Sleep and Consciousness

Jayne Gackenbach
This is an invited address on consciousness in sleep given at the
Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., for a lecture series entitled "The
Brain and Consciousness: Frontier of the 21st Century", May 19, 1994.

Introduction

Freud helped us focus on consciousness with the idea that there's an

unconscious and never the twain shall meet. They're separated because,
according to Freud, we're driven by unconsciousness impulses. To the
point where it can feel like, "who the heck is driving this boat called 'me'."
I've been interested in this question for most of my life. I'm a first
generation baby boomer, born 1946. I've done all that baby boomers were
supposed to do including living in New Mexico in the 6O's. After doing the
prerequisite baby boom agenda of the 7O's, I shaved my legs after
finishing my master's thesis on a feminist topic and went on to get my
doctorate. In looking for a topic for my dissertation the question of
consciousness came up as I watched the death of an elderly friend.

Thus my research, writing, and a lot of my thinking has been involved with
dreams and sleep, and in particular the experience of consciousness
during sleep or lucid dreaming. During this experience you're sound
asleep, which we popularly think of as unconscious. You're whacked out
and lying there in bed. If that isn't unconscious, I don't know what is. Yet
at the same time some say they know they're dreaming. This seems a
paradox. How can you know you're unconscious when you're
unconscious? If you're unconscious, you can't be conscious. You get into
this sort of wafflely feeling just thinking about it, so ingrained in our
society is the idea of consciousness and unconsciousness being mutually
exclusive. If you've had the experience of knowing you are dreaming while
you're dreaming, then you know what it is like. Typically it's fun and you
enjoy it. If you've never had it you may scratch your head and feel
confused. In any case for 20 years I've pursued these questions. I'm 48
years old, and I'm still wondering who's driving this boat, while awake and
while asleep? I've a little better idea which I will share with you tonight.

I'm going to try to walk that thin line between an intellectually

sophisticated member of the audience and the person who's kind of
interested but not really informed about contemporary psychological
thinking. I shall try as much as possible to broach that gap. I'm going to
start by talking in general about some of the biology of sleep and dreams
and then move into the notion of consciousness in sleep and the various
forms that consciousness can take in sleep as it develops.

Brain/Body Activity During Sleep and Dreams

There are three majors measures of sleep that are used in the sleep
laboratory; brain waves, eye movements and muscle tone. In Figure 1
waking is compared to the two basic categories of sleep: NREM and REM
sleep. Some of the major markers of these differences which are apparent
with this kind of very brief look at a polygraph record is the eye movement
activity, which in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is quite intense.
Certainly relative to NREM sleep, and even much more variable and dense
than during waking. Muscle tone is also quite interesting. Waking muscle
tone is high relative to NREM muscle tone which is moderate, but what's
interesting about REM is that there is virtually no muscle tone. For all
practical purposes you're paralyzed!

When you go to bed at night, you sort of snuggle into your favorite
sleeping position. You may be a side person or a back person or sleeping
on your stomach may be the only way for you to settle in. Once you get
yourself settled in Figure 2 shows the sequence of events that occur in
sleep. You start in light sleep at point "A" while point "B" is deepest sleep.
There are several features I'd like to point out on this figure. First you cycle
between light and deep sleep throughout the night, about every hour and
a half. This hour and a half circadian rhythm we actually experience
throughout the twenty four hour day and thus it simply continues into
sleep. It's particularly noteworthy in sleep because of the movement into
what is called rapid eye movement sleep (REM). It is associated with
dreams but this association is not absolute. You can see at "C" that there
is mental activity that we might call dreams that occur in non-rapid eye
movement sleep (NREM). So although there are some dreams, for the
most part, they are clustered in the REM episodes.

Furthermore, the dreams of REM sleep are phenomenologically quite

distinct from those in NREM sleep. There's been an argument in the
dream research literature about whether or not REM sleep is the biological
marker for dreams. That's what it was touted as when first discovered in
the early 1950's. Then with subsequent research sleep and dream
scientists got disillusioned with that simplistic isomorphism and
concluded that dreams go on all night long to one degree or another, they
simply cluster in REM.

As is often the case in science, we have gone almost full cycle and realize
that there are real phenomenological markers of mental activity during
REM that are quite distinct from mentation during NREM sleep. One
difference is bizarreness. In a recent article by Harry Hunt in the journal
Dreaming, he was able to show that attempts to equate the bizarreness of
REM sleep mentation to the bizarreness of NREM sleep mentation doesn't
work. In other words, REMing dreams are distinct from NREMing dreams.

Lets return to Figure 2. You can see at "D" that REM episodes get longer
as you go through the sleep cycle. Therefore most of your dreaming
happens late in the sleeping cycle. Those dreams which last from 30 to
40 minutes have the elaborate story lines and complex shifts and
transitions which we call bizarreness. Your mother's got a purple face. Tin
cans are growing out of people's heads. That's the kind of stuff you are
experiencing during these early morning hours. That's the kind of stuff
that "real" dreams are made of!

