Lucid Dreaming Read online

  By cultivating awareness of and in your dreams and learning to use your magic carpet, you can add more consciousness, more life to your life. In the process, you will increase your enjoyment of your nightly dream journeys and deepen your understanding of yourself. By waking in your dreams, you can waken to life.

  A Psychobiological Model of Dreaming

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  The brain is wider than the sky,

  For, put them side by side,

  The one the other will contain

  With ease, and you beside.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  If this [a scientific finding] contradicts some aspect of Buddhist doctrine as contained in the scriptures, we have no other choice but to accept that that teaching is in need of interpretation. Thus, we cannot accept it literally simply because it has been taught by the Buddha; we have to examine whether it is contradicted by reason or not. If it does not stand up to reason, we cannot accept it literally. We have to analyze such teachings to discover the intention and purpose behind them and regard them as subject to interpretation. Therefore, in Buddhism great emphasis is laid on the importance of investigation.

  —HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA XIV[1]

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  Proverbially, dreamers tend to have their heads in the clouds. Thus it is all too easy for them to lose their orientation. The scientific approach of this chapter provides a salutary grounding. especially for those prospective explorers of the dream world (“oneironauts”) who think they are not interested in science, this chapter should be considered required reading.

  WHAT IS A DREAM?

  Every night we enter another world, the world of dreams. While we are dreaming, we usually implicitly believe that we are awake. The mental worlds of dreams are so convincingly real that we mistake them for the outside world that we share with other people. how can this be? Why does it happen? What is the relation between our day and night lives? And what is the origin and function of dreaming? Incredibly, in this age of scientific understanding of the most intricate workings of biology, there is little scientific consensus about the answers to these questions.

  The Oxford English Dictionary defines a dream as “a train of thoughts, images, or fancies passing through the mind during sleep.”[2] But such a definition fails to capture the lived-in, experiential reality of dreams. In my view, dreams are much more accurately described as experiences—that is, conscious events one has personally encountered. It may seem odd to speak of dreams as conscious experiences, but the essential criterion for consciousness is reportability, and the fact that we can sometimes remember our dreams shows them to be conscious rather than unconscious mental processes. We live through our dreams as much as our waking lives. In these terms, dreaming is a particular organization of consciousness.

  Of course, that begs a question: what is consciousness? For me, it is the dream of what happens. Whether awake or asleep, your consciousness functions as a simplified model of yourself and your world constructed by your brain from the best available sources of information. during waking, the model is derived from external sensory input, which provides the most current information about present circumstances, in combination with internal contextual, historical, and motivational information. during sleep, little external input is available, and given a sufficiently functional brain, the model is constructed from internal biases. These will be expectations derived from past experience and motivations—wishes, for example, as Sigmund Freud observed, but also fears. The resulting experiences are what we call dreams, the content of which is largely determined by what we fear, hope for, and expect. From this perspective, dreaming can be viewed as the special case of perception without the constraints of external sensory input. Conversely, perception can be viewed as the special case of dreaming constrained by sensory input.

  There are two kinds of sleep. The first is an energy-conserving state known as Quiet Sleep (QS) associated with growth, repair, restoration, a relaxed body, and an idling brain. The second is a very different state known variously as Active Sleep, Paradoxical Sleep (PS), or REM. This state is associated with rapid eye movements and muscular twitches, a paralyzed body, a highly activated brain, and dreaming. Although REM is not the only sleep state in which people can dream, it provides the optimal conditions for vivid dreaming—a switched-on brain in a switched-off body.

  DREAMING AND WAKING SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES

  It is frequently assumed that waking and dreaming experiences are completely distinct. dreams, for example, are said to be characterized by lack of reflection, lack of control over attention, and the inability to act deliberately. But the evidence flatly contradicts this characterization of dreams as single-minded and nonreflective. In recent studies directly comparing reports from waking and dreaming, my colleagues Tracy Kahan, Lynne Levitan, Philip Zimbardo, and I found that, compared to waking experiences, dreaming contained public self-consciousness and emotion slightly more frequently, and deliberate choice slightly less frequently. However, no significant differences between dreaming and waking was found for other cognitive activities, and none of the measured cognitive functions was typically absent or rare in dreams. In particular, nearly identical levels of reflection were reported in both states.

  The fact that dreams contain sudden shifts of characters and scenes of which the dreamer takes little note is sometimes cited as evidence for a cognitive deficiency in dreaming. The presumption is that if this occurred in waking, one would immediately notice and attempt to understand the discontinuity. However, this assumption is unwarranted. Recent studies on “change blindness” have shown that people are far less likely to detect environmental changes than common sense assumes. For example, in a recently completed study with Philip Zimbardo at Stanford, we showed twenty-eight college students a fifty-minute selection from Luis Buñuel’s film That Obscure Object of Desire. Only seven of the subjects (twenty-five percent) noticed that the eponymous character of the title was played by two different actresses in alternating scenes—and the two did not even look similar.

