Looking Lucid lately ? always looking, to sleep, perchance to lucid dream – more examples higher resolution recorded using IBVA brainwave monitor in USA with friends April 2009 -

Brainwave files on Blip

http://www.dream-recorder.com/

done

Originally uploaded by Luciana Brainlady

Between Life + Mind + Art, 29th October 2008 at InQbate, Sussex University

Organised by Matthew Egbert (CCNR) and Anna Dumitriu (Director of the IUR and Artist in Residence CCNR)

Luciana presents IBVA interaction to researchers whose work is linked to that of the Life and Mind seminar group http://lifeandmind.wordpress.com. They have found that as part
of their output the spontaneous production of art is occurring, sometimes intentionally and at other times more organically.
This event seeks to investigate this phenomenon and invites researchers to share their artworks and experiences alongside artists working in similar areas. Features an exhibition, a keynote presentation by Pia Tikka and a debate chaired by Tom Froese.

I will be co-presenting this friday 07.11.08 a lecture in Brunel university with Stelarc, he has invited me to introduce the wonders of the IBVA brainwave recording interactive system to Performing Arts students with a hands-on ( brains-in) workshop in the afternoon ! I personally hold Stelarc responsible for my obsession with biofeedback, since he visited my degree course in 1994 in Interactive Art, and gave me my first electrode gel ! I was orginally building cybernetic interfaces using ECG monitors sending realtime heart beat as trigger to a multiway audio speaker switching system. I need to add that photo from the archives.

Stelarc’s Ear PORTRAIT taken by nina sellars

Performing for The Future of Sound in Liverpool – The ReActor3 event, Luciana’s Lucid Dream “Cyber Sleep” EEG interaction begins with auditions from the audience throughout the evening to find a suitable volunteer. In three hours Ms Meres located 2 potential candidates, a jet-lagged interface designer is pictured as the oneironaut  in this photo – Miss Meres assists Luciana in this photo. ( nice electrode stuck to forehead lu chi )

Dave lends his EEG after the show as Luciana connects him to the IBVA.  As he confessed to already know effective techniques for lucid dreaming and has  good success with his oneironautic interventions !

New York times, 16.09.07

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

Published: September 16, 2007

THE kiss you share with the exquisite stranger is electric, deep and seemingly endless — that is until you open an eye and see drool on your pillow.

Skip to next paragraph 

 

Yari Film Group

DON’T PINCH ME In “The Good Night,” Martin Freeman plays a man who dreams to escape reality.

 

Teresa Isasi/Picturehouse

The faun in “Pan’s Labyrinth” came from the director’s childhood dreams.

If only you could have slept long enough to consummate the seduction. Then again, you had no idea you were dreaming. Besides, you cannot control the nightly ride on the wings of your subconscious. Or can you?

Maybe, if you learn to practice “lucid dreaming,” a state in which a sleeping person becomes aware he or she is dreaming and may even be able to direct the action. Those who regularly experience the phenomenon say that like the physics-defying characters in “The Matrix,” they are able to generate or manipulate the fantastical events that unfold. They can fly without wings, play instruments they never learned, go bowling with T. S. Eliot — and, yes, indulge sexual fantasies.

It is likely some people have always had such dreams, said Jayne Gackenbach, a professor of psychology at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, Alberta, who conducts research into lucid dreaming. But the esoteric practice, which has been acknowledged in the West since at least 1867, seems on the verge of becoming much better known.

A film exploring its allure, “The Good Night,” written and directed by Jake Paltrow and starring his sister, Gwyneth, Penélope Cruz and Martin Freeman, is opening Oct. 5. Depressed by his waking life, the film’s main character is determined to master the art of lucid dreaming to escape to an inspiring, sensual unreality with a lacquer-lipped knockout. “What I find myself most attracted to are things that can actually occur,” Mr. Paltrow said in an interview. “There’s really nothing in this movie that couldn’t happen.”

For those wishing to become lucid dreamers, a nine-and-a-half-day instructional retreat, “Dreaming and Awakening: Lucid Dreaming, Consciousness and Dream Yoga,” is scheduled to begin Oct. 1 in Hawaii. Don’t want to pay the airfare? On Oct. 3, an online chat about lucid dreaming takes place, part of the PsiberDreaming conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. There are new and soon-to-be published books, like “Lucid Dreaming for Beginners: Simple Techniques for Creating Interactive Dreams” (Llewellyn Publications) and “Between the Gates: Lucid Dreaming, Astral Projection and the Body of Light in Western Esotericism” (Weiser Books).

“It has gone from this very obscure type of dream to being discussed at the various dream and consciousness conferences,” Dr. Gackenbach said.

But it is not only dream experts discussing the topic. Two filmmakers described their lucid dreaming earlier this year. Michel Gondry, who directed “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” described for The Guardian lucid dreams in which “I generally end up having sex with the first girl I can find.” Guillermo del Toro, the director of “Pan’s Labyrinth,” mentioned his lucid dreaming on the National Public Radio program “Fresh Air.” “Pan’s Labyrinth” brings to life a twiggy mythological creature (a faun) he encountered in lucid dreams as a boy; the film won an Oscar this year for its surrealistic makeup.

Other films, including “Waking Life” and “Vanilla Sky,” have woven lucid dreaming into their plots. So have television series like “Alias,” “Star Trek” and “Ed” (Daryl Hall and John Oates make an appearance in Ed’s dream). Novelists including Stephen King, William Boyd and Graham Joyce have written about lucid dreaming, and the Verve, a British rock band, sang about it in “Catching the Butterfly.”

“Lucid dream” is the name of pop and jazz CDs, small businesses, modern artworks, even a sex toy.

Still, many people have never heard of it. Established sleep researchers say lucid dreaming is occasionally reported by subjects, though it is difficult to validate scientifically. “Yes, lucid dreaming exists,” said Dr. Rodney Radtke, the medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Duke University. “Yes, people certainly can, within their dream, realize ‘this is just a dream’ and continue to participate.”