There you are paralyzed from the neck down, your eye movements are
jerky and rapid, your heart rate fluctuates, your breadth rate changes.
Sometimes when you wake up from an especially intense REM episode
you may be panting, your heart's pounding and you're sweating. And you
mutter, "Thank God, that was only a dream!" If that happens you have
come out of rapid eye movement sleep. So for instance, if you're an ulcer
sufferer there are twenty times the amount of stomach acid secretions
during REM than during NREM. If your child has asthma and they wake up
with an asthma attack, they're likely waking from REM sleep. If you have
angina, these heart problems are going to occur most likely out of REM
sleep. In other words, REM doesn't seem to be really good for your health.
It stresses the body. It pushes all these different systems more so than
while awake. Not while your jogging ten miles, obviously, but this whole
system is going to be really revved up in the main more so than while
awake. In addition, while all these systems are on over-drive, the brain is
increasing its activity. What is going on?

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Functions of REM and NREM

During rapid eye movement sleep is the time when new information is
processed and stored into our memory banks. Our personal experience of
this very important brain function is dreaming. A world is created. When
you're in a dream it feels real. Even if you know it's a dream at the time it
feels real. If you jump up in a dream and you fall down you feel the thud.
Although when you wake up, you realize "oh well, that was a dream" and
then tend to minimize and dismiss it, but the feelings of it's reality are
there during the dream.

So how come whoever put this system together, God, nature, whatever,
made this time when we are hallucinating so much that we think it's real.
We're having all these emotions. All this bizarre stuff is going on. Our
body is responding like mad while we are paralyzed from the neck down.
Furthermore if we weren't paralyzed there is good evidence that we'd get
up and act out the dream. Recently in Toronto a man got up from bed in
the middle of the night, got into his car, drove across town, and killed him
mother-in-law. A colleague of mine testified at the court case. He took
him to his sleep laboratory in Boston and monitored the Toronto man's
sleep He told me there is no doubt, it is easy to identify as can be seen in
Figure 1. You can see that muscle tone has flattened out in REM but in his
REM the muscle tone did not flatten out. He had muscle tone. Enough to
murder.

The point is, if we didn't have that paralysis we'd act out our dreams. Can
you image acting out your dreams? Maybe your dreams would be okay
but some of my dreams, I don't know! So how come this thing called REM
is there? There is all this activity on a biological level. From the intra-
psychic, heavily psychodynamic level, all my inner self, unconscious
motives and drives or all my "junk" is in there. That combination sounds
interesting all by itself. We have some idea of how these things develop
and Figure 3 gives you some indication of it. If you look at the percent of
waking as we go through the life span from infancy and birth through
childhood and adolescence to adulthood and old age you see it increases.
Along the horizontal axis are the daily sleep and waking requirements. You
can see that in infancy there are huge amounts of REM sleep relevant to
the rest of your life. We certainly know newborn infants sleep a lot, that
the older you get you sleep less and less and thus you have less and less
REM sleep.

These data give us some hint as to the functions of REM and NREM sleep.
Very briefly these are: information processing for REM whereas the
function of NREM is somatic, vegetative maintenance. In other words
NREM restores the body. For instance, growth hormones peak during
delta sleep. Delta sleep is the deepest NREM sleep. So children not only
have to get enough sleep, they've got to get enough delta sleep. Delta
sleep tends to occur early in the sleep cycle. There's a disorder called
social dwarfism where there is a failure to grow, children with it are
unusually small. It was called "social" cause no biological mechanism
could be discovered but they found that among failure to thrive children
there was a high incidence of family dysfunction. There was a lot of stress
and tension in the family. It may be that the children's sleep cycles are
being disrupted enough so that there was not enough growth hormone
being released during delta.

Another piece of evidence that supports the vegetative restorative

function of NREM sleep is when there is high pre-sleep metabolic rates
they are associated with higher levels of delta sleep. So if you're working
on getting your metabolism up you are going to need more delta sleep.
Also higher brain functions appear to be somewhat reduced during delta
sleep. Slightly less brain oxygen consumption and as noted psychological
events related to it are sparse.

REM sleep plays a role in the reorganization, restoration of brain

processes that mediate the flow, structure and storage of information.
This includes things like problem-solving, memory consolidation,
information processing, and creativity. About 50% of the sleep cycle of
the newborn is REM or quasi-REM kinds of sleep. Newborns sleep 16 to
20 hours a day. That is eight hours of REM! A reasonable question is,
"What are they dreaming about, after all they were just born?" Although
one could get metaphysical and talk about past lives it's not really
necessary.

It turns out that when an infant is born although they have all their brain
neurons, the communicating aspect of the neuron, the synapse which
connects neuronal cells, have just begun to grow about a month before
birth. Without the ability to communicate with each other the neurons are
virtually useless. There are enough synaptic connections at birth for some
basic survival behaviors. For instance, a newborn will recognize their
mother's voice at birth and can see with perfect visual acuity for about 8
inches, the distance to mothers face as nursing but not beyond, which
would be confusing and disruptive to the bonding process with the
mother which must occur for the newborn to ensure its survival. Still there
are a lot of neuronal connections to be made. After all getting that thumb
in the mouth without poking ones eye is a fairly major task particularity
when mom's not around. Learning to coordinate visual input, thumb, with
motor output, moving it to mouth, takes synaptic connections. This
growth of the synapses probably occurs during REM sleep. Because the
newborn has so much to piece together in terms of simply getting all the
potential motor activities working properly, among many other tasks, it is
no wonder that they need huge amounts of synaptic growth time or REM.
Along the same lines a premature infant will show as high as 75% rapid
eye movement sleep.

