Dreams — The Lucid Experience

Dreams — The Lucid Experience

Lynne Malcolm: Hello, you're with All in the Mind on RN. I'm Lynne Malcolm.

Paul Davies: The thing about lucid dreams is that it's not like the real world where you
are constrained by all sorts of things, including the laws of physics; you can do magic.

Nano Daemon: In a lucid dream everything is practically identical to your real life, so
that it is incredibly hard to tell whether it's reality or a lucid dream. But something is off.

Stephen La Berge: Lucid dreaming provides that extra perspective that gives a much
broader view of the possibilities of life.

Lynne Malcolm: Have you ever had a lucid dream? You may well have had this
intriguing and sometimes disturbing experience, not realising what it is. Today we'll
explore lucidity, which is sometimes viewed as an altered state of consciousness, and
quite different from a regular dream.

Stephen La Berge: Well, lucid dreaming, the basic idea is while you are in a dream you
know that it's a dream. You explicitly think to yourself, 'Right now I'm in a dream.'

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Lynne Malcolm: Dr Stephen La Berge is a world leader in the scientific study of lucid
dreaming, and founder of the Lucidity Institute in the United States.

Stephen La Berge: Sometimes you can't believe that…I know I'm dreaming because, for
example, I'm just floating out of this chair, but everything else looks so real that it can't
be a dream. So it's a wonderful mind-blowing experience to realise that you can have a
simulation of reality that is as real as it ever gets while you are asleep in bed but somehow
your mind, your brain has constructed this. It's a meta consciousness, it means that you
know that you know it while it's happening, so you can control lucid dreams because you
know that they are dreams.

Paul Davies: I'm Paul Davies, I'm director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental
Concepts in the Science at Arizona State University. I began lucid dreaming when I was
a teenager. I'd always suffered from nightmares, even as a very young child, and this was
very terrifying. But in my mid to late teens I had what at the time was a very disturbing
if not terrifying different type of dream in which I thought I was awake but actually I was
asleep. It seemed so vivid, everything seemed so real and normal, I could see the bedroom
around me, and yet I felt paralysed. I felt I was trapped in sleep and that this might very
well on forever. And then I realised in later years that these were what people called lucid
dreams, and then once I realised that this was a particular type of dream state I began to
get interested in it and began to try to induce these lucid dreams.

I should explain right away that a lucid dream is not just the same as a vivid dream,
everybody has vivid dreams. A lucid dream is where you can have all of the fine detail,
so for example you look at a tree and you can see individual leaves in all their glory, and
you have the tactile sensation. You get the whole range of sensory experience. And if you
are aware it's a lucid dream then you can say, a-ha, I'm now in this dream state, what
next? And that's where the fun starts, the adventurous side of lucid dreaming. So it's got
a scary side if you don't know what's happening, and an adventurous side once you gain
control over it.

Lynne Malcolm: Physicist Paul Davies.

Psychophysiologist Stephen La Berge has studied the science of lucid dreaming at

Stanford University for over 30 years.

Stephen La Berge: The basic finding of all that time was that lucid dreaming occurs
during the phase of sleep called a REM sleep, a rapid eye movement sleep, and it's a
particular part of REM sleep where the brain is more activated than usual. So it's like

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having sufficient memory for a complex program. And we don't always have that amount
of memory energy, if you like, available during sleep, and certainly not even during all
REM sleep. In each REM period there will be several points at which you could become
lucid, and these are the high periods when there is more intense eye movement activity,
that's called phasic REM. There's more twitching behaviour.

And then when you become lucid you stay in this REM sleep as long as the lucid dream
lasts, and that could be up to maybe an hour in terms of what we've seen in the laboratory.
Most of the lucid dreams in the lab have been closer to two or three minutes in length,
and we never found any evidence that this was somehow an almost awake state or
partially mixed with waking and dreaming. But the evidence suggests that no. This state
of REM sleep was called paradoxical sleep when it was first discovered because it just
went beyond the usual expectations of what sleep was going to be. And lucid dreaming,
I believe, shows that that degree of integration that the brain can have during REM sleep
can be fully equivalent to the waking state. So it's paradoxical but it's nevertheless true.
So it's an exciting set of possibilities of what can be done with this.

Lynne Malcolm: Nano Daemon was going through a very difficult time in her life facing
issues of extreme stress and betrayal, when she began dreaming prolifically and vividly.
She was gaining helpful insight from her dreams, when things started to change.

Nano Daemon: I just couldn't wait until I would wake up to analyse my dreams. So I
found myself waking up in my dreams and I'm analysing my own dreams and I'm
coming to the conclusions, and by the time I woke up I had all the answers anyway. And
I didn't realise at the time that that was the beginning of lucid dreaming.

