lucid_dreams

Designer dreams
24 Dec 94

Do you know when you're in the middle of a dream? And does it
matter if you do? The world of lucid dreams

                                 "I'M WALKING along a street with a friend. `In a lucid dream,' I tell
                                 him, `reality feels just as real as this.' And I start stomping the
                                 pavement, which feels very solid. As we walk along I notice that the
                                 Sun appears to be flashing. I think this is unusual and then realise
                                 that this could be a dream.

                                 "I try to remain calm since I often become so excited when I first
                                 realise I'm in a lucid dream that I wake up. I start to perforin a reality
                                 test by reading a shop sign and looking away. If I am in a dream, the
                                 words in the sign will have changed when I look back. But I already
                                 know this is a lucid dream, and leave my friend and try to fly.

                                 "At first, getting off the ground is difficult. I have to conjure up some
                                 handles, like those used by water-skiers, to pull me into the air. I
                                 begin to rise and experience a feeling of marvellous exhilaration as I
                                 pick up speed. I can see clearly all around me but I can't control my
                                 excitement and wake up."

                                 This is the twilight world of lucid dreams, where sleepers roam a
                                 dreamy reality and the future is nothing but a careless thought. But
                                 lucid dreams may be more than a wonderfully cheap, built-in virtual
                                 reality system. Sleep therapists say lucid dreams can combat
                                 nightmares. Psychologists believe they can help with sporting
                                 performance and other aspects of life in the real world. They may
                                 even improve your health. One psychologist has started selling
                                 machines that can trigger these dreams.

                                 The paradoxical phenomenon of consciousness during sleep is by no
                                 means rare. According to Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at
                                 Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada, 60 per cent of adults
                                 experience at least one lucid dream during their lives and 16 per cent
                                 experience them every month. Nor are lucid dreams a modern
                                 phenomenon. Aristotle wrote that he was sometimes conscious of
                                 dreaming, and in 1867 a French academic called Marquis d'Hervey de
                                 Saint-Denys published a book called Dreams and how to guide them
                                 in which he outlined several techniques for lucid dreaming. The term
                                 "lucid dream", however, did not appear until 1913, when the Dutch
                                 physician Frederick Willem van Eeden coined it.

Getting an eyeful

                                 Despite its long history, lucid dreaming is not well understood. Every
                                 dream is a unique personal experience, and reports like the one
                                 above are inevitably anecdotal. But the dream world is not as
                                 impervious to study as it might seem, and inventive researchers have
                                 devised a way for dreamers to communicate with the real world. The
                                 method relies on the fact that lucid dreams, like most dreams, occur
                                 during a phase of sleep characterised by rapid eye movement (REM).
                                 Such movement can be measured with electrodes that monitor the
                                 eye muscles. In 1979, Stephen LaBerge, a psychologist at the
                                 Stanford Sleep Research Center at Stanford University in California,
                                 and, working independently, Keith Hearn and Alan Worsley at the
                                 University of Liverpool, discovered that eye movements in a dream
                                 correspond to real eye movements that can be measured. This
                                 opened a channel of communication from the dreamer to the
                                 experimenter.

                                 Using this technique, LaBerge went on to show that the perception of
                                 time during a lucid dream was similar to the perception of time when
                                 awake. He asked subjects to make a signal with their eyes every ten
                                 seconds while experiencing a lucid dream and while awake: the
                                 interval was roughly the same in both cases.

                                 The channel of communication is not one way; it is also possible to
                                 arrange for external stimuli to influence a dream. De Saint-Denys, for
                                 example, describes how he was able to use this technique to
                                 stimulate erotic dreams. His method was to choose a desirable lady
                                 and waltz with her only when a specific tune was played. He was then
                                 able to conjure up her image in a dream by playing the appropriate
                                 tune on a musical box while he was asleep.

                                 LaBerge has taken this technique further. He has developed a machine
                                 that monitors rapid eye movement and produces flashing lights and
                                 beeps when the sleeper is dreaming. The idea is that the signals will
                                 be incorporated into the dream somehow, as the Sun flashing in the
                                 example above, or as doorbells ringing or traffic lights changing. With
                                 training, the subject can learn to recognise these events as
                                 indications that he or she is in a dream. The next step is to take
                                 control.