“Do I believe that someone could potentially alter or interact with their dreams in such a way that they could change the dream? Yes,” he said. “Do I think that you could essentially design a dream — ‘Oh, I want to go to Honolulu and have this big hunk hit on me’? It’s a bit of a stretch. But I can’t say it can’t happen.”

He added: “Only in New York or California do they worry about this stuff.”

Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist and the founder of the Lucidity Institute (lucidity.com), conducts lucid dream research and teaches people to do it.

“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible,” Dr. LaBerge said. “Fly. Dream sex. That’s what everybody likes to do. There’s also the possibility of creative problem-solving, overcoming nightmares and anxieties, learning more about yourself.”

A student at Stanford University, where Dr. LaBerge conducted much of his research, wrote in The Stanford Daily: “In one of my earliest experiences with lucidity, I announced to an auditorium full of people that I was their god (wasn’t I?). When they did not respond deferentially, I used telekinesis to send one of them flying across the room.”

It can be particularly appealing to those who have nightmares, as it allows them to realize while still asleep that they are just dreaming.

Interest in these potential real-world benefits and the otherworldly freedoms of lucid dreaming — as well as the questions it provokes about the precarious nature of reality — has spurred the invention and evolution of seemingly wacky dream aids. There are masks with lights and sounds; Orwellian devices that announce THIS IS A DREAM! in the middle of the night; and pills.

At the Hawaii gathering next month, attendees will be able to check out Dr. LaBerge’s NovaDreamer, a mask meant to light up during REM sleep and cue the person entangled in the sheets that he or she is dreaming. It is based on the notion that people can make a plan while awake and then execute it in their dreams. A light or sound is meant to remind them of their goal of lucid dreaming without actually waking them up. Participants may also take part in experiments with an herbal version of a drug that impacts acetylcholine, a neurotransmitting compound that affects memory.

As bizarre as these things may sound, there is a scientific rationale for cueing users during REM sleep. “REM-sleep dreams are much more visual,” said Matthew P. Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former assistant professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School. “They have a strong narrative that runs through them. They’re hallucinogenic.”

There are several reasons for this, including that the lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in logical reasoning and working memory, becomes more inactive during REM sleep, while other areas of the brain, like the visual and emotional centers, rev up.

Scientists, however, are still trying to discover the difference between the dreaming brain and the lucid-dreaming brain. The leading candidate, Dr. Walker said, is the lateral prefrontal cortex. He thinks that during REM sleep, the activity level of this logic-oriented part of the brain begins to rise back to waking levels, and when it does, an invisible switch is flipped and the sleeper gains lucidity. “In the next five years, I think somebody will demonstrate that,” he said.

Lucid-dream researchers say there are myriad mental exercises a person can do during waking hours to try to become cognizant while dreaming. One technique involves performing various reality checks many times a day — such as looking at the numbers on a watch, looking away, and then looking at them again to make sure that night has not suddenly become day. The theory is that if a person does this regularly while awake, he or she will likely repeat it while dreaming and will recognize inconsistencies — if, say, the watch is melting in a Dali-esque way. Then the sleeper will think: “This looks surreal. I must be dreaming.”

In “The Good Night,” the would-be lucid dreamer performs a series of reality checks: he flips a light switch on and off (light in dreams is not usually nuanced); looks in a mirror (reflections in dreams are often obscured); and stares at his hands (in dreams one’s hands may be elongated or have fewer fingers).

Keeping a dream journal is also said to promote better recall and to train people to identify signs that indicate they are dreaming — chatting with the deceased, floating cars, talking skeletons. Again, the idea is that when people are sleeping, they will recognize these things as signs they are dreaming and they will become lucid.

Waking up half an hour earlier than usual, staying awake for 30 to 60 minutes and then going back to sleep may also induce lucid dreams, Dr. LaBerge has found. Dr. LaBerge honed his own lucid-dreaming abilities by writing his dreams down immediately after waking and telling himself he intended to remember and recognize his dreams.

Psychologists who study lucid dreaming do not know why some people need more help triggering full lucidity than others, though they agree that adept lucid dreamers are excellent at remembering dreams. Dr. Gackenbach said they tend to have strong visualization and spatial skills. They can look at a machine and envision how the parts work inside, she said, or sew a dress from scratch and know exactly what the finished frock will look like. Many practice meditation.

Of course some professionals, particularly psychoanalysts, think orchestrating one’s dreams is not a critical goal.

“We distinguish between the manifest content of the dream — the dream as you remember it — and the latent content of it,” said Dr. Edward Nersessian, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. “Whatever you manage or do not manage to do with the manifest content isn’t really that relevant. That’s like a screen behind which lies all sorts of answers which you have to go digging for.”

When then asked if lucid dreaming was a dangerous enterprise, he chuckled gently and said: “If people who do it think it calms their anxiety, I’m all for it.”

Susan Blackmore

Published in Skeptical Inquirer 1991, 15, 362-370

What could it mean to be conscious in your dreams? For most of us, dreaming is something quite separate from normal life. When we wake up from being chased by a ferocious tiger, or seduced by a devastatingly good-looking Nobel Prize winner we realize with relief or disappointment that “it was only a dream.”

Yet there are some dreams that are not like that. Lucid dreams are dreams in which you know at the time that you are dreaming. That they are different from ordinary dreams is obvious as soon as you have one. The experience is something like waking up in your dreams. It is as though you “come to” and find you are dreaming.

Lucid dreams used to be a topic within psychical research and parapsychology. Perhaps their incomprehensibility made them good candidates for being thought paranormal. More recently, however, they have begun to appear in psychology journals and have dropped out of parapsychology—a good example of how the field of parapsychology shrinks when any of its subject matter is actually explained.

Lucidity has also become something of a New Age fad. There are machines and gadgets you can buy and special clubs you can join to learn how to induce lucid dreams. But this commercialization should not let us lose sight of the very real fascination of lucid dreaming. It forces us to ask questions about the nature of consciousness, deliberate control over our actions, and the nature of imaginary worlds.

