The Neuroscience of Lucid Dreams

Lucid dreams are perhaps the most bizarre perceptual experience one can have. You are asleep
and dreaming, but suddenly you realize that its all just a dream. At that point, you can choose to wake
up (I usually do I dont think Ive ever had a lucid dream that wasnt a nightmare) or you can
continue to dream on, with one important advantage. Youre now aware that the world around you is
completely made up by your brain. As with the post-awakening of Neo in the movie The Matrix, you
can bend the physical laws to your liking. You can fly, stop bullets with your bare hands, or even
deliver magical punches to the bad guys to make them shrink in size (yeah, I have weird dreams).
There is no spoon.
The very first dream that I remember having, at the age of 4 or 5, was a lucid dream. I was waiting for
my mother to finish her purchases at the neighborhood newsstand, when the boogeyman showed up.
He must have been a philosophical boogeyman interested in moral dilemmas, because he asked me to
decide the menu for his next meal: me or my mother. If I didnt decide, he would eat us both. My
mother, just a couple of meters away, was blissfully unaware of this exchange. I felt paralyzed. I didnt
want to be eaten, but feeding my mam to the monster for dinner was unthinkable. Id never been in
such a horrible situation in my short life. Then it occurred to me: this is just too awful to be real, so it
follows that I must be dreaming. I woke up with a start.
There have been other lucid dreams since. Sometimes I have two in a month, other times I go for the
better part of a year without them. It turns out, the ability to experience lucid dreams differs wildly
from one person to another.
A recent study, published earlier this month in the Journal of Neuroscience, set out to determine if
people with high and low dream lucidity were also dissimilar in their metacognitive ability, that is, the
ability to reflect on, and report, ones mental states.
The study participants completed questionnaires that assessed their lucid dreaming frequency, intensity,
and degree of control, and also their metacognitive skills, including their self-reflection and selfconsciousness. The experimental subjects moreover underwent brain imaging while conducting a
thought monitoring task. This consisted of two 11-minute runs during which the subjects had to
evaluate the each and every thought that entered their heads on an externally-internally oriented scale.
Externally oriented thoughts meant thoughts related to the external environment, such as the visual
surroundings, or the noise from the scanner. Internally oriented thoughts were not related to the
immediate environment, such as remembering past events or planning for the day ahead.
The research showed that the brains of people with high and low dream lucidity were different.
Subjects with high lucidity had greater gray matter volume in the frontopolar cortex, compared to those
with low lucidity. This brain region also showed higher activity during thought monitoring in both
high- and low-lucidity subjects, with stronger increases in the high-lucidity group. The scientists
concluded that lucid dreaming and metacognition share some underlying mechanisms, particularly with
regards to thought monitoring. This relationship had been previously suspected, but never before
explored at the neural level.
Future research may tell us if its possible to control the frequency and contents of our lucid dreaming
by training ourselves to monitor our thoughts while were awake. I, for one, would love some lucid
dreams that dont involve Freddy Krueger every now and then.