In the last 50 years, science has come to prove what many have known for thousands of years:
that dreamers can become conscious - or "lucid" in their dreams,
and direct those dreams with intention.
As well as being a powerful tool for personal growth,
lucid dreaming connects the dreamer to a world beyond the self,
not limited by the normal constraints of time and space.
What’s more, it allows scientists and psychonauts to conduct repeatable experiments
testing the nature of the dream world, and the structure of reality itself.
Lucid dreaming is the practice of gaining consciousness - or “lucidity” - within a dream
and achieving some level of control in directing the dream’s progression.
One can achieve any degree of lucidity, from barely conscious, to highly alert,
and feeling as though one is truly living the experience in waking life.
People have recorded lucid dreams for at least 3000 years.
Tibetan Buddhists have been gaining lucidity as part of a dream yoga practice
that dates back to the Indian Upanishads of the first millennium BCE.
Aristotle mentioned achieving conscious awareness in dreams in 350 BCE.
In 1867, the French sinologist, Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys,
wrote the first guide to “directing” one’s dreams,
and it’s commonly believed that the writer and psychiatrist, Frederick van Eeden,
coined the term “lucid dreaming” when writing of his own experiences in 1913.
In 1968, the founding director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research, Celia Green,
published the book, “Lucid Dreams,” lending a great deal of credibility
to what had previously been considered a “fringe” subject.
By the 1970s, at least two labs were actively researching the phenomenon.
In 1975, Alan Worsley a participant in a study at the University of Hull, England,
demonstrated lucidity to Keith Hearne by making predetermined eye movements in his sleep.
Independently, the Dutch dream researcher, Stephen LaBerge,
conducted similar experiments at Stanford University in 1978, with the same success.
LaBerge’s research helped popularize lucid dreaming in the early 1980s,
and he founded The Lucidity Institute in 1987.
By the mid-1980s, the evidence for lucid dreaming was virtually conclusive,
but LaBerge continued to encounter a lot of skepticism from his scientific colleagues
who insisted that it was impossible for the dreaming brain to produce consciousness.
But further research only confirmed initial findings,
showing that lucid dreaming was a distinct state of consciousness with measurable analogs in the brain.
In the early 2000s, a team of scientists measured electrical activity in the brains of lucid dreamers
at a sleep lab at Goethe University Frankfurt.
The team noted that their students’ frontal lobes were active while experiencing lucid dreams,
but other parts of the brain that are also normally active in waking life, like the parietal lobe,
which processes sensory information from the outside world, were inactive, as they are in REM sleep.
The researchers posited the existence of a “hybrid state of consciousness” during lucid dreams,
where the dreamer is partially both asleep and conscious.
They published their research in 2009.
In 2012, a team of scientists working at the Institute of Psychiatry in Munich
published the results of fMRI imaging of the lucid dreaming brain,
and found that the lucid state involved the reactivation of a range of regions in the brain
associated with reflective thinking and awareness, normally deactivated in REM sleep.
There have also been several pilot studies on athletic performance, showing that training in a lucid dream
can lead to improved performance in snowboarding and diving in waking life.
LaBerge continues to collect data through lucid dreaming workshops in Hawaii,
and has authored many scientific articles.
He continues to be a leader in the field.
Though the lucid dreaming experience correlates with particular brain activity,
it’s not clear that the dreamworld is a completely mental construction.
In some instances, the dreamworld appears to be shared between dreamers.
Ed Kellogg and Linda Lane Magallon have documented instances of mutual lucid dreaming,
in which two or more dreamers meet up in the same space,
interact with each other, and recall the same sequence of events after waking.
Lucid dreamers also report meeting deceased acquaintances
and learning verifiable information from them that they had not already known.
Some dream figures object to being considered products of your imagination,
and insist on a dream world shared by all dreamers.
Some lucid dreamers have travelled to places they’d never been and seen them accurate to reality,
or visited familiar places exactly as they appear in waking life, down to the finest detail.
Lucid dreamers can also access information unknown in the present, and get glimpses of future events.