A Real Dream or Not?

The term lucid dreaming was coined by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in 1913. It is something of a misnomer since it means something quite different from just clear or vivid dreaming. Nevertheless we are certainly stuck with it. Van Eeden explained that in this sort of dream “the re-integration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper reaches a state of perfect awareness and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition. Yet the sleep, as I am able confidently to state, is undisturbed, deep, and refreshing.”

This implied that there could be consciousness during sleep, a claim many psychologists denied for more than 50 years. Orthodox sleep researchers argued that lucid dreams could not possibly be real dreams. If the accounts were valid, then the experiences must have occurred during brief moments of wakefulness or in the transition between waking and sleeping, not in the kind of deep sleep in which rapid eye movements (REMs) and ordinary dreams usually occur. In other words, they could not really be dreams at all.

This presented a challenge to lucid dreamers who wanted to convince people that they really were awake in their dreams. But of course when you are deep asleep and dreaming you cannot shout, “Hey! Listen to me. I’m dreaming right now.” All the muscles of the body are paralyzed.

It was Keith Hearne (1978), of the University of Hull, who first exploited the fact that not all the muscles are paralyzed. In REM sleep the eyes move. So perhaps a lucid dreamer could signal by moving the eyes in a predetermined pattern. Just over ten years ago, lucid dreamer Alan Worsley first managed this in Hearne’s laboratory. He decided to move his eyes left and right eight times in succession whenever he became lucid. Using a polygraph, Hearne could watch the eye movements for signs of the special signal. He found it in the midst of REM sleep. So 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 6:30 A M, nearly half an hour into a REM period and toward the end of a burst of rapid eye movements. They usually lasted for two to five minutes. Later research showed that they occur at times of particularly high arousal during REM sleep (Hearne 1978).

It is sometimes said that discoveries in science happen when the time is right for them. It was one of those odd things that at just the same time, but unbeknown to Hearne, Stephen LaBerge, at Stanford University in California, was trying the same experiment. He too succeeded, but resistance to the idea was very strong. In 1980, both Science and Nature rejected his first paper on the discovery (LaBerge 1985). It was only later that it became clear what an important step this had been.

An Identifiable State?

It would be especially interesting if lucid dreams were associated with a unique physiological state. In fact this has not been found, although this is not very surprising since the same is true of other altered states, such as out-of-body experiences and trances of various kinds. However, lucid dreams do tend to occur in periods of higher cortical arousal. Perhaps a certain threshold of arousal has to be reached before awareness can be sustained.

The beginning of lucidity (marked by eye signals, of course) is associated with pauses in breathing, brief changes in heart rate, and skin response changes, but there is no unique combination that allows the lucidity to be identified by an observer.

In terms of the dream itself, there are several features that seem to provoke lucidity. Sometimes heightened anxiety or stress precedes it. More often there is a kind of intellectual recognition that something “dreamlike” or incongruous is going on (Fox 1962; Green 1968; LaBerge 1985).

It is common to wake from an ordinary dream and wonder, “How on earth could I have been fooled into thinking that I was really doing pushups on a blue beach?” A little more awareness is shown when we realize this in the dream. If you ask yourself, “Could this be a dream?” and answer “No” (or don’t answer at all), this is called a pre-lucid dream. Finally, if you answer “Yes,” it becomes a fully lucid dream.

It could be that once there is sufficient cortical arousal it is possible to apply a bit of critical thought; to remember enough about how the world ought to be to recognize the dream world as ridiculous, or perhaps to remember enough about oneself to know that these events can’t be continuous with normal waking life. However, tempting as it is to conclude that the critical insight produces the lucidity, we have only an apparent correlation and cannot deduce cause and effect from it.

Becoming a Lucid Dreamer

Surveys have shown that about 50 percent of people (and in some cases more) have had at least one lucid dream in their lives. (See, for example, Blackmore 1982; Gackenbach and LaBerge 1988; Green 1968.) Of course surveys are unreliable in that many people may not understand the question. In particular, if you have never had a lucid dream, it is easy to misunderstand what is meant by the term. So overestimates might be expected. Beyond this, it does not seem that surveys can find out much. There are no very consistent differences between lucid dreamers and others in terms of age, sex, education, and so on (Green 1968; Gackenbach and LaBerge 1988).

For many people, having lucid dreams is fun, and they want to learn how to have more or to induce them at will. One finding from early experimental work was that high levels of physical (and emotional) activity during the day tend to 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 REM period and is the basis of some induction techniques.

Many methods have been developed (Gackenbach and Bosveld 1989; Tart 1988; Price and Cohen 1988). They roughly fall into three categories.

One of the best known is LaBerge’s MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming). This is done on waking in the early morning from a dream. You should wake up fully, engage in some activity like reading or walking about, and then lie down to go to sleep again. Then you must imagine yourself asleep and dreaming, rehearse the dream from which you woke, and remind yourself, “Next time I dream this I want to remember I’m dreaming.”

A second approach involves constantly reminding yourself to become lucid throughout the day rather than the night. This is based on the idea 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 while dreaming. German psychologist Paul Tholey suggests asking yourself many times every day, “Am I dreaming or not?” This sounds easy but is not. It takes a lot of determination and persistence not to forget all about it. For those who do forget, French researcher Clerc suggests writing a large “C” on your hand (for “conscious”) to remind you (Tholey 1983; Gackenbach and Bosveld 1989).

This kind of method is similar to the age-old technique for increasing awareness by meditation and mindfulness. Advanced practitioners of meditation claim to maintain awareness through a large proportion of their sleep. TM is often claimed to lead to sleep awareness. So perhaps it is not surprising that some recent research finds associations between meditation and increased lucidity (Gackenbach and Bosveld 1989).

The third and final approach requires a variety of gadgets. The idea is to use some sort of external signal to remind people, while they are actually in REM sleep, that they are dreaming. Hearne first tried spraying water onto sleepers’ faces or hands but found it too unreliable. This sometimes caused them to incorporate water imagery into their dreams, but they rarely became lucid. He eventually decided to use a mild electric shock to the wrist. His “dream machine” detects changes in breathing rate (which accompany the onset of REM) and then automatically delivers a shock to the wrist (Hearne 1990).