                                 But experiencing lucid dreams is not just a question of donning the
                                 headgear and falling asleep. Remembering them is just as important,
                                 and some of LaBerge's subjects experience a lower incidence of
                                 remembered dreams when they start to use his machine. Aspiring
                                 lucid dreamers must practise writing down their dreams as soon as
                                 they wake up, and to help them, LaBerge's machine can be
                                 programmed to wake them up after a dream has finished.

Reality test

                                 LaBerge has also developed a set of mental exercises that allow the
                                 subject to answer the question "Am I dreaming?". The presence of
                                 flashing lights is not always enough to guarantee that they are, so
                                 LaBerge has produced a reality test, which subjects must practise
                                 each time they see a flashing light. The test involves finding a written
                                 word of at least four characters, such as on a banknote or traffic
                                 sign, reading it and then looking away. "For some unknown reason, in
                                 a dream, the words will have changed when you look at them again,"
                                 says LaBerge. Once this test becomes second nature, subjects find
                                 they begin to use it in their dreams.

                                 Although practised dreamers can exercise a great deal of control
                                 over their dreams, lucid dreaming will not always take you where
                                 you want to go. Some dreamers report that mundane activities like
                                 switching a light on and off seem impossible or result in unexpected
                                 changes. Nobody knows why. Other subjects say they have had
                                 difficulty trying to commit dream suicide or dream murder. LaBerge
                                 claims lucid dreaming is a harmless activity, but some sleepers have
                                 reported nightmarish experiences like being attacked by a mob each
                                 time the dream became lucid. On the other hand, Kathryn Belicki, a
                                 psychologist at Brock University in Canada, has successfully taught
                                 people to become lucid during a nightmare in order to make the
                                 dream less unpleasant.

                                 Reading also presents problems. The reality test is founded on the
                                 brain's apparent inability to simulate consistently words of more than
                                 three letters. Charles McCreery at the Institute of Psychophysical
                                 Research in Oxford believes that the left side of the brain is
                                 responsible for activities like reading. He says these problems may be
                                 explained if the left side of the brain is less active than the right
                                 during lucid dreaming. He has measured just this effect in people
                                 experiencing out of body experiences, and plans to carry out tests
                                 next year to see if the same thing happens to lucid dreamers.
                                 LaBerge is working to pinpoint these active sites.

                                 Other experiments have shown that eye movement is not the only
                                 physical change that lucid dreams can produce. LaBerge has
                                 detected faster breathing rates in subjects who try to run in dreams.
                                 The German psychologist Paul Tholey at the Goethe University in
                                 Frankfurt has even shown that athletes can improve their
                                 performance by practising their routine in a dream. There is a
                                 growing body of anecdotal evidence that lucid dreaming can help the
                                 healing process, although it is difficult to test these claims.

                                 The first such machine consisted of a tower of black metal boxes
                                 covered with flashing lights. The subject was linked to the tower by a
                                 tangle of cables connected to a pair of swimming goggles. "It looked
                                 rather like a prop from a bad 1950s science fiction movie," says
                                 LaBerge, and he has now developed more user friendly designs. The
                                 simplest of these, known as the NovaDreamer, is a lightweight sleep
                                 mask housing a microchip, a REM sensor, a couple of small lights and a
                                 battery.

                                 In 1988, he set up the Lucidity Institute in Palo Alto in California to
                                 popularise lucid dreaming through training programmes and to sell his
                                 machines. The NovaDreamer sells for $275, and more advanced
                                 models for $900. Profits currently run at about $40 000 a year. The
                                 institute also publishes a newsletter that invites readers to participate
                                 in experiments. One such experiment has established that lucid
                                 dreams are most likely to occur towards the end of a sleep when
                                 periods of REM are more common. The business could make LaBerge a
                                 wealthy man. Perhaps dreams can come true after all.

                                 Further reading: Lucid Dreaming by Celia Green and Charles
                                 McCreery, Routledge, pp 186, £30 hbk, £9.99pbk; Lucid Dreaming by
                                 Stephen LaBerge, Ballantine, pp 304, $4.95; Creative Dreaming by
                                 Patricia Garfield, Ballantine, pp 256, $4.95

                                 TOM FOREMSKI
                                 JOURNALIST, CALIFORNIA
                                  From New Scientist magazine, vol 144 issue 1957, 24/12/1994, page
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