Many lucid dreamers have been forewarned of future health problems and personal losses,
or the future problems of others’.
In some instances, lucid dreams can bleed through to the physical world.
LaBerge has demonstrated that actions performed in a lucid dream can affect the physical body in waking life.
In his book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self,
Robert Waggoner cites an example of a man who was burned with a cigarette in a lucid dream
and woke up with a burn mark in the same location on his hand.
Waggoner, Kellogg, and Patricia Garfield have demonstrated that performing a
symbolic healing practice on oneself or on another person in a lucid dream
can coincide with a physical healing in waking life.
For example, Patricia Garfield shares the story of a woman
who regained her ability to walk after severely fracturing her ankle by going inside her ankle
in a lucid dream and removing a bunch of junk.
These kinds of seemingly impossible mind-body interactions
challenge the Western understanding of the dream world as a purely mental construction,
created from the dreamer’s expectations, and informed by their own experiences.
But although lucid dreamers can will changes in the environment, and summon objects around them,
they do not consciously design every detail of the dreamworld.
For example, a lucid dreamer who wills herself on a cruise ship
doesn't consciously specify the dimensions of the hull, or the width of the trim around the doors.
Something else manages the details, and often to a level of realism beyond the knowledge of the dreamer.
Even the most experienced lucid dreamers will have new elements appear spontaneously in their dreams,
and everyone encounters scenarios that challenge expectations, or figures that defy their will.
Often, dream figures insist on an awareness of their own,
and some appear in multiple dreams as guides or guardians.
Robert Waggoner has even demonstrated that one can ignore dream figures completely
and receive responses to questions posed to the dream itself.
These responses can contain information consciously unknown to the dreamer.
Consciously, lucid dreamers can only direct the course of their dreams,
they don’t actually create them - at least not entirely.
So what actually produces the dream?
Robert Waggoner has proposed the existence of another component of the self,
beyond the ego and the subconscious.
He calls this component the “inner self,” and has likened it to the “hidden observer”
hypothesized by the Stanford psychologist, Ernest Hilgard.
The inner self constructs the lucid experience by drawing from a wider realm of awareness.
Once, when attempting to find out what was behind the lucid dream experience,
Waggoner experienced a state of pure awareness that he visualized as an expanse of clear light.
He suggests that this all-encompassing awareness is what connects all conscious beings,
and all lucid dreamers, and notes that several dream yogas
have recorded experiencing the same conscious light.
Lucid dreaming is a skill that nearly anyone can learn, practice, and develop through simple exercises.
There are many different methods for achieving lucidity in dreams,
but most involve making a habit of questioning reality,
and learning to set and follow through on specific intentions.
There are many benefits of lucid dreaming including gaining the ability to heal oneself and others,
or to see into future events, but it’s also a powerful tool for exploring the self.
By asking dream figures, or the dream world itself, for the meaning of dreamed events,
one can decode messages from the subconscious, or the inner self, and help resolve inner conflicts.
But lucid dreaming has applications in science as well.
Due to the control they afford the dreamer, lucid dreams are ideal places for scientific experimentation.
Without the aid of any instrumentation, a lucid dreamer could attempt to “view” a remote location
never seen before in life, or try to divine the next winning lottery number.
Any specific information retrieved from the dream could be checked against fact in waking life,
and “hits” could be methodically compared against “misses.”
Lucid dreaming offers science a method for investigating dreams, consciousness,
and reality through repeatable and falsifiable experimentation.
Though the scientific research on lucid dreaming is still in its early stages,
there is no doubt that individuals can attain consciousness in a dream,
and explore mental worlds as compelling as those in waking life.
The level of control this affords the dreamer makes it ideal for scientific experimentation,
but it’s open to anyone who wants to learn.
Researchers have not yet determined what's behind the construction of the dream world,
or how it can access information not consciously known to the dreamer,
but certain evidence suggests that lucid dreamers are not limited to the contents of their own minds;
we may all share in a greater consciousness beyond the self, and beyond each other.
(Sources listed in the video description.)