Meanwhile, in California, LaBerge was rejecting taped voices and vibrations and working instead with flashing lights. The original version was laboratory based and used a personal computer to detect the eye movements of REM sleep and to turn on flashing lights whenever the REMs reached a certain level. Eventually, however, all the circuitry was incorporated into a pair of goggles. The idea is to put the goggles on at night, and the lights will flash only when you are asleep and dreaming. The user can even control the level of eye movements at which the lights begin to flash.

The newest version has a chip incorporated into the goggles. This will not only control the lights but will store data on eye-movement density during the night and when and for how long the lights were flashing, making fine tuning possible. At the moment, the first users have to join in workshops at LaBerge’s Lucidity Institute and learn how to adjust the settings, but within a few months he hopes the whole process will be fully automated. (See LaBerge’s magazine, DreamLight. )

LaBerge tested the effectiveness of the Dream Light on 44 subjects who came into the laboratory, most for just one night. Fifty-five percent had at least one lucid dream and two had their first-ever lucid dream this way. The results suggested that this method is about as successful as MILD, but using the two together is the most effective (LaBerge 1985).

Lucid Dreams as an Experimental Tool

There are a few people who can have lucid dreams at will. And the increase in induction techniques has provided many more subjects who have them frequently. This has opened the way to using lucid dreams to answer some of the most interesting questions about sleep and dreaming.

How long do dreams take? In the last century, Alfred Maury had a long and complicated dream that led to his being beheaded by a guillotine. He woke up terrified, and found that the headboard of his bed had fallen on his neck. From this, the story goes, he concluded that the whole dream had been created in the moment of awakening.

This idea seems to have got into popular folklore but was very hard to test. Researchers woke dreamers at various stages of their REM period and found that those who had been longer in REM claimed longer dreams. However, accurate timing became possible only when lucid dreamers could send “markers” from the dream state.

LaBerge asked his subjects to signal when they became lucid and then count a ten-second period and signal again. Their average interval was 13 seconds, the same as they gave when awake. Lucid dreamers, like Alan Worsley, have also been able to give accurate estimates of the length of whole dreams or dream segments (Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick 1988).

Dream Actions

As we watch sleeping animals it is often tempting to conclude that they are moving their eyes in response to watching a dream, or twitching their legs as they dream of chasing prey. But do physical movements actually relate to the dream events?

Early sleep researchers occasionally reported examples like a long series of left-right eye movements when a dreamer had been dreaming of watching a ping-pong game, but they could do no more than wait until the right sort of dream came along.

Lucid dreaming made proper experimentation possible, for the subjects could be asked to perform a whole range of tasks in their dreams. In one experiment with researchers Morton Schatzman and Peter Fenwick, in London, Worsley planned to draw large triangles and to signal with flicks of his eyes every time he did so. While he dreamed, the electromyogram, recording small muscle movements, showed not only the eye signals but spikes of electrical activity in the right forearm just afterward. This showed that the preplanned actions in the dream produced corresponding muscle movements (Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick 1988).

Further experiments, with Worsley kicking dream objects, writing with umbrellas, and snapping his fingers, all confirmed that the muscles of the body show small movements corresponding to the body’s actions in the dream. The question about eye movements was also answered. The eyes do track dream objects. Worsley could even produce slow scanning movements, which are very difficult to produce in the absence of a “real” stimulus (Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick 1g88).

LaBerge was especially interested in breathing during dreams. This stemmed from his experiences at age five when he had dreamed of being an undersea pirate who could stay under water for very long periods without drowning. Thirty years later he wanted to find out whether dreamers holding their breath in dreams do so physically as well. The answer was yes. He and other lucid dreamers were able to signal from the dream and then hold their breath. They could also breathe rapidly in their dreams, as revealed on the monitors. Studying breathing during dreamed speech, he found that the person begins to breathe out at the start of an utterance just as in real speech (LaBerge and Dement 1982a).

Hemispheric Differences

It is known that the left and right hemispheres are activated differently during different kinds of tasks. For example, singing uses the right hemisphere more, while counting and other, more analytical tasks use the left hemisphere more. By using lucid dreams, LaBerge was able to find out whether the same is true in dreaming.

In one dream he found himself flying over a field. (Flying is commonly associated with lucid dreaming.) He signaled with his eyes and began to sing “Row, row, row your boat….” He then made another signal and counted slowly to ten before signaling again. The brainwave records showed just the same patterns of activation that you would expect if he had done these tasks while awake (LaBerge and Dement 1982b).

Dream Sex

Although it is not often asked experimentally, I am sure plenty of people have wondered what is happening in their bodies while they have their most erotic dreams.

LaBerge tested a woman who could dream lucidly at will and could direct her dreams to create the sexual experiences she wanted. (What a skill!) Using appropriate physiological recording, he was able to show that her dream orgasms were matched by true orgasms (LaBerge, Greenleaf, and Kedzierski 1983).

Experiments like these show that there is a close correspondence between actions of the dreamer and, if not real movements, at least electrical responses. This 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. So what exactly is the status of the dream world?

The Nature of the Dream World

It is tempting to think that the real world and the world of dreams are totally separate. Some of the experiments already mentioned show that there is no absolute dividing line. There are also plenty of stories that show the penetrability of the boundary.

Alan Worsley describes one experiment in which his task was to give himself a prearranged number of small electric shocks by means of a machine measuring his eye movements. He went to sleep and began dreaming that it was raining and he was in a sleeping bag by a fence with a gate in it. He began to wonder whether he was dreaming and thought it would be cheating to activate the shocks if he was awake. Then, while making the signals, he worried about the machine, for it was out there with him in the rain and might get wet (Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick 1988).