Other evidence pointing to this cognitive function for REM is with the right
hemisphere. Although the right-left hemisphere dichotomy has been over
simplified, there is relatively more activity in the left than in the right
hemisphere of the brain during the day. What happens at night is not that
the right hemisphere takes over rather it increases activity to the level of
the left hemisphere. Therefore the kind of information that is best
processed in the right hemisphere in conjunction with the left hemisphere
is going to happen in the main during REM.

On a psychological level REM may serve some compensatory process

function as hypothesized by Freud. Personally important experiences may
be repressed during the day and thus you'll see a reciprocal emphasis in
dreams at night. More often than not, however, you'll see a continuity
between presleep experiences and dream experiences of the REM or
NREM sort. What you've been thinking about before you go to bed at
night, you'll see in the dream of that night. This is especially evident in our
children. When my son was about 8-years-old we were impressed with
the advertisements for a movie about cute little "Gremlins". Naively we
went to the theater but during their first transformation with water into
sharp toothed small but lethal monsters we both high tailed it out to the
lobby. Not surprisingly that night about 2 a.m. I felt a small body crawl into
bed with me. The "gremlins" from the show had awoken him from a
nightmare!

But to simply reduce dreams to meaningless rough reproductions of

waking events is also to reduce their importance. Most dreams occurr
during the time of the sleep cycle when we process new information into
our memory banks, REM sleep. Therefore dreams are always
autobiographical and unique to each individual.

Why is Dream Forgetting Common?

If these experiences of the night are so biologically and psychologically

important, how come we typically forget our dreams upon awaking? The
norm in the dominant European culture of North America is dream
forgetting. The average adult sleeps about eight hours a night and of that
about two hours is REM or dreaming sleep. That's usually four dreams
every night. Very few people remember even one dream a night no less
four a night! The average is four a month, which would be about one a
week. The norm is we forget dreams. There are various reasons but the
three major hypotheses related to our failure to recall dreams which have
been investigated by dream scientists are: repression, salience and
interference.

The concept of dream forgetting being due to the repression of

unpleasant emotions/experiences is classically Freudian. This is the idea
that the dark side of my inner self, which I'm not ready to deal with, may
emerge in dreams thus I forget the dream. Some Freudian analysts might
argue that if you remember a dream, you're ready to deal with that
material. Although there is some evidence for the repression hypothesis it
is probably not the major reason we forget dreams.

The salience hypotheses states that some dreams are so personally

impactful that you couldn't forget them. You wake up in the morning and
your life has been changed or you hope like heck you life hasn't been
changed. When my children were about nine and four I had a dream that
they were crossing the street at a crosswalk with a friend of theirs. All
three got hit by a car and were killed. I recall waking up and being
absolutely terrified. I jumped out of bed and went to check on them. They
were both sound asleep and in good health. None-the-less the fear would
not leave me so I did something that I rarely do, I knelt by my bed with
tears running down my face and prayed to God that this dream never
come true. It still sends a shiver down my spine to even think about it!
That is a dream I can not forget and in fact I still get anxious any time I
know they will be in a cross walk.

Despite experiences of this sort of impact, probably the major reason we

forget our dreams, according to scientific research, is something quite
simple. It is interference. It's the same reason why if I said to you "I want
you to tell me about your breakfast this morning". If you didn't remember
you'd start to sort of extrapolate, "I normally have yogurt and fruit, so I
must have had yogurt and fruit." You might remember some of it but I
doubt many of you would include details like the number of glasses on the
counter or other ordinary details. If you got a new table cloth, you might
mention it. But if it's something that happens every day it's probably not
high on your need to recall list. Other things interfere with that recall like
the families hurry to get to work and school because mom overslept.
When we wake up from a dream most people immediately think, "Got to
get up. Got to get ready for work . Got to get the kids dressed. Got to get
breakfast." It's forward thinking and interferes with the recall of what was
just happening to us in our dream. Occasionally we will simply lay there
and drift but still the simplest things can interfere, like moving or opening
your eyes. Or we will wake up and think, "I was dreaming. I don't have a
clue what it was. But I was dreaming." It's sort of like the tip of the tongue
phenomena or may feel like peanut butter on your tongue. When my son
was three-years old he couldn't image being awake while I slept so he
would "helpfully" come into my bedroom, lift my eyelid and cheerfully
announce to me, "Wake up time mommy!" I went through a rather long
period of dream forgetting due to his well intended interference.

