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WOULD you like to wake up in your dreams? There are many people who
can, many more who want to be able to, and now there are even machines,
gadgets and special clubs that you can join to help you to learn how. Moreover,
a few people adept at ‘lucid dreaming’ are helping sleep researchers to
penetrate the world of dreams in a way that seemed impossible 10 years ago.

In ordinary dreams, it is only when we wake up that we realise it was
a dream. We may even look back and be appalled that we could have dreamt
such ridiculous or disturbing things. ‘Why didn’t I realise that the tiger
was just a phantom?’ ‘How could I have pulled off his arm without realising
something was wrong?’ ‘I should have known that I can’t fly.’ ‘I should
have known it was a dream!’

In fact, being taken in like this is the norm. Thinking you shouldn’t
have been deceived is the first step towards lucid dreaming. Wondering ‘Could
I be dreaming?’ during the dream is the next step (though you may conclude
that you couldn’t possibly be). And, finally, true lucidity means knowing,
during the dream, that it is a dream. At that point, the spell is broken.
You seem to be wide awake in your dream and can take control of it.

The term ‘lucid dreaming’ (which isn’t a very good one since it means
much more than vivid or clear dreaming) was coined by Frederik van Eeden,
a Dutch psychiatrist, in 1913. He explained that, in this sort of dream,
‘the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper
reaches a state of perfect awareness and is able to direct his/her attention,
and to attempt different acts of free volition. Yet the sleep, as I am able
confidently to state, is undisturbed, deep and refreshing.’

It was this last point that researchers had been disputing for three-quarters
of a century. Only a handful of psychical researchers studied lucid dreams
and many people associated such work with the paranormal or occult. Orthodox
scientists who studied sleep were not interested. They argued that lucid
dreams could not possibly be real dreams at all; that the very idea of awareness
during a dream was a contradiction in terms. So their theory went, lucid
dreams must be occurring in brief moments of wakefulness or in the transition
between waking and sleeping – but not in the kind of deep sleep during which
rapid eye movements (REMs) and ordinary dreams usually take place. In other
words, lucid dreams were not really dreams at all.

How could the dreamers of lucid dreams convince them otherwise? After
all, when you are in a deep sleep and dreaming you cannot shout, ‘Hey! Listen
to me. I’m dreaming right now.’ The muscles of the body are paralysed. You
cannot even move a finger.

The breakthrough came when sleep researcher Keith Hearne, at the University
of Hull, realised that, of course, not all your muscles are paralysed. In
REM sleep, the eyes move. So perhaps a lucid dreamer could signal with eye
movements. It was just over 10 years ago that Alan Worsley, a lucid dreamer,
first managed this crucial trick. He decided to move his eyes left and right
eight times in succession whenever he realised he was dreaming. In the sleep
laboratory, Hearne had him connected to a polygraph and could see the string
of extreme eye movements clearly recorded in the middle of REM sleep. So
the doubters were wrong. Lucid dreams are real dreams and do occur during
REM sleep.

Further research showed that Worsley’s lucid dreams most often occurred
in the early morning, around 6.30am. They usually began nearly half an hour
into a period of REM, towards the end of a burst of rapid eye movements,
and lasted between two and five minutes.

It was one of those odd quirks of science that at the same time, unknown
to Hearne, Stephen LaBerge at Stanford University in California was trying
the same thing. Resistance to the idea was still strong. In 1980, both Science
and Nature rejected LaBerge’s first paper on the discovery. It was published
finally, however, and the door opened to serious research on some of the
most perplexing questions about sleep, dreaming and consciousness.

LaBerge’s research not only confirmed what Hearne and Worsley had found
but encouraged other researchers to find out, for example, who is likely
to have lucid dreams and when. The most consistent finding is one that Hearne
had already laid claim to: that high levels of physical (and emotional)
activity during the day precede lucidity at night. Waking during the night
and carrying out some kind of activity before falling asleep again can also
encourage a lucid dream during the next period of REM.