This kind of interference is amusing, but there are dreams of confusion that are not. The most common and distinct are called false awakenings. You dream of waking up but in fact, of course, are still asleep. Van Eeden (1913) called these “wrong waking up” and described them as “demoniacal, uncanny, and very vivid and bright, with . . . a strong diabolical light.” The French zoologist Yves Delage, writing in 1919, described how he had heard a knock at his door and a friend calling for his help. He jumped out of bed, went to wash quickly with cold water, and when that woke him up he realized he had been dreaming. The sequence repeated four times before he finally actually woke up—still in bed.

A student of mine described her infuriating recurrent dream of getting up, cleaning her teeth, getting dressed, and then cycling all the way to the medical school at the top of a long hill, where she finally would realize that she had dreamed it all, was late for lectures, and would have to do it all over again for real.

The one positive benefit of false awakenings is that they can sometimes be used to induce out-of-body experiences (OBEs). Indeed, Oliver Fox (1962) recommends this as a method for achieving the OBE. For many people OBEs and lucid dreams are practically indistinguishable. If you dream of leaving your body, the experience is much the same. Also recent research suggests that the same people tend to have both lucid dreams and OBEs (Blackmore 1988; Irwin 1988).

All of these experiences have something in common. In all of them the “real” world has been replaced by some kind of imaginary replica. Celia Green, of the Institute of Psychophysical Research at Oxford, refers to all such states as “metachoric experiences.”

Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist from the University of Alberta, Canada, relates these experiences to UFO abduction stories and near-death experiences (NDEs). The UFO abductions are the most bizarre but are similar in that they too involve the replacement of the perceived world by a hallucinatory replica.

There is an important difference between lucid dreams and these other states. In the lucid dream one has insight into the state (in fact that defines it). In false awakening, one does not (again by definition). In typical OBEs, people think they have really left their bodies. In UFO “abductions” they believe the little green men are “really there”; and in NDEs, they are convinced they are rushing down a real tunnel toward a real light and into the next world. It is only in the lucid dream that one realizes it is a dream.

I have often wondered whether insight into these other experiences is possible and what the consequences might be. So far I don’t have any answers.

Waking Up

The oddest thing about lucid dreams— and, to many people who have them, the most compelling—is how it feels when you wake up. Upon waking up from a normal dream, you usually think, “Oh, that was only a dream.” Waking up from a lucid dream is more continuous. It feels more real, it feels as though you were conscious in the dream. Why is this? I think the reason can be found by looking at the mental models the brain constructs in waking, in ordinary dreaming, and in lucid dreams.

I have previously argued that what seems real is the most stable mental model in the system at any time. In waking life, this is almost always the input-driven model, the one that is built up from the sensory input. It is firmly linked to the body image to make a stable model of “me, here, now.” It is easy to decide that this represents “reality” while all the other models being used at the same time are “just imagination” (Blackmore 1988).

Now consider an ordinary dream. In that case there are lots of models being built but no input-driven model. In addition there is no adequate selfmodel or body image. There is just not enough access to memory to construct it. This means, if my hypothesis is right, that whatever model is most stable at any time will seem real. But there is no recognizable self to whom it seems real. There will just be a series of competing models coming and going. Is this what dreaming feels like?

Finally, we know from research that in the lucid dream there is higher arousal. Perhaps this is sufficient to construct a better model of self. It is one that includes such important facts as that you have gone to sleep, that you intended to signal with your eyes, and so on. It is also more similar to the normal waking self than those fleeting constructions of the ordinary dream. This, I suggest, is what makes the dream seem more real on waking up. Because the you who remembers the dream is more similar to the you in the dream. Indeed, because there was a better model of you, you were more conscious.

If this is right, it means that lucid dreams are potentially even more interesting than we thought. As well as providing insight into the nature of sleep and dreams, they may give clues to the nature of consciousness itself.

References

Blackmore, S. J. 1982. Beyond the Body. London: Heinemann.

———. 1988. A theory of lucid dreams and OBEs. In Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain, 373-387, ed. J. Gackenbach and S. LaBerge. New York: Plenum.

Delage, Y. 1919. Le Revel Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France.

Fox, O. 1962. Astral Projection. New York: 370 University Books.

Gackenbach, J., and J. Bosveld. 1989. Control Your Dreams. New York: Harper & Row.

Gackenbach, J., and S. LaBerge, eds. 1988. Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain. New York: Plenum.

Green, C. E. 1968. Lucid Dreams. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Hearne, K. 1978. Lucid Dreams: An Electrophysiological and Psychological Study. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull.

———. 1990. The Dream Machine. Northants: Aquarian.

Irwin, H. J. 1988. Out-of-body experiences and dream lucidity: Empirical perspectives. In Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain, 353-371, ed. J. Gackenbach and S. LaBerge. New York: Plenum.

LaBerge, S. 1985. Lucid Dreaming. Los Angeles: Tarcher.

LaBerge, S. and W. Dement. 1982a. Voluntary control of respiration during REM sleep. Sleep Research, 11:107.

———.1982b Lateralization of alpha activity for dreamed singing and counting during REM sleep. Psychophysiology, 19:331-332.

LaBerge, S., W. Greenleaf, and B. Kedzierski. 1983. Physiological responses to dreamed sexual activity during lucid REM sleep. Psychophysiology, 20 454-45s.

Price, R. F., and D. B. Cohen. 1988. Lucid dream induction: An empirical evaluation. In Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain, 105-134, ed. J. Gackenbach and S. LaBerge. New York: Plenum.

Schatzman, M., A. Worsley, and P. Fenwick. 1988. Correspondence during lucid dreams between dreamed and actual events. In Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain, 155-179, ed. J. Gackenbach and S. LaBerge. New York: Plenum.

Tart, C. 1988. From spontaneous event to lucidity: A review of attempts to consciously control nocturnal dreaming. In Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain, 67-103, ed. J. Gackenbach and S. LaBerge. New York: Plenum.

Tholey, P. 1983. Techniques for controlling and manipulating lucid dreams. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 57:79-90.

