Lucid Dreaming

This work on lucid dreaming really took off among dream researchers. The initial verification of the possibility of knowing you are dreaming while you are dreaming is primarily due to my colleague Steven LaBerge. By now his work has been replicated in several sleep laboratories. I think we can say with reasonable certainty that you can be "awake" in some sense while you're asleep.

This is how it has been proven. When you're in REM sleep remember you're paralyzed from the neck down. The task was to come up with a way to signal to the polysongrapher, "Hey, I know I'm dreaming". You can not hit a micro switch or kick your leg because of this paralysis. But it turns out that you do have control of your eye movements. That is, while in a dream if you think, "I'm going to move my eyes way to the right and then way to the left" and then your dream self does it with his/her dream eyes, that's what really happens to the dreamers physical eyes. Faberge devised a technique at exactly the same time as Keith Hearne in England, totally unbeknownst to each other, where people could signal when they realized they were dreaming. The signal to the sleep lab technician through electrodes attached to the corners of the eyes was a prearranged set of eye movements. Then the technician would wake them up and ask "what was going on before I awoke you?" If dreamer knew they were dreaming and had signaled they would want to know if the technician got the signal?

For instance in Figure 4, there are five signals from LaBerge's laboratory. He writes about this figure: "This is from the last eight minutes of a thirty minute REM period. Upon awakening the subject reported having made five eye movement signals. The first signal at one -- left-right, marked the onset of lucidity. . . . During the following ninety seconds, the subject flew about exploring his dream world until he believed he had awakened, at which point he made the signal for awakening, at number two, which is four movements of left-right, left-right. After another ninety seconds the subject realized he was still dreaming and signaled at three with three pairs of eye movements. Realizing this was too many, he correctly signaled with two pairs at number four. Finally, upon awakening a hundred seconds later, he signaled appropriately with again four movements of left-right, left-right." You can see that you don't need to be a trained polysonographer to recognize the signals. They jump out at you. They're not ambiguous. And they exactly fit the dream transcript describing the felt experience of the dream.

Last week I indeed had a lucid dream. I was all of a sudden in my room, I don't recall how i got there but it was just me in my room all of a sudden. Apparently in my dream I found this funny too, I don't know what tipped me off but for some reason I suspected I was dreaming. With much uncertainty I tried turning the lights off, but it was impossible. I was overwhelmed with excitement; for the first time i was conscious during a dream! The first thing I could think of to do was fly. So i through my arms up like super man (no lie) and tried to fly. That is when the room began to disappear until it was just me in a blank white room. End of dream.

This morning my cat woke me up sometime between 3-5 by meowing outside my door. When I woke I was angry for a second, until i realized that i had another lucid dream. I was overwhelmed with joy. This time around was a bit more long and vivid, but it was quite similar but i remember a little more to it this time. I was talking to my uncle (odd because I rarely see this uncle) and I literally asked him "what to you know about lucid dreams?" JUST like in the film, Waking Life which i find really odd. I remember he was really enthused that I asked him. It gets a little vague from here. I remember my uncle went off about lucid dreams for a long time meanwhile I kept trying to ask him a question I thought was very important (although i cant remember what it was, or what my uncle was talking about at this point.). From here is gets more vivid. I was in my basement with somebody, presumably my uncle, it was pretty dark and no lights were on, yet i could still see the figure of a human, and it did not seem weird (at first) that we were interacting in the dark. Again, something tipped me off. I feel it was the lack of lights, but i cant say for certain. I asked whoever it was to hit the light switch, I cant explain how we knew where it was but we did. When the figure hit the switch no lights came on or anything. At this point I realized i may be dreaming, so i tried flipping the switch and nothing, I got excited, and flipped the switch on/off numerous times. Once I realized 100% I was dreaming, i was instantly in my room which is odd because last time i was just suddenly in my room as well. The lighting was still dark and of course, i tried to fly. This time i actually started to fly but i did not get far at all when the room again began to fade, this time to black. I was much more aware this time around and i was consciously fighting it. As I was fighting 'The Fade' there were these weird splotches of ultraviolet sort of like the patterns you see when you rub your eyes really hard. In the end the fade won. End of dream.