their breathing). People trying to lucid dream sometimes try to trigger this state, or accidentally trigger this state, while using a waking induction of lucid dreaming (WILD) technique to enter a lucid dream directly when falling asleep.
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Things to do in a lucid dream

  • Supernatural acts: Lucid dreamers, realizing they are dreaming, then go on to realize that normal limitations like gravity or "solidity" no longer apply, and it's possible to perform acts that can't be done in real life (e.g.: running faster than 50 miles per hour, or staying underwater for lengthy periods of time).
    • Flying: One of the more common and pleasurable activities of lucid dreamers is flying. Many lucid dreamers report they are able to float, fly and transport themselves anywhere in the dreamworld at will. With practice, so called "impossible" feats such as flying at supersonic speeds, or flying through objects are possible. Some dream flyers claim their flights might in some cases be out of body experiences.
    • Transformations: Some people believe that (after some practice) one can transform one's dream-self into real or fictional animals, or any number of other forms. Some also claim to have tried sensory experiences not normally achievable while awake, such as 360 degree stereo vision, sonar (bat) vision, and being able to modify one's body to try out being a different weight, height, gender, age, etc.
  • Spiritual practice: Some religions claim that lucid dream states give the dreamer a special kind of access to the spiritual world. By practicing prayer or meditation during a lucid dream, the dreamer can gain access to mystical states of awareness that would not be accessible from the waking state. Such practices are sometimes classified as "dream yoga".
  • Real-life rehearsal: Since the mental and physical effects of lucid dreaming are almost indistinguishable from real-life, dreamers can rehearse various things (such as stage performances, soccer moves, etc.) in a lucid dream and readily apply that to real-life.
  • Experience enjoyable activities (e.g.: having sex).
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Popular culture

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
  • The movies Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes), Vanilla Sky, and Waking Life are partly about lucid dreaming, while the Nightmare on Elm Street series directly involves lucid dreams as a plot device by which the villain threatens the heroes.
  • The movie Mulholland Drive can be interpreted as a study of lucid dreaming and dream interpretation.
  • The Matrix, while not about lucid dreaming, has the hero in the similar position of living in a simulated world (complete with its own distinctive "dream signs", such as a subtle overall green hue and the slightly inaccurate mechanics) and being able to control it by simply being aware that it isn't real.
  • The song "Silent Lucidity" by Queensrÿche, a top-five hit in 1990, was about the benefits of lucid dreaming.
  • The music video for Everlong by the Foo Fighters features lucid dreaming, in which lead singer Dave Grohl uses lucid dreams to save his girlfriend from a nightmare.
  • The book Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett is mostly set in a videogame world accessed by lucid dreaming.
  • One episode of the show Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex, called Escape From, featured two of the characters "diving" into a machine in a way similar to a dream. The episode could be interpreted as a reference to lucid dreaming. The same episode has the moral of "It's okay to have dreams, but not to live in them".
  • In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Waking Moments", Chakotay used lucid dreaming and the image of a blue moon, in order to wake himself from a deep sleep state induced by an alien culture.
  • Waking Life is a movie by Richard Linklater where the main character is in a persistent dreamlike state and explores lucid dreaming.
  • The episode "Captain Lucidity" of Ed (TV series) is based almost exclusively within a lucid dream.
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Books

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See also

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External links

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es:Sueño lúcido fr:Rêve lucide it:Sogno lucido he:חלימה מודעת lt:Lucidiniai sapnai nl:Lucide droom ja:明晰夢 no:Klardrøm pl:Świadomy sen pt:Sonho lúcido ru:Осознанные сновидения simple:Lucid dream sr:Луцидни сан fi:Selkouni sv:Klardrömmande

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