There are some other factors I'd like to briefly point to which may
contribute to dream recall. When I moved to Canada I started working with
the Central Alberta Cree and quickly found out that their dream recall is
quite high. Not only is this my personal observation but there is research
on the Cree done before I got there as well as my own substantiating this
observation. Because of this work it has occurred to me that perhaps part
of the large dream forgetting characteristic of Euro-North American's is
our cultural taboos around attending to this sort of material. We're not
supposed to pay attention to our inner lives. We're not supposed to take
them seriously. In fact one theory of dreaming in REM sleep is that it's
garbage. It's the way the brain makes sense of presumably random
neuronal firing from the brainstem. Thus according to this perspective
recalling dreams is recalling garbage and couldn't possibly be healthy.
That theory has been generally debunked. I am not saying that every
single thing you dream every night is equally important but I do think
there's a moderate position.

Metaphoric Magic in Dreams

Dreams speak to us albeit it is in a different language. The language is

metaphor. While awake we might use the metaphor rose to refer to rosy
cheeks while in dreams that rose may be thorny and may refer to Rosie,
someone you work with who has a thorny personality.

Therefore the language of our "un"consciousness in sleep can be difficult

to understand. Metaphors used in dreams are often idiosyncratic and
personal but it is a language you can learn that is somewhat culturally
specific. If you were raised in a culture where from day one you were told
that if you dream about a white Volkswagens it meant you would get a job.
So that if you got a job you'd be sure to dream about a white Volkswagen.
Unfortunately most of us are not taught these keys to our inner life thus
we are left to our own devices in interpreting our dream metaphors.

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Lucid Dreaming: The Maximum Self-reflectiveness?

Most of the way we experience consciousness in sleep is in the form of

dreams. And most of the dreams that we recall come from REM sleep.
This time of sleep has been called paradoxical because as noted we're
paralyzed yet our physiology is so juiced. We're in this alternative reality in
every way, shape and form. But there are many forms of dreams which
societies have identified over the years. As my topic is consciousness in
sleep I will now turn to one of these intensified REM forms called lucid
dreams.

This hyper-REM phenomenon is significantly more of whatever REM is.

Lucid dreaming is when you know you're dreaming while you're dreaming.
You're sound asleep and dreaming believing that the dream is reality when
for a variety of reasons you recognize it is a dream and that you are in fact
asleep. Typically people react initially with a sense of wonder and fun.
They quickly realize that they can do in a dream all these things they
could not do while awake. However this initial excitement also often wakes
them up. Because you get so excited you can't stay asleep. There are
limits to being conscious while you're unconscious.

There are various ways to conceptualize lucid dreaming. One is in terms of

the relative self-reflectiveness that the attainment of such a state of
consciousness might imply. Canadians Alan Moffitt and colleagues
developed a scale measuring self-reflectiveness based on the therapeutic
work of Ernest Rossi. In it they consider degrees of self-reflectiveness in
dreams. The classic position has been that in most dreams we are fairly
unself-reflective or critical of our dream surroundings/events/characters.
For instance, I recall one of my students telling me that he knows he's
dreaming a lot. I asked, "how do you figure that out?" He replied, "Well, I
know if I'm in an airport in a dream and my car is there and it's blue, and I
know my car's not blue. I know my car's purple. Ergo, it must be a dream. "
I recall thinking to myself, if that was me in the dream and there was a
purple car instead of a blue one, I'd think "oh well, something must have
changed and I now have a purple car". I'd just drift along accepting
whatever came my way. In contrast this student is very critical in his
attitude in waking and that translates into dreaming thus he is often able
to identify that he is dreaming. That degree of reflectiveness, or critical
attitude, is actually quite rare.
At the lowest level this self-reflectiveness scale begins with "The dreamer
is not in the dream". Researchers have found that this is one of the first
experiences of dreaming that children have. It takes quite a while until
they begin to move to the next stage of thinking abilities when they can
begin to construct the self enough to have a self in the dream. One day
when I was telling my seven year old boy my dream he looked at me with
an irritated expression. I asked him, "What's wrong?" He said, "How come
you get to be in your dreams, and I don't?" I remember thinking that was a
fairly sophisticated observation. Without explaining that he has cognitive
limitations, I assured him that eventually he would be there and of course
he is now fully in his dreams. Although occasionally young children are in
their dreams as active characters more often than not they are watching,
or they have a sense of it happening out there somewhere. A self in ones
dream is a developmental benchmark.

The midway point on the scale is when the dreamer becomes completely
involved in the dream. This is where many of us remain, completely
absorbed in the dream so much so that if it is a nightmare we are so
relieved when we finally awaken. Eventually we have some experience of
some kind of reflective activity like thinking about an idea. So in the dream
we might mutter to our dream selves, "This isn't quite right." Particularly
as we utilize the highest form of logical thought called, formal operations.
The reality is that only about half the time do we actually end up doing
thinking at this higher level even when awake!

At one of the higher levels on this scale the dreamer has multiple levels of
awareness simultaneously participating and observing. This would be a
dream where you're watching yourself doing something and you're in it
and out of it at the same time. But it still feels real. Another example would
be a false awakening dream. In it you dream that you wake up, and then
you really wake up and realize that you dreamt you woke up. Did you ever
do that two or three times in a row? You know you dream you wake up,
and then you dream you wake.. and then, and then, and then....after all
"waking up" can get scary? I recall doing it once four times in a row, and I
was getting pretty scared thinking, "what's real and what's not?" Another
example of the slipperiness of reality that these dream experiences can
subject us to is the dream where you were so sure it was real that you
comment on it as though it were real to a friend. They look at you like
you're crazy and only then do you realize in embarrassment that "I dreamt
it!"