Van Eeden, F. 1913. A study of dreams. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 26:431-461

Dreams have mystified humanity for thousands of years. But a Californian scientist is teaching people to harness and control their dreams to have wild adventures, improve their skills, solve problems and find happiness. Is this a great boon for mankind, or is he tinkering with our minds?

From The Sunday Times, May 9, 2004, Report by Tony Barrell

What did you dream about last night? Did you rerun some mundane event of the day — a trip to the supermarket; a chat over the garden fence? Or did you have that recurring nightmare in which you’re chased by an 8ft tax inspector with fangs, and your legs stop working properly? We all dream: researchers say that if you don’t remember any night-time visions, it’s just your memory failing you. What the experts still can’t tell you, definitively, is why we dream, though that doesn’t stop them theorising. Dreams may be an outlet for pent-up emotions, or they may help us organise our memories. They might, as Freud believed, contain subconscious messages about ourselves and the world. Or they could be just mental excreta, a useless by-product of the brain.One leading researcher believes that dreams are much more exciting than all of that. Dr Stephen LaBerge says they are an underused adventure playground in which we can have the greatest fun imaginable, and bring fantastic feelings of euphoria and self-empowerment into our waking lives. LaBerge advocates “lucid dreaming” — which occurs when you know you are dreaming. At that point, claims LaBerge, you can take control and change the dream — its setting, its characters, its plot, its denouement. Colours and sensations become incredibly vivid. You can acquire super-powers — fly, breathe underwater, walk through walls. You can discover Atlantis, win Wimbledon (yes, even you, Tim Henman), get tickets for Glastonbury and have sex with a supermodel. 

Periodically, LaBerge runs lucid-dreaming workshops on the east coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. It’s an inspired choice of location: this 50th American state, this weird paradise of pumice and papaya, ruled over in legend by the volcano goddess Pele, is itself the stuff of dreams.

It is Saturday morning, and LaBerge is giving a lecture to a class of 16 rapt dream students on the second storey of a big wooden hut at the Kalani Oceanside Retreat. As a ceiling fan whirrs overhead and a brief shower slaps the huge leaves of the coconut palms outside, he tells us about bedtime anarchy. Rules, you see, don’t apply in dreams: you can float to the ceiling as easily as walking. In fact, if you ever find yourself flagrantly disobeying the rules of gravity, it’s a sure sign that you’re dreaming. If you find yourself walking down the street with no clothes on, bingo! You’re probably dreaming — at least you hope you are.

This is just the first of many long sessions in which the 56-year-old scientist outlines the secrets of dream lucidity. Beside him constantly is Keelin, a 53-year-old female Californian dreamer who is the super-serene “facilitator” of this course, adding her own observations and keeping the show under control. LaBerge and Keelin are, effectively, the Richard and Judy of lucid dreaming, though the quick-fire, wisecracking LaBerge mixes the unpredictable gestures of Richard Madeley with the facial contortions of the late Hughie Green.

LaBerge is more than happy to call himself an “oneironaut” — from the Greek oneiros, meaning “dream”, and nautes, “sailor”. And as a charismatic Californian pusher of alternative life skills, with a bestselling book to his name (Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, co-written by the author Howard Rheingold), LaBerge ticks all the boxes for “new-age guru”. But check his credentials.

He studied at Stanford University in California, where he began rigorous research into lucid dreaming in the late 1970s, obtaining a PhD in psychophysiology. By using eye signals in the depths of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, he proved that lucid dreaming is a genuine, scientifically observable human state. Thanks to Dr Stephen LaBerge, you can no longer lump it with astrology, tea leaves and fork-bending.

“Dreamsigns”, says LaBerge, are a key to lucid dreaming; clues that potentially reveal we are not in ordinary waking life. As his book puts it, “When people realize they are dreaming, it is often because they reflect on unusual or bizarre occurrences in their dreams.” Your dreamsign could be that 8ft tax inspector with the fangs, the appearance of a long-dead relative, or the fact that everyone is talking in Serbo-Croat. One of the students, Philippe Lewis, 32, who hosts “love parties” in San Francisco — “They’re underground dance parties, except that they’re more open; people can explore relationships” — has already spotted an extremely distinctive clue in his dreams. He catches himself… ahem, self-fellating. “It’s like, wow! Suddenly I’m really flexible. And now, because it’s happened a number of times, I’m trying to identify that as a dreamsign. It’s a strange one — some people see pink cats, and I’ll see that.”

But you don’t have to rely on dreamsigns alone to become lucid. Several of the students are tossing and turning at night wearing a device called the NovaDreamer, which is LaBerge’s invention. It fits round your head like an ordinary sleep mask, but has built-in photoelectric sensors. When these recognise the flickering of your eyes in REM sleep — the best state for lucid dreaming — two red-light-emitting diodes in the mask start winking at you. If you’re having a dream, which you don’t know is a dream, and the little red lights suddenly appear in it, Bob’s your uncle. The NovaDreamer, explains LaBerge, is a mass-market development from various prototypes he created in his sleep laboratory at Stanford. “It was an attempt at making the most inexpensive device that actually worked.” You need to be a dedicated dreamer to own one, though: you have to pay about £450 for the privilege of frightening your spouse in the middle of the night. But it’s a relatively small price for these students, who have already stumped up $2,000 to come to the retreat.

From the moment you realise you’re dreaming, the “world”, such as it is, is supposed to be your oyster. You can script your own adventure, solve problems, or dress-rehearse a tricky future real-life event “such as an oral exam, a dance routine, a meeting with an influential business associate, a surgical procedure, or a difficult discussion with a loved one”, as LaBerge’s dream bible has it. You can overcome fears by confronting your object of terror in a dream, and banish nightmares. If scary monsters are running towards you, try “embracing them with a loving heart”, LaBerge lectures us, and they will be pacified.