At the physiological level, lucid dreams tend to occur in periods of
higher cortical arousal during sleep. It is as though the brain has to reach
a certain threshold of arousal before awareness is possible. The beginning
of lucidity (marked by eye signals) is associated with pauses in breathing,
brief changes in heart rate and changes in the electrical potential of the
skin.

In terms of the dream itself, there are several features that seem to
provoke lucidity. Heightened anxiety or stress often precedes lucidity,
as can the intellectual recognition that there is something ‘dreamlike’
or incongruous about what is going on. It is as though, once there is sufficient
cortical arousal, it is possible to apply a bit of critical thought: perhaps
enabling one to remember enough about how the world ought to be in order
to recognise the dream world as ridiculous, or enough about oneself to know
that this cannot be part of normal waking life. However, tempting as it
is to conclude that this critical insight produces lucidity, there is as
yet no certainty about the direction of cause and effect.

Research has helped to refine methods for inducing lucid dreams. It
seems as though anyone can learn to dream lucidly if they have enough persistence
and determination. The techniques for doing it fall into three categories.
One of the best known is LaBerge’s MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming).
You can do this on waking in the early morning from a dream. Without forgetting
the dream, you should wake up fully, engage in some activity such as reading
or walking about and then lie down to sleep again. The idea is then to imagine
yourself asleep and dreaming, rehearse the dream from which you woke and
remind yourself, ‘Next time I’m dreaming, I want to remember I’m dreaming.’

Another approach is rather more radical and involves reminding yourself
throughout the day to become lucid during your dreams. This technique relates
to the realisation that we spend most of our time in a kind of waking daze.
If we could be more lucid in waking life, perhaps we could be more lucid
in dreams, too. The German psychologist Paul Tholey suggests asking yourself
many times every day, ‘Am I dreaming or not?’ And if this sounds easy, try
it. It takes considerable determination not to forget all about it. If you
do forget, you could try the trick of a French researcher, Olivier Clerc,
and write a large ‘C’ on your hand (for ‘conscious’) to remind you. These
methods are reminiscent of age-old techniques for increasing awareness by
meditation and mindfulness. Advanced practitioners of meditation claim to
maintain awareness during much of their sleep. So perhaps it is not surprising
that some recent research finds associations between meditation and increased
lucidity in dreams.

The final technique is the one that needs all the gadgets. The basic
principle is to use some kind of external signal to remind people, during
REM sleep, that they are dreaming. Hearne first tried spraying water on
sleepers’ hands and faces but eventually settled for a mild electric shock
to the wrist. His ‘dream machine’ detects periods of REM by monitoring changes
in breathing rate, delivering the shocks automatically.

Meanwhile, LaBerge rejected taped voices and vibrations and finally
designed the ‘dreamlight’, a machine that detects the eye movements of REM
sleep and turns on flashing lights when they reach a certain level. To test
the effectiveness of LaBerge’s machine, 44 people came into his laboratory,
most of them for just one night, and more than half of them had at least
one lucid dream. Two people had their first-ever lucid dream in this way.
From preliminary studies, this method seems to be about as successful as
MILD, but using both together is the most effective. Researchers are also
testing other techniques, but it is too early to be sure which ones work
best and why. Nevertheless, the availability of induction techniques means
there are ever more subjects who can have lucid dreams in the laboratory
and who can take part in experiments to learn more about lucid dreams. Such
studies can answer some interesting questions.

For example, how long do dreams last? It is a popular idea that lengthy
dreams are actually created in a flash, on waking. The most famous example
is from Alfred Maury, in the last century, who dreamt a long and complicated
dream leading up to his being beheaded by the guillotine. On waking, terrified,
he found that the bedhead had fallen on his neck and concluded that the
whole dream had been created in that moment.

For a long time, it seemed almost impossible to test this theory. Researchers
woke dreamers at various points during REM and found that those who had
been in REM sleep for longer claimed to have had longer dreams. However,
accurate timing became possible only when lucid dreamers could send ‘markers’
from the dream state. LaBerge even got people to signal when they became
lucid, count a 10-second period and signal again. Their average interval
was 13 seconds, the same as they gave when awake.