These things get very slippery. What's dreaming and what's not
dreaming? What's real and what's not real? It can get quite confusing. A
colleague of mine has a great slide that he uses in his presentations of a
huge toilet with a little person standing there looking at it! It illustrates the
dream where you are telling yourself, "it's OK, you're awake you can pee!"
when another part of you replies, "No. You're asleep. Don't go!" Did you
ever lose that argument?

At the highest level of Moffitt and colleagues scale the dreamer

consciously reflects on the fact that he or she is dreaming. This is the
lucid dream. It is the experience of, "Hey, wait a minute, this is a dream.
That's why there's a tin can growing out of that guy's head or that's why I
can fly like superman!" Although for these dream researchers that is the
highest level of self-reflectiveness, I'm going to argue it's the basement of
the potential of consciousness in sleep. And in fact, the potential of
consciousness in the twenty-four hour cycle.

Lucid Dreaming Proof

This work on lucid dreaming really took off among dream researchers.
The initial verification of the possibility of knowing you are dreaming while
you are dreaming is primarily due to my colleague Steven LaBerge. By
now his work has been replicated in several sleep laboratories. I think we
can say with reasonable certainty that you can be "awake" in some sense
while you're asleep.

This is how it has been proven. When you're in REM sleep remember
you're paralyzed from the neck down. The task was to come up with a
way to signal to the polysongrapher, "Hey, I know I'm dreaming". You can
not hit a micro switch or kick your leg because of this paralysis. But it
turns out that you do have control of your eye movements. That is, while
in a dream if you think, "I'm going to move my eyes way to the right and
then way to the left" and then your dream self does it with his/her dream
eyes, that's what really happens to the dreamers physical eyes. Faberge
devised a technique at exactly the same time as Keith Hearne in England,
totally unbeknownst to each other, where people could signal when they
realized they were dreaming. The signal to the sleep lab technician
through electrodes attached to the corners of the eyes was a prearranged
set of eye movements. Then the technician would wake them up and ask
"what was going on before I awoke you?" If dreamer knew they were
dreaming and had signaled they would want to know if the technician got
the signal?

For instance in Figure 4, there are five signals from LaBerge's laboratory.
He writes about this figure: "This is from the last eight minutes of a thirty
minute REM period. Upon awakening the subject reported having made
five eye movement signals. The first signal at one -- left-right, marked the
onset of lucidity. . . . During the following ninety seconds, the subject flew
about exploring his dream world until he believed he had awakened, at
which point he made the signal for awakening, at number two, which is
four movements of left-right, left-right. After another ninety seconds the
subject realized he was still dreaming and signaled at three with three
pairs of eye movements. Realizing this was too many, he correctly
signaled with two pairs at number four. Finally, upon awakening a hundred
seconds later, he signaled appropriately with again four movements of
left-right, left-right." You can see that you don't need to be a trained
polysonographer to recognize the signals. They jump out at you. They're
not ambiguous. And they exactly fit the dream transcript describing the
felt experience of the dream.

Lucid Dreaming Is REMing at It's Best

Figure 5 summarizes some of the biological activity associated with lucid

dreaming. On the left is the REM episode prior to the eye movement
signal. While on the right are the same physiological variables after the
eye movement signal. You can see that across the board there is an
increase in activity immediately after the signal. For instance, REM
density, the number of eye movements per unit of time, goes up. This may
be a rough estimate of the efficiency of REM sleep in doing its task.
Specifically the more eye movements in a shorter period of time can be
interpreted as indicating that the brain is doing more efficiently what it is
supposed to do in REM sleep.

Also evident in Figure 5 is the increase in respiration rate, heart rate, and
skin potential. If you think about these findings in the context of what I
have just told you about REM sleep and it's hyper effect on many bodily
functions, in lucid REM there is another significant jump in heart rate,
respiration and skin potential. One might say that lucid REM is more of
whatever REMing is about.

Not shown in this figure is data regarding the paralysis associated with
REM. Remember you're paralyzed in REM. One of the measures of
paralysis is the Hoffman or H-reflex, a spinal reflex. It turns out that in
lucid REM, you're significantly more paralyzed than in ordinary REM.
Paralyzed isn't just an on - off mechanism. There's varying degrees of
cataplexy. Thus whatever REM sleep is about relative to NREM, lucid REM
is more of it. REM sleep is about dreaming, which is a unique form of
mentation in sleep. Lucid REM sleep is more of that.

Individual Differences in Lucid Dreaming

Most of the questions I have asked in my research program over the last
almost 20 years have dealt with individual differences in lucid dreaming.
So, for instance, I have asked what is the spontaneous incidence of these
experiences of consciousness in sleep? I was interested in knowing when
this occurred normally. That is when a dreamer wasn't programmed go
out and try to have the experience. In a series of studies my students and
I found that among college students if I asked them did you ever have a
dream when you knew you were dreaming, 58% said they had had such a
dream at least once in their lifetime while 21% had had it once or more per
month. It's interesting that if you look at certain populations you get
remarkable increases in this incidence. From five samples of meditators
we got average incidences of once or more per week. It is important to
note that among these groups of meditators they were not meditating in
order to have lucid dreams. Lucid dreams seemed to be part of a range of
positive outcomes that emerged from the practice of meditation. I'm
going to argue that this outcome is not superfluous rather it is a fairly
central aspect to the practice of meditation.