  I am not saying that there are no differences between dreams and waking experiences, because indeed there are distinctions. For example, the dream world is much less stable than the waking world because a dream lacks the stabilization of an external structure—physical reality. Likewise, one can violate the laws of physics and society in dreams without the usual consequences. But the absence of sensory constraint is the only essential difference. One might or might not know that one is dreaming, and the dream would still be a dream. And whatever differences there may be between the two, I believe they are more alike than they are different. As the early twentieth-century English physician and writer Havelock Ellis said, “dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?”

  EVOLUTION OF SLEEP AND DREAMS

  It is likely that REM evolved for purposes more basic than dreaming. Just as philosophy, poetry, music, and abstract mathematics are probably the lucky side effects of other features that emerged through natural selection—such as general purpose language—so dreaming is perhaps something that humans do, and extract value from, but that did not evolve directly.

  The distribution of REM across development and in the course of a night provides a clue to the most important functions of this sleeping state. REM is at its maximal level perinatally and in the last weeks of prenatal development when the brain is growing its vast networks of neural circuitry. The appealing idea that REM serves as an endogenous (“self-organizing”) state for the unfolding of genetic programming has been proposed by several researchers, including French sleep researcher Michel Jouvet and Stanford university psychiatrist William C. dement. The percentage of REM activity gradually drops off throughout childhood but does not completely disappear when brain growth stops at adulthood, implying that REM may serve another function. The fact that REM gradually increases through the night, reaching a maximum as the time of wakening approaches, suggests that it may prepare our brains for waking action—a sort of
brain tune-up. These recurrent activations every ninety minutes or so throughout the night may also help consolidate new learning.

  WHY DREAMS ARE DIFFICULT TO RECALL

  The average person remembers a dream only once or twice a week. Given the fact that we all dream every night, that leaves at least ninety-five percent of most dreams forgotten (in REM alone, assuming five REM cycles per night with perhaps two dreams per each REM period). A variety of theories have suggested fanciful explanations as to why dreams are so easily forgotten, ranging from Freud’s belief that dreams are repressed because they contain so much taboo dream thought, to Francis Crick’s view that the content of dreams is what the brain is trying to unlearn and therefore ought not to be remembered. Of course, standard memory theory explains much of what is remembered of dreams and what is not, which aspects of dream content are more readily recalled and which aspects are not, and so on. But these explanations do not answer the basic question of why it should be that dreams are so difficult to remember.

  The answer, as I have proposed elsewhere, is probably evolution. humans learn that dreams are distinct from other experiences by talking with other humans. Nonspeaking animals, however, have no way to tell each other how to distinguish dreams from reality. Thus, explicit dream recall would have been maladaptive for all the nonlinguistic mammals experiencing REM sleep during the past 140 million years since REM evolved. The purpose of REM cannot therefore have anything to do with the explicit recall of dreams, to say nothing of dream interpretation! To make the argument concrete, let us suppose you had a mutant cat that remembered its dreams. Suppose we say it lives on the other side of a tall fence that protects it from a vicious dog. Suppose further that your cat dreams that the wicked dog was dead, and replaced by a family of tasty mice. What would happen if the cat were to remember this dream when it awoke? not knowing it was a dream, it would probably hungrily jump over the fence, expecting to find a meal. After its encounter with the dog, it would be less likely to pass on genes for easy dream recall.

  Thus explicit dream recall obviously is maladaptive for cats, dogs, bats, whales, and all of the rest of the mammalian dreamers except humans. This fact very likely explains why dreams are difficult to recall. They may be so, according to this view, because of natural selection. We and our ancestors might have been protected from dangerous confusion by the evolution of mechanisms that made forgetting dreams the normal course of affairs. But if this theory is correct, since humans can tell the difference between dreams and waking reality, remembering dreams should do us no harm, and indeed may inspire us to remake reality in accord with our dreams.

  Even if dreaming has no special biological function, dreams themselves may play a specific role. They may, for example, increase variability in the nervous system. Darwinian evolution requires a variable population, a selective pressure, and a means of reproduction of successful variations. Perhaps dreaming generates a wide range of behavioral schemas or scripts guiding perception and action from which to select adaptive responses to changing environments. Be that as it may, answers about why we dream need not be framed so narrowly. For some, the answer is: we dream to find out why we dream. Personally, I prefer: I dream to find out who I am beyond who I dream I am.

