Consciousness

• seCtIon FIVe: BoRDeRLAnDs
  (‘lucid’ means either clearly expressed, or bright or luminous), it
  has stuck. Surveys show that about 50% of people claim to have
  had at least one lucid dream in their lives, and about 20% have
  one a month or more. This figure may be unreliable, because
  although lucid dreamers will easily recognise the description,
  people who have never had a lucid dream may misunderstand
  it. With this proviso, surveys show no correlations with age, sex,
  personality measures, or basic demographic variables, but the
  same people tend to report lucid dreaming, flying and falling
  dreams, and out-of-body experiences (Green, 1968a; Black-
  more, 1982; Gackenbach and LaBerge, 1988).
  Lucid dreams were long considered beyond the pale of serious
  sleep research, and were studied only by psychical researchers
  and parapsychologists. Even in the mid-twentieth century,
  many psychologists rejected the whole idea, arguing that
  self-reflection and conscious choice are impossible in dreams,
  so lucid dreams must really occur before or after sleep, or
  during micro-awakenings.
  They were proved wrong. The breakthrough was made simul-
  taneously and independently by two young psychologists,
  Keith Hearne at the University of Hull in England, and Stephen
  LaBerge at Stanford University in California. The problem they
  faced was simple. In REM sleep the voluntary muscles are para-
  lysed, so a dreamer who becomes lucid cannot shout out ‘Hey,
  listen to me, I’m dreaming’ or even press a button to indicate
  lucidity. What Hearne and LaBerge realised was that dreamers
  could still move their eyes. In Hearne’s laboratory, Alan Worsley
  was the first oneironaut (or dream explorer) to signal from a
  lucid dream. He decided in advance to move his eyes left and
  right eight times in succession whenever he became lucid and
  Hearne picked up the signals on a polygraph. He found them in
  the midst of REM sleep (Hearne, 1978), a finding that has been
  confirmed many times since (LaBerge, 1990).
  Further research has shown that lucid dreams last an average
  of two minutes, although they can last as long as fifty min-
  utes. They usually occur in the early hours of the morning,
  nearly half an hour into a REM period and towards the end
  of a burst of rapid eye movements. Onset tends to coincide
  with times of particularly high arousal during REM sleep and
  is associated with pauses in breathing, brief changes in heart
  rate, and skin response changes. There is also increased activ-
  ity in the left parietal lobe, which may be related to the more
  solid sense of self in lucid dreams (Holzinger, LaBerge, and
  Levitan, 2006) and more 40 Hz power than in ordinary dream-
  ing, especially in frontal regions (Voss et al., 2009). Stimulat-
  ing REM sleepers’ brains with 40 Hz currents has also been
  shown to induce lucid dreaming, especially in those who
  have had lucid dreams before, and with strong correlations

ACtIVItY 15.2

Inducing lucid dreams

As a class activity, divide the group into three and
give everyone a week to try to have a lucid dream. It
is best to assign people randomly to the groups, but
if you have several good lucid dreamers in the class,
spread them equally across the groups. Compare the
number of lucid dreams achieved in each group and
discuss the results. (If you have enough data, use
ANOVA based on the number of lucid dreams per
participant. Alternatively, compare two groups using an
independent t-test.) Even if the groups are too small
for statistical analysis, the experiences of trying, the
frustrations of failing, and the pleasures of successful
lucidity will provide plenty of scope for discussion.

The groups are as follows:

1 Control group. Use no special technique.
People often report having lucid dreams after sim-
ply hearing or reading about them, so this group
provides a better baseline than people’s previous
levels of lucidity. If you have fewer than about thirty
participants, drop this group and use only 2 and 3.

2 Daytime awareness. Use letters
drawn on the hands as in Practice 15.2.

3 Nighttime intention. The idea is to
go to sleep thinking about dreams and intending to
notice the next time you have one. Before you fall
asleep at night, try to remember the dream you had
the night before, or any recent dream. Go through
your memory noticing odd features, the way things
behaved, or anything that is characteristic of your
dreams. Tell yourself, ‘Next time I dream this, I will
realise I’m dreaming’.

A more arduous version of this is LaBerge’s MILD
(mnemonic induction of lucid dreaming) technique
(for more details see LaBerge, 1985; LaBerge and
Rheingold, 1990). Wake yourself with an alarm in
the early hours of the morning. If you have been
dreaming, mentally rehearse the dream or, better still,
get up and write it down. As you go to sleep again,
visualise yourself back in the dream, but this time you
realise it is a dream. Keep rehearsing the dream until
you fall asleep.