finger-tapping or throwing coins into a cup, practice
worked better in lucid dreams than when awake
(Stumbrys and Erlacher, 2016).
Another question is whether the eye movements of
REM sleep correspond to dream events. This had been
suspected from observations of non-lucid dreams but
is easily confirmed with expert lucid dreamers who can
deliberately do things like playing tennis, revealing that
eye movements do indeed reflect dream events. Fur-
thermore, experiments tracking moving objects during
the dream revealed that lucid-dream eye movements
more closely resemble the smooth pursuit of waking
vision than the saccadic eye movements associated
with imagination (LaBerge, 1985, 1990). But smooth
pursuit is now known to occur in mental imagery,
too, especially with increased drowsiness (de’Sperati
and Santandrea, 2005), suggesting a fluid perceptual
continuum between imagining, dreaming, and lucid
dreaming.
Few people can induce lucid dreams at will, but there
are techniques that can help. Several machines work
on the twin principles of first detecting REM sleep and
then delivering a stimulus strong enough to increase
arousal slightly, but not strong enough to wake the sleeper, including Hearne’s
(1990) Dream Machine and LaBerge’s DreamLight. Of forty-four participants who
used the DreamLight in the laboratory, 55% had at least one lucid dream and two
had their first ever lucid dream this way (LaBerge, 1985). The later NovaDreamer
packed all the hardware into goggles which could be worn at home. Competitors
including the REM Dreamer have added features like interactive controls, and
lucid-dreaming apps now claim to detect dream sleep via mattress movement, so
all you need is your phone. Apps like psychologist Richard Wiseman’s Dream:ON
also offer a range of soundscapes to help shape your dream into a peaceful garden
or ocean scene. It wakes you up once it detects your dream is over, and asks you to
submit a dream report to its ‘dream catcher’ database.
Other methods include maintaining awareness while falling asleep, LaBerge’s MILD
technique (see Activity 2), and other procedures that increase awareness during the
day rather than just at night. These are based on the idea that we spend much of
our time in a waking daze and if we could only be more lucid in waking life, it might
carry over into dreaming. These methods are similar to the age-old techniques of
meditation and mindfulness. Indeed, advanced practitioners of meditation claim
to maintain awareness through a large proportion of their sleep, and research has
found associations between practising meditation and increased lucidity (Gacken-
bach and Bosveld, 1989). Some people even choose to meditate once they become
lucid, echoing the ancient Tibetan practice of deepening meditative insight through
lucid ‘dream yoga’. Others choose wish fulfilment, problem-solving, skill-training,
and mental or physical healing (Stumbrys and Erlacher, 2016).
AM I AWAKE OR
DREAMING?EEGROCLOCEMGEEGROCLOCEMGLUCID REMAWAKECOUNT 10 s ESTIMATE 10 sCOUNT 10 s ESTIMATE 10 s4 sFIGURE 15.8 • Dream time estimations. LaBerge asked participants to estimate ten-second
intervals by counting, ‘one thousand and one, one thousand and two, etc.’
during their lucid dreams. Signals marking the beginning and end of the
subjective intervals allowed comparison with objective time. In all cases, time
estimates during the lucid dreams were very close to the actual time between
signals (LaBerge, 2000, Figure 2).