I also examined the phenomenological content of lucid and nonlucid

dreams, wondering if they were similar. We found that it depends on who
you ask. If you ask the dreamer, they tend to characterize their lucid
dreams as much more remarkable and noteworthy than their non-lucid
dreams. This is true at least for those who have had them somewhat
infrequently. The more you have them, the more ordinary they appear.
Eventually everything habituates. They don't necessarily get boring, you
just get used to this state of mind in sleep. Therefore, I think our self-
evaluation findings are confounded by novelty .

If on the other hand you ask independent judges' to evaluate lucid and
non-lucid dreams, we found that in the main there were very few
differences. The few differences are noteworthy. The most obvious, of
course is that you know you're dreaming. But this defines the categories.
It does also appear to open certain dream potentials. You've got some
control over the dream. This we have seen over and over when you're
dreaming and you know you're dreaming you can, to a point, control the
dreams.

Another difference is that the auditory references are higher in lucid

dreams. The fact that this difference was combined with kinesthetic
differences seems to indicate that the vestibular system is somehow more
implicated. This we substantiated in other research.

Also there are fewer characters in lucid dreams. That's kind of interesting
from a psychodynamic perspective. If you view every character in the
dream as part of yourself, then fewer of them would imply more
integration of the aspects of self. Furthermore, lucidity has the potential to
give you an opportunity to further your integration/growth process. I was
also interested in the psychological predisposition's which result in people
having lucid dreams. Although there were some differences there was
nothing that was particularly remarkable. For instance, there was some
evidence for lucid dreamers to be more androgynous, that is they were
comfortable expressing both the masculine and feminine parts of
themselves. Lucid dreamers are more likely to take internal risks like being
willing to be hypnotized. They're also more self oriented.

Where we found stronger individual differences was in terms of the

superior spatial skills of lucid dreamers. People who spontaneously
experience lucid dreams seem to know how to maneuver in space (not
outer!) really well. You may wonder, "what do you mean that having the
ability to lucid dream is associated with getting around in space? I mean
this quite literally. For instance, we measured people who frequently
reported having lucid dreams and those who didn't, and looked at the
integrity of their vestibular systems. Before the experiment we weeded
out people who get motion sickness or had some kind of obvious
vestibular problem. Thus these were all people who had reasonably
healthy vestibular systems. We used standard clinical tests of the integrity
of the system and found that for those that were not having lucid dreams
very often there were marginal problems with their vestibular system. The
vestibular system is one of the primary systems we use to orient ourselves
in the space around us. How much do we tilt when turning a corner on a
bicycle? Are these high heels too high? We also found the same thing
when we tested them on a piece of apparatus called a stableometer. This
apparatus is like in a circus when clowns balance on a platform resting on
a ball. That is frequent lucid dreamers could balance on the platform.

Another aspect of spatial abilities is field independence. Have you ever

known someone who no matter wherever they are, they're never lost.
Even if there's no big buildings or mountains they seem to know how to
find their way around with some sort of internal map. These people are
field independent. It is someone who can be relatively independent of
their physical environment and can still accurately orient and maneuver
themselves in space. This independence of the field we found was very
true of spontaneous lucid dreamers. They also are able to manipulate
complex spatial objects in their imagination. So, for instance, we asked
them to rotate a three dimensional object in imaginary space and then
match it to another three dimensional object. They were able to do this
significantly more accurately than those for whom consciousness in sleep
rarely if ever appeared.

The idea of moving in mental space has some correlates to the ability to
move in physical space. Remember when you're in a dream, you're in what
feels like a real world with spatial parameters. Although the laws of
physics aren't quite the same, you still have to maneuver.

It turns out that the practice of meditation increases performance on

these various spatial measures as well as the frequency of lucid dreaming.
More over there are some forms of meditation that maintain that
consciousness in sleep is a marker of the development of higher states of
consciousness. Specifically, if you measure meditators on field
independence, they not only score highly field independent but scientists
have had to cut the administration time of the test in half in order to get
any variability because everybody scores perfectly in the normally allotted
time!

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How to Have a Lucid Dream

You may be now asking, "how can I have this thing?" There's various ways
to think about lucid dream induction. Research has found that you might
do some things before sleep and/or during sleep or naps. Before sleep,
you may want to try simply suggesting to yourself that you will know you
are dreaming that night. "It sounds interesting. Let's give it a shot."

To facilitate this you might ask a question while you're awake, "Am I
dreaming?" I do not recommend this if you have any problems with
identifying what's real. We can go on and on about nothing's real and get
lost in the whole philosophy of it but let's put that aside. If you are
reasonably confident that you know what's real and what's not, that is on
an emotional level it does not create strong anxiety, then you might ask
that question every time a light blinks. So when you stop at a stoplight a
light blinks. Turn a light on in a room that's a light blinking. At these times
say to yourself, "Am I dreaming?" Of course the next question is, how the
heck do you test if you are dreaming? Because if you think about it when
you are in a dream you usually can't tell that it's a dream. One of the
things you might do is look at your watch, look away and then look at your
watch again. If when I looked at my watch it said five to seven and when I
looked again, it said five to seven then I am awake. But if I looked again
and it said ten to nine then I'd strongly suspect that this was a dream.

