Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge/Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge.iso/OCCULT/LUCID.DRE

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              LUCID DREAMING: AWAKE IN YOUR SLEEP?

                      By Susan Blackmore

           From Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 15 Summer 1991
                        pages 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 is 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 sign 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 push-ups 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 show 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 dream 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 re