If it’s fun they’re after, dreamers often plump for one activity in particular. “Flying is one of the things that most occurs to people when they become lucid,” explains Jennifer Dumpert, 38, a computer consultant and Jane Fonda lookalike from San Francisco, who has had “phases of lucidity” in her dreaming life. “Often I think, ‘Great! I can fly.’ I once had a lucid dream there and took off over Manhattan. I went over Central Park, which had all these lakes in it, and there was a bright moon, which was reflecting in all these lakes. It was beautiful. I did a dream flight also over 19th-century London, which was remarkable — all these old grey roofs, and it was winter time.”

Lynette Christensen, 40, a married woman who works at a hot-tub shop in Montana, says she’s often whizzing through the air: “Sometimes I fly like Superman; sometimes I fly standing straight up; sometimes I spin while I fly. Sometimes I have on clothes; sometimes I’m naked. In one of my lucid dreams I actually flew to the stars. I’ve also flown with my cats, Sparkey, Abbey and Mike. My cats feature a lot. In one of my funniest dreams, my cats were running a cat dating service and I was their office manager.”

Shortly before coming to Hawaii, Philippe Lewis also lucidly defied gravity, getting on top of a police car and using it as an airborne surfboard. “I decided, ‘Okay, I’m going to have fun with this.’ I decided to accelerate. But I didn’t want to do this by myself, so I summoned this girl I’d met a few weeks before. She jumped towards me and tried to catch my hands, but she fell down. I said, ‘Oh well, she’s just a dream character, so it doesn’t matter.’”

LaBerge asks us to make goals, to focus on what we want to dream about this week. Expert lucid dreamers can manifest particular people, places and themes simply by nurturing an intention to dream about them. Kai Schoppe, 31, who runs a school for t’ai chi and Taoistic meditation in Wiesbaden, Germany, has an unusual dream plan. “I want to experience what it would be like to be a dragon,” he says. Schoppe has practised martial arts in his lucid dreams — tae kwon do, as well as t’ai chi — and says he has even learnt new oriental movements in the dream realm. “I was surprised that the Wachowski brothers, who made the film The Matrix, never talk about lucid dreaming,” he says, “because it’s so much like a lucid dream: Neo’s movements, when he jumps so high. I really like to do this too in my dreams.”

Lynette Christensen decides that, when she becomes lucid, she will receive a “book of knowledge from a dolphin” and read it to learn the meaning of life. And there is pathos among the bathos. Flemming Olsen, 38, from Copenhagen, wants to go all the way back to Denmark to visit his mother: “She’s got pancreatic cancer, and the relationship is not close. It could be a beautiful way to prepare myself for meeting her in real life.” It would only be a rehearsal, explains Olsen; he doesn’t believe that meeting his mother in a dream means he has left his body and is operating at a supernatural level. But not all the students here share his scepticism. Erica Upton, 45, a wine seller who lives near the California-Oregon border, says she plays a mystical game with her young nieces. She hangs a picture on her bedroom door, and they have to visit her house in their dreams, look at the picture and then, back in the wide-awake world, tell her what they saw. “They’re pretty good at it,” she says, “better than me.”

Lynette Christensen recently determined to meet her “spirit guide”, Angel, in a dream. “I visualised what she would look like, what setting I would find her in, and then that night she came to me in my dreams.” Does she really believe that obtaining a dream “book of knowledge” would teach her the meaning of life? “I definitely do. I think a lot of my dream characters have information to give me.” She says she has had a lot of precognitive dreams, including some in which she was bumping up and down the hilly roads of this very island. “So I was having dreams about Hawaii, without realising.”
I ask Jennifer Dumpert if she dreamt about Hawaii before coming here. “No,” she says, “but you know, I dream about Wales pretty frequently.” Images of rainy Cardiff flicker through my mind, till she clarifies: “No, not the place: the beasts. Whales. This is a major spot for whale-watching.”

LaBerge is hard-nosed about the supernatural claims. When a student raises the idea that two people can arrange to meet in a dream, and then both have the same dream and exchange real information, he counters with: “I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that we share dreams.” And when I suggest he could found a religion based on lucid dreaming, he replies: “I really don’t see myself going down that route. I feel what I have to do is simply follow what seems true to me, but certainly never to contradict science, because that is one of our true guides to reality. If you throw that away, you’re just going to get lost in dreamland.”

In 1987 he set up an organisation called the Lucidity Institute, “to sponsor and support research on human consciousness”. These days, with his most ground-breaking lucid-dream research a quarter of a century old, the institute appears to have a mainly proselytising function, spreading the word about lucidity and flogging books, NovaDreamers and workshops like this one. LaBerge seems frustrated that many of his peers are still ignorant of his 1970s breakthrough. “One of my strategies now,” he says, “is to get more of the scientific research published in high-profile journals. It’s published somewhere or other, but the literature is so big that scientists may not know the power of the research.”

Just as sex didn’t really begin in the 1960s, lucid dreaming didn’t suddenly start in the 1970s. In 1665, Samuel Pepys recorded a lucid sex dream that gave him “so much real pleasure”, in which “I had my Lady Castlemayne in my armes and was admitted to use all the dalliance I desired with her, and then dreamed that this could not be awake…” But the history goes back much further, and it is no surprise that this course attracts people like Kai Schoppe, with his eastern disciplines. Tibetan Buddhist monks were practising “dream yoga”, otherwise known as lucid dreaming, over 1,000 years ago. “According to the Tibetan tradition,” says Erica Upton, “after you die you go into something like a lucid dream. So all this could be a rehearsal for death. And the idea that I can have an effect on my afterlife in this life is kind of cool.”

There are other classes at the Kalani retreat, teaching that more common form of yoga — the bendy-body sort — and the place is crawling with lithe women and monkish bald men, some of whom are exchanging whispers about “the dream class”, regarding the participants as freakish, even as they meditate with their feet stuck behind their heads. It’s a common reaction, say the dreamers. “I have talked to friends about it,” says John Witney, “and they’re interested, but they talk about it with a smile on their face.” Witney, 39, is a British computer programmer and entrepreneur, one of the founders of the highly profitable JobServe recruitment website. Last September he had a very short, spontaneous lucid dream in which “this guy came running up to me from behind and said, ‘John, John, we haven’t got much time — quick! Leeds, Man U, 3-2, Tuesday.’ And then I woke up”. Not even a football fan, he started checking the schedules to see if Leeds United were indeed playing Manchester United. It transpired that they were indeed playing on a Tuesday, and, though “not a gambling man”, he placed a bet that Leeds would win 3-2. The score turned out to be spot-on, though the dream hadn’t made it clear who would win, and it was 3-2 to Man U, not Leeds.