One thing that's gotten a lot of attention over the last few years is a
biofeedback sleep mask designed by Stephen LaBerge. With it your eye
movements are monitored when you're in REM. When there feedback is
received of a blinking light which is placed in this mask that you wear as
you sleep. When you see a blinking light in your dreams you have trained
yourself while awake to then ask, "Am I dreaming?" With sufficient
motivation, LaBerge has found success with the mask in helping to induce
lucid dreams.

Two other presleep activities may contribute to the increase in dream

lucidity, the practice of meditation and the cultivation of high dream recall.

When it spontaneously occurs to you that you are dreaming without all the
effort of practice and electronic gadgetry, it is likely to occur in one of
three ways; nightmares, incongruities, or you simply knew from the
beginning of the dream. For instance, the bogeyman may be chasing you
and you suddenly realize it's only a dream and are quite relieved. By
incongruities I mean those oddities in dreams that do not occur while
awake. For instance, I once had a dream of an old man with a tin can
growing out of his head. It occurred to me upon thinking about this oddity
in the dream that this may be a dream. All too often we blindly accept
these strange events in our sleep. Finally, subjects who spontaneously
report lucidity tell me that they just new from the onset of the dream.
Thus there was nothing that specifically triggered the awareness. I believe
this third manner of recognizing the true state of mind in sleep may be an
indicator of the development of higher states of consciousness.

Lucid Dreaming Is Only the Beginning

Why would you want to have a lucid dream? Some of the possibilities
include, developing greater self awareness, getting rid of nightmares,
solving work problems, even practicing your tennis stroke. If you're a
tennis player and you want to practice a new angle with your wrist in order
to get that shot exactly right, you can practice in your imagination and
that can be helpful. But the dream is the strongest imagistic realm to
which we have access. To practice there "feels" real. Sports psychologist,
Paul Tholey from Germany has done a lot of work with athletes, training
them in lucid dreams. In any case, it's fun, it's enjoyable, it has some
psychological as well as some very pragmatic potentials, but lucidity is
only the beginning.

I'm going to briefly summarize why I believe that dream lucidity is only the
beginning. In my research program and in my books about lucid dreaming
I have conceptualized it as the bargain basement of consciousness in
sleep. Witnessing dreams and sleep are indicates of higher forms of the
development of consciousness. My colleague Charles Alexander has
conceptualized these "higher" states of consciousness as post-
representational. Let me explain, the way we think is representational.
When I think it is always about "something". There is a representation of
something. Thus when I think about my children, I have feelings that
represent them, I have an idea or cognition's about them, I have a mental
picture about them, I have felt sense of how it is to touch them. But always
they are represented. Even when I think about myself there is still
representation, me the teacher, me the mother, me the middle aged-
woman, me the expert, and so forth! There is always "something" that is
represented in my consciousness.

In post-representational levels of consciousness our thought, feelings,

sense of body, etc. is without content. It is self-referral and is sometimes
called pure or transcendental consciousness. The idea that
consciousness can have its own integrity, can know itself without an
object, without a thing to be conscious of has been around for many
thousands of years in some philosophical systems from east Asia. For
those of us in the west it can feel like one of those peanut butter kind of
concepts. You know what it is but its like trying to talk with peanut butter
in your mouth when trying to explain it. Here's a quote from Alfred Lord
Tennyson that somewhat describes this idea: "It's a kind of waking trance,
I frequently had from boyhood, when I had been all alone, once as it were
out of the intensity of consciousness of individuality . The individuality
itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being. And this,
not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the
surest. .utterly beyond words".

Some traditions argue that the most unambiguous marker of the

development of these states of being is consciousness in sleep. These
states have been called spiritual or mystical states. One of the early steps
towards this consciousness in sleep is a lucid dream. But in a lucid dream
although you know you're dreaming while you're dreaming you're still
caught up in it. It's exciting, it's fun, you're not detached from it, which is
what happens as you move into the higher forms of consciousness in
sleep.

I was fortunate enough to have access to an elite group of meditators.

These people are on a program of their practice all but two hours a day.
They constitute extremely sophisticated observers of these states of
consciousness. Lucid dreaming was described to them as a dream in
which they are actively thinking of the fact that they're dreaming. One of
them wrote about his lucid dreams, "I'll become aware of the dream as
separate then aware that I am dreaming. Then I begin to manipulate the
story and the characters to create whatever situation I desire. [At] times in
unpleasant situations, I'll think as the dreamer, 'I don't have to put up with
this.' And I change the dream, or at least I back out of the involvement."

Witnessing a dream was described to them as, "a dream in which you
experience a quiet, peaceful inner awareness or wakefulness, completely
separate from the dream". Another elite meditator wrote about this
experience, "sometimes, whatever the content of the dream is, I feel an
inner tranquillity of awareness that is removed from the dream.
Sometimes, I may even be caught up in the dream, but the inner
awareness and peace remains. It is deembedded."

