Brief History of Lucid Dreaming - Astral Projection - Lucid Dreams

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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

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.

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 with utopia Lucid dream pills."

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 with Utopia lucid dream pills?

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.

Lucid Dreaming Information

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Dreams Editor Psychology and Dreams