  The view of dreams as world models is far from the traditional notion of dreams as messages, whether from the gods or from the unconscious mind. nonetheless, interpretation of dreams can be very revealing of personality and a rewarding practice. If what people see in inkblots can tell something about their personal concerns and personality, how much more revealing should dreams be, because they are the worlds we have created from the contents of our minds. dreams are not intended as messages, but they are our own most intimately personal creations. As such, they are revealingly colored by who and what we are, and who and what we could become.

  SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR LUCID DREAMING

  Our dreams seem so real that it is usually only when we wake up that we recognize them as the mental experiences they are. Although this is how we generally experience dreams, there is a significant exception: sometimes while dreaming, we consciously notice that we are dreaming. This clear-sighted state of consciousness is referred to as lucid dreaming.

  During lucid dreams, one can reason clearly, remember the conditions of waking life, and act voluntarily within the dream upon reflection or in accordance with plans decided upon before sleep—all while remaining soundly asleep, vividly experiencing a dream world that can appear astonishingly real.

  Until recently, researchers doubted that the dreaming brain was capable of such a high degree of mental functioning and consciousness. In the late 1970s, our laboratory research at Stanford university proved that lucid dreams did in fact occur during unambiguous sleep. Based on earlier studies showing that some of the eye movements of REM corresponded to the reported direction of the dreamer’s gaze, we asked lucid dreamers to carry out distinctive patterns of voluntary eye movements when they realized they were dreaming. The prearranged eye-movement signals appeared on the polygraph records during uninterrupted REM, proving that the subjects had indeed been lucid during sleep.

  Subsequently, my colleagues and I began new studies of the dreaming mind, made possible by the ability of lucid dreamers to carry out experiments within dreams. We learned that the physiological effects on the brain and body of dream activities are nearly identical to the effects of experience in waking life. For example, we found that time intervals estimated in lucid dreams closely match actual clock time, that dreamed breathing corresponds to actual respiration, that dreamed movements result in corresponding patterns of muscle twitching, and that dream sex shows physiological responses similar to actual sexual activity.

  These studies all support the following picture: during REM dreaming, the events we consciously experience (or seem to) are the results of patterns of neural activity that, in turn, produce effects on our bodies. While to some extent these effects are modified by the specific conditions of active sleep, they remain virtually equivalent to the effects that would occur if we were actually to experience the corresponding events while awake. This explains, in part, why we regularly mistake our dreams for reality: to the functional systems of neuronal activity that construct the experiential world model of our consciousness, dreaming of perceiving or doing something is equivalent to actually perceiving or doing it.

  Learning Lucid Dreaming: Methods for Developing the Skill of Lucid Dreaming

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  The vast majority of people have enormous potentialities of thinking, far beyond anything ordinarily suspected; but so seldom do the right circumstances by chance surround them to require their actualization that the vast majority die without realizing more than a fraction of their powers. Born millionaires, they live and die in poverty for the lack of favorable circumstances which would have compelled them to convert their credit into cash.

  —A.R. ORAGE , PSYCHOLOGICAL EXERCISES AND ESSAYS[1]

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  LEARNING TO DREAM

  Just as we ordinarily take for granted that we know how to think, we may also presume that we know how to dream. But there are vast differences in the degree to which these two faculties are developed in different people. Orage’s remarks about thinking apply, I believe, with equal force to dreaming. We possess undeveloped capacities yet undreamed of. Like conscious thought, lucid dreaming is an ability that can be gained or improved by training, and this chapter will show you how to practice.

  In my view there are three essential requirements for learning lucid dreaming: adequate motivation, correct practice of effective techniques, and excellent dream recall. The necessity of motivation is obvious enough: lucid dreaming, after all, demands considerable control of attention, and hence you must be motivated to exert the necessary effort to focus your mind and intention. But the amount of motivation required is not extremely high. Having a lucid dream does not have to be the most important thing in the world for you to succeed in inducing one. But it does have to be someth
ing that you genuinely want to, and more importantly, expect to happen.

  The necessity of correct practice of effective techniques is easily seen: even if you have all the motivation in the world to learn to, say, play the piano, you will not be able to do it if you keep your fingers in your ears, or if you believe you can learn to play by sleeping with a piano book under your pillow.

  There are several reasons why developing excellent dream recall is an essential prerequisite for learning lucid dreaming. First, when you remember your dreams well, you can become familiar with what they are actually like. Once you get to know your dreams really well, you will be in the position of recognizing them as dreams while they are still happening. Second, it is possible that with poor dream recall, you may actually have lucid dreams that you do not remember! Finally, as you will soon see, the most effective lucid dream induction method—the Mnemonic Induction of Lucid dreams (MILD) technique—requires you to remember more than one dream per night. Hence, for the purposes of learning lucid dreaming, excellent dream recall means remembering at least one dream per night. To put that in perspective, the average person remembers only a few dreams per week, and we all have at least half a dozen dreams per night.