“I’m not saying I believe it was any kind of prophecy,” insists Witney, “but I was very curious.” Inspired to take up lucid dreaming seriously, he determined to ask the dream character, whom he calls “Pete”, for the latest lottery numbers. Finally, after months of failure, on January 1 he had the dream. “Sure enough, Pete reappeared. I said, ‘Great. Could you give me the lottery numbers, please?’ And he said, ‘Actually, John, I’ve got something more important to tell you.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not interested. Can you give me the lottery numbers, please?’” Pete gave in, handed over the numbers, and Witney awoke and wrote them down. “And then I thought, ‘Idiot!’ he had something really important to tell me, and all I cared about was the lottery. I felt awful.” The numbers didn’t even win him any money — at least so far.

For a while he couldn’t find Pete, and thought the adventure was over. Then, about a week before he came to Kalani, Witney dreamt about Pete again, and “for some reason he suggested we meet on a diving board. I’ve got a swimming pool at home in Surrey, but it doesn’t have a diving board”. Witney also has a boat back home, a 58ft motor cruiser, and he’s so taken with his bedtime adventures that he’s called it Lucid Dream. But he is racked with an inner conflict. “It all sounds a bit new-agey, which I’m embarrassed about. I’m very logical, and I’m not into anything supernatural. So it’s a surprise for me to find myself even talking to you here in these terms.”

Early on in the course, he experienced the next episode, in his “longest lucid dream ever”. Walking around the grounds of the retreat, he suddenly realised he was dreaming, whereupon he spun around and travelled magically back home, to find he suddenly had a diving board and Pete was on it. Pete was trying to tell him a big secret, but Witney’s pencil didn’t work, and then somebody told him they were going back to Kalani because there had been a terrible accident and John Witney was in trouble. Worried by this news, Witney then tried to wake up but found he couldn’t; he asked people for help. The Dalai Lama appeared at one point, as did Stephen LaBerge, who was “on a boat” and couldn’t help. Eventually, Witney “woke up” to find himself on a stretcher, beside an ambulance at Kalani, a big explosion having wrecked his room. Then he really did wake up, in his room, which was undamaged.

Witney’s dream epics keep the whole class entertained. But this latest one, with its deceptive false awakening, is a lucid nightmare, and gives the lie to the idea that dream control is easily achieved and maintained. One night, Lynette Christensen has an even worse experience. “I was in this dark, crowded prison — and I immediately became lucid because I realised that I was not really in a prison. The prison was filled with men, and a
lot of them were evil. By ‘evil’, I mean they wanted to rape me. They’d come up behind me and grab me, and they’d be naked, and I’d have to fight
them off. That was pretty terrifying. I realised I was dreaming but I couldn’t do anything to get out of the dream.” When she tried to wake, she
found she had sleep paralysis — an immobilisation of the body that is normal during REM sleep. “And I came out of my body — I was standing
up, looking at myself on the bed, and although I could hear myself screaming, my lips weren’t moving and there wasn’t any sound coming out of my mouth. When I woke up I was really upset; I was shaking and crying.”

In his book, LaBerge does address the possible dangers of lucid dreaming. “The overwhelming majority of lucid dreams are positive, rewarding experiences,” he says. “…Nevertheless, there probably will be some people who find the experience of lucid dreaming… extremely disturbing. For this reason we cannot recommend lucid dreaming to everyone.”

Isn’t there a danger, I ask LaBerge, that deep immersion in lucid dreaming makes people more inward-looking and self-absorbed? “It could,” he replies, “but you could also seek to develop your compassion, for example, in a dream, which does the opposite. And I can think of people who have overcome shyness through lucid dreaming.”

I think lucid dreaming is akin to a martial art: it’s something that takes enormous patience and dedication, and not all of us can or should do it.
I, for one, flunked the course. As soon as I put the NovaDreamer on, I was blighted with acute insomnia, like an actor with stage fright.

On my last day under the sun-kissed coconut palms, I decide to wear a turban and walk around telling people that I’m Kurdish. I hear news that a “pack of cats”, a kind of feral feline version of a rat-king, their bodies all connected in some way, is terrorising the retreat. It’s all so obvious, isn’t it? But only when I wake up do I realise it’s a dream, and I’ve been home from Hawaii for two whole weeks. Next week I’m going to have a crack at Japanese flower-arranging.

Looking at sleep stage changes and ‘lucidity’ – more likely during REM sleep, roughly every 45 minutes.
Part 1.
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I watched as their brainwaves change suddenly from high amplitude Beta to mainly Alpha 8Hz on both hemispheres, then gradually more slow waves dominate. All of this is replayed at ‘x10′ tempo. Little change for next 45 minutes just intermittent beta, possibly asleep but noises nearby are listened too. Some REM eye movements can also be seen in these sleep recordings, 4.34 ( 43 minutes asleep ) Then at 5.09 Beta on right begins, subject is sleeping lighter once more after 50 minutes for 2 mintues, more attention coming to the conscious. Then goes deeper again, all waves Theta 4 hz and below. Finally a Brief REM at 5.58 on the right side.

Part 2.
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Shows some high amplitude Eye and muscle activity at 3.20 (32 minutes into recording)

Part 3.
done

Shows some Delta, Eye REM and Beta

Click here for Youtube clips from IBVA of subject ‘M’ going to sleep, wearing an IBVA 2 channel EEG monitor.

Nova Dreamer REM biofeedback interface on Luciana ( sleeping )

Originally uploaded by Luciana Brainlady