One of the classic characteristics of the development of thought, the

development of consciousness is a continued de-embeddedness. We
think of this as wisdom, somehow things don't shake us up so much when
we get older and hopefully wiser. As we move through life we become de-
embedded or the term more classically used, "detached". Detachment
does not mean that we don't care. Rather we've been through it and we
have learned how to let those things wash over us.

Witnessing in deep sleep or relatively dreamless sleep was described to

these meditators as, "a dreamless sleep in which you experience a quiet,
peaceful inner state of awareness and wakefulness." One informant wrote,
"It's a feeling of infinite expansion and bliss and nothing else. Then I
become aware that I exist, but there is no individual personality. Gradually
I become aware that I'm an individual, but there are no details
who..where..what..when..etc. eventually these details fill in and I might
awaken."

This state of consciousness has also been called the "void". Because
there is no content or object of awareness, the only referrals are when
leaving it. Thus what happens is you begin to construct not only self but
also world, and finally self in world. You realize it's only a construction, a
fabrication. The notion that self and the world are constructions is
consistent with current information processing views of the way the brain
processes information from sensory channels. What's amazing is how
wrong this construction can be as in the case of eye witnesses testimony
or our susceptibility to illusions. But what's more amazing is how right it
can be. If you think it's just a construction it's really quite amazing that
we're not killing each other more on the highways.

Development of Pure Consciousness from Lucidity

I argue in my book Control Your Dreams that with the growth of self-
reflectiveness in dreaming it moves toward lucid dreaming and onto
witnessing dreaming and witnessing deep sleep. Here's an example of
witnessing deep sleep from a mathematics professor who has been
meditating for twenty years on a regular basis. He describes it in this way,
"one experiences oneself to be a a part of a tremendous composite of
relationships. These are not social or conceptual, or intellectual
relationships, only a web of relationships. I'm aware of the relationship
between entities without the entities being there. There's a sense of
motion, yet there's no relative things to gage motion by. . .it's just
expansiveness. There're no objects to measure it. The expansiveness is
one of light, like the light of awareness. Visual, but not visual; more like a
light in an ocean. An intimate experience of light."

I don't want to say that you have to be lucid in order to witness, some
people get so attached to lucidity that they find they need to let go of
lucidity in order to eventually develop the detached perspective of the
witness. You can become as attached to knowing you're dreaming while
you're dreaming as you can to anything else. After all there is still an
object of awareness while lucid in dreams - your dream.

There are several lines of evidence both biological as well as

psychological that support this developmental model or at the least that
there is a relationship between these states of consciousness in sleep. I
have summarized this research in a book I coedited, Dream Images: A Call
to Mental Arms. I shall briefly highlight some of it here.

It has been found that increases in REM density have been associated
with both the lucid state in nonmeditators and for meditators who claim
witnessing half the night or more. Alpha brain waves are experienced in
early and pre-lucid episodes and they're associated with witnessing
dreams and sleep. A model which has nicely pulled some of this EEG work
together is that of Fred Travis. He argues that in meditation you have
moments of this transcendence or unity, which isn't to say that you might
not also have it when you're running or crocheting or nursing your baby.
What these and most of lives activities may have in common is a focused
sense of total connection, total communion. Travis and others have
measured those experiences in meditation and it turns out that they're
identical to to your EEG every time you change states of consciousness.
That is move from sleeping to waking to dreaming sleep. The implication
is that perhaps there is a state of consciousness which underlies waking,
dreaming, and sleeping which I have called pure or transcendental
consciousness.

Building on Travis's work is a recent dissertation by Lynn Mason. In a

sophisticated sleep laboratory study she found that the:

experimental subjects [meditators] reported experiencing a quiet peaceful

inner awareness and alertness during deep sleep. Experimental subjects
displayed a unique electrophysiological signature. . . These findings
support the primary criteria of higher states of consciousness as the
maintenance of transcendental consciousness along with deep sleep.

What Does It Feel Like?

I did a phenomenological analysis looking at similarities and differences

between lucid dreaming, witnessing dreams and witnessing sleep on
about 60 elite meditators. Basic things I want to bring your attention to is
the feelings of separateness.. .more characteristic of witnessing dreams
you're not caught up in the dream . . .in the sense that a true elder is not
caught up in the day to day flow of life. Now one could make a reasonable
argument that I don't know if I want to be that detached. The whole
argument with Prozac maybe you read all those articles coming out
Prozac may be .Have you tried it. I did my shtick with Prozac. It was fun. It
was great. But I got some side effects I didn't want. one of the things
people claim, is hey wait a minute I feel so detached, am I anymore in the
world? And is that what I want? Is that what I not want? I mean the whole
values dialogues there. In any case, that's the nature of this experience in
this phenomenological analysis. State transitions more likely to be
described in witnessing in sleep because there's nothing to talk about so
you can only talk about coming out of it. .in the description we showed.
Control is something that happens in lucid dreams. It's something that's
just not relevant, in witnessing because if you're detached from
something, you're not particularly interested in controlling it.

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