Lynne Malcolm: So once you experienced a lucid dream and you had a sense of the
difference between a normal dream and a lucid dream, did you train yourself to…?

Nano Daemon: Oh definitely. I wanted more, and more came to me in the most unusual
ways.

Lynne Malcolm: Nano Daemon.

Stephen La Berge's interest in lucid dreaming began when he had his first few
experiences of it in the late '70s as a student. So in order to study it he taught himself to
dream lucidly at will. Now he's found ways to teach others to have lucid dreams.

Stephen La Berge: Well, you can learn to have lucid dreams basically by developing your
dream awareness, meaning starting with better and better dream recall, so you remember
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most of the dreams of the night. And then you come to recognise what kinds of elements
of your dream could tell you that you are dreaming, things that are odd that are
characteristic of dreams, that when they happen, if you noticed you could become lucid.
In these we call dream signs. By simply cultivating the awareness of dream signs…for
example a typical one would be I step out of the room for a moment, I'll be right back,
and then when I come back to the room everybody is gone. Wait a minute, what's with
this? And the answer of course, it's a typical dream content. Of course people disappear
when you stop paying attention to them because they are not really there.

Lynne Malcolm: So it's noticing the weirdnesses that we are familiar with in dreams, it's
actually taking notice of those.

Stephen La Berge: Yes, exactly, you've got to notice it, because normally they happen
but we don't notice what they mean. So you have to have the mental set that you are
going to use the dream signs as a means of recognising you're dreaming.

Nano Daemon: If you set your intentions before you go to sleep, your subconscious will
provide the answers to you or the moving pictures, because there is a Hollywood
happening in your mind, you know, and it shows it to you like it's a movie on a screen.

Lynne Malcolm: So are you ever aware of testing whether your dreams are reality or just
dreams when you are asleep?

Nano Daemon: I did test it only about three months ago, and I said, 'I want to have a
lucid dream tonight,' but I didn't specify what. So in the middle of the night I woke up
very thirsty and I have a side lamp next to my bed and every night before I go to sleep I
have a cup of tea. So I woke up to go and get myself some water, I realised I had not
drunk my cup of tea and I thought, funny, I must have forgotten to drink and I fell asleep.
So I drank my tea and I thought, this is funny, it doesn't taste like my normal tea, it's got
sugar in it and I never take sugar in my tea. Never mind, I drank it, I switched the light
off and I fell asleep again.

And then I had the urge to have a drink again and I thought, it's funny, I hardly ever get
thirsty in the middle of the night, why am I getting thirsty again? So I wake up, and there's
my cup of tea, full cup of tea next to me and my light is still on. And yet I was convinced
earlier on that that was reality, and now is this still a reality or is it a dream? So I drank
my cup of tea, it tasted exactly like my cup of tea and I switched the light off and I went
back to sleep. In the morning the light was off and the tea was gone, so the second part
of it was a reality, the first part of it was a dream, a lucid dream.

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In a lucid dream everything is practically identical to your real life, so that it is incredibly
hard to tell whether it's reality or a lucid dream. But something is off, something is off,
and that is the clue that you need that this is a lucid dream. And my clue in that instant
was that there was sugar in my tea, which I normally don't take sugar.

Lynne Malcolm: Nano Daemon, who's written about her personal experience of altered
consciousness in her book Fate or Destiny?.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, online and on your mobile device. I'm Lynne
Malcolm, with the second part of two programs about dreaming.

Most lucid dreamers are quite sure about their experience, that although the dreams feel
very real, the dreamers are actually asleep when they have them. But can this be proved?

Stephen La Berge and his colleagues decided that they wanted to prove it scientifically.
They set up experiments in the lab using subjects who had the ability to decide before
going to sleep that they would have a lucid dream. Stephen La Berge and the other
subjects used a particular pattern of eye movements, while asleep, to signal when they
were having a lucid dream.

Stephen La Berge: I could agree in advance that when I realise I'm dreaming I'll move
my eyes in a particular pattern, in a kind of gesture. So I'll look to my left ear, right ear,
left, right, and back. So that left, right, left, right will be a signal saying I know I'm
dreaming now. And then when I did that in the lab, sure enough, that signal appeared in
REM sleep, and then it corresponded to what I reported when I woke up. And that's what
we found with the other five subjects in my dissertation study at Stanford in 1980. So the
basic idea is that you can have signals so that the subjects in the dream can, once they
become lucid, remember that they have a task to perform, can then mark different
portions of the dream with eye movement signals.

One of the striking experiments that we did was addressing the question of dream time;
how long do dreams take? That was a difficult thing to address without lucid dreaming,
but once we had the method, all