Worsley dreamed, while being monitored in the same sleep laboratory,
a long dream about drawing triangles on a blackboard. In his report afterwards,
he claimed, ‘I’d say the whole dream took about 5 minutes.’ In fact, the
recorded time was 5 minutes and 15 seconds.

The reason for drawing the triangles was simple. It was one of many
experiments investigating the relationship between dreamed actions and real
actions. This sort of research has a long history. Early sleep researchers
occasionally found examples where they could demonstrate a correlation,
such as a long series of left-right eye movements, after which the dreamer
woke to report having watched a ping-pong game. The problem was that researchers
had to wait until the right sort of dream came along. With lucid dreaming,
all this changed. In this experiment, with researchers Morton Schatzman
and Peter Fenwick in London, Worsley had planned to draw large triangles
and to signal with flicks of his eyes every time he did so. While he dreamed,
an electromyogram, which records small movements of muscles, showed not
only the eye signals but spikes of electrical activity in the right forearm
just afterwards. So the pre-planned actions in the dream produced corresponding
muscle movements. Further experiments, when Worsley dreamt that he was kicking
objects, writing with umbrellas or snapping his fingers, all confirmed that
the physical body shows small movements corresponding to the actions of
the dream body. Moreover, the eyes can track moving objects in a dream with
the correct kind of tracking movements, and dreamed speech starts when the
person begins to breathe out, just as real speech does.

LaBerge was interested in breathing for another reason. At the age of
five he had dreamed of being an under-sea pirate who could stay under water
for much longer periods than would be possible in waking life. Thirty years
later, he wanted to find out whether dreamers holding their breath in dreams
do so physically as well. He found that they do. He and other lucid dreamers
were able to signal from the dream and then hold their breath or breathe
rapidly in their dreams. A corresponding pattern appeared on the monitors.

In further experiments, LaBerge has gone on to answer questions that
would have been impossible to deal with before the advent of laboratory
lucid dreams. In waking life, the left and right hemispheres of the brain
are activated during different kinds of task. For example, singing uses
the right hemisphere more, while counting uses the left. In one dream, LaBerge
found himself flying over a field. He quickly signalled with his eyes and
began to sing ‘Row, row, row, your boat . . .’. He made another eye signal
and then counted slowly to ten before signalling one last time. The records
of his brain waves showed just the same patterns of activity that you would
expect if he had done these tasks while awake.

Finally, LaBerge has experimented with sex in dreams and found – yes
– that a woman’s dream orgasm is associated with physiological changes comparable
to those observed in orgasms while awake.

Experiments such as these show that there is a close correspondence
between actions of the dream body and, if not real movements, at least electrical
responses. This discovery puts lucid dreaming somewhere between real actions,
in which the muscles work to move the body, and waking imagery in which
they are rarely involved at all. However, it is obvious that, in spite of
similarities in the dreaming and waking actions of the body, the dream world
is quite different from the real world. Or is it? In one experiment, Worsley
had to administer himself a specified number of small electric shocks by
making eye movements. In his dream, he was in a sleeping bag out in the
rain. He could see the light from his alarm clock and knew that the machine
that was to deliver the shocks was there. Indeed, as he carried out the
task, he worried about getting the machine wet.

Such a correspondence between the dream world and the real world happens
in a much more bizarre form during ‘false awakening’, or, as van Eeden called
it, ‘wrong waking up’. You simply dream that you have woken up and rather
than being aware that it is a dream (in other words, being lucid), you are
convinced that what went before was a dream and this, now, is real. A student
at the University of Bristol told me how she would (apparently) wake up,
drag herself out of bed, clean her teeth, get dressed and even cycle up
the long, steep hill to the medical school, only to wake up and have to
go through it all again! These false awakenings can be anything from mildly
amusing to intensely unpleasant. Many dreamers have described the ‘eerie
glow’ or a ‘strong diabolical light’ which seems to surround objects in
this false world. Some have become terrified and others have learnt to wake
themselves to escape. It is as though being trapped without awareness in
a replica world is something to avoid, while becoming aware in a dream is
delightful. It is not surprising, then, that children sometimes learn to
have lucid dreams to get out of recurrent nightmares, while others learn
the skill just to enjoy the fun.

An uplifting experience

In all these experiences, it seems as though the perceptual world has
been replaced by another world, built from the imagination, a hallucinatory
replica. Put this way, it becomes obvious that other experiences fit in
the same category. Celia Green, of the Institute of Psychophysical Research
in Oxford, has called them ‘metachoric experiences’. They include the out-of-the-body
experience in which you seem to come out of your body and float up to view
things from above. Although traditionally thought to involve the separation
of an astral body or soul, this experience is now better understood as a
replacement of the perceived world by one from memory and imagination. Interestingly,
there is plenty of evidence, including that from my own surveys, that the
same people that report having out-of-the-body experiences also have lucid
dreams; many of them say that the experiences feel very similar, if not
identical.

Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist from the University of Alberta in Canada,
relates these experiences to near-death experiences and stories about abductions
by UFOs. Although the ‘UFO abductions’ may be the most bizarre, they, too,
involve the replacement of the perceived world by a hallucinatory replica.
What makes the lucid dream special, in this context, is the person’s insight
into what is happening. In a typical out-of-the-body experience, people
think they really have left their bodies. In a ‘UFO abduction’, they believe
that the little green men are ‘really there’ and in the near-death experience,
they are convinced that they are rushing down a real tunnel towards the
next world. It is only in the lucid dream that they realise it is a dream.
Is insight into these other experiences possible in the same way? Worsley,
the pioneer of signalling from lucid dreams, is now trying an even more
arduous and difficult task – inducing lucid dreams (or something like them)
from the waking state. His method sounds ridiculously simple. You just lie
on your back and keep still. Simple it may be, but easy it isn’t. Each attempt
takes two hours or more to work. Then the realistic, dream-like images can
be so disturbing that it is almost impossible not to move. As Worsley himself
puts it ‘ . . . if one dreams, as I have, in rich tactile and auditory imagery,
of being examined in the dark by robots or operated on by small beings whose
goodwill and competence may be, doubt . . . it can be very difficult to
keep still.’ If he moves, the state evaporates and he has to start the two
hours all over again. Nevertheless, this method holds out the hope of exploring
the oddities of metachoric experiences.

Of course, for most lucid dreamers, the most important thing is how
they feel in a lucid dream: more alive, alert and conscious, or ‘more like
my real self’. What does this mean? The self in a dream is, of course, just
a mental model. But then so is the self in waking life. We might like to
think that we are more than that, but psychology teaches us that selves
are constructed, just as the world we perceive is constructed. So how can
I be ‘more’ or ‘less’ myself? I think the answer is that the self constructed
in lucid dreams is not the fleeting, ephemeral creature of ordinary dreams,
with no memory and no insight. In fact, it is much more like the model constructed
in waking life. Perhaps this is why we feel more like ourselves in lucid
dreams. If so, future research should be able to use lucid dreaming not
just to understand sleep and dreams but to explore the very nature of our
conscious selves.

* * *

How lucid are your dreams?

IMAGINE how you would react if you had the following dream: You are
driving along the motorway when you notice that you are being overtaken
on the inside by a small black toy car, with no one at the wheel.

1) With no awareness at all, you are annoyed at the car’s behaviour
and flash your lights or try to catch it up.

2) With a little insight, you think it odd that a toy car is on the
motorway and try to understand why. You wonder if it’s a remote control
car and someone nearby is driving it.

3) With a little more awareness, you realise it’s illegal and probably
impossible for a toy car to drive on a motorway. You wonder whether it could
be a dream but dismiss this idea as ridiculous. This is called a pre-lucid
dream.

4) With full lucidity, you ask yourself whether it is a dream and conclude
that it must be.

5) You take control of the dream and jump into the toy car, fly out
of your own car above the motorway, or dissolve the whole scene and fix
on something you really want to dream about.

Dr Susan Blackmore is a research fellow at the Department of Psychology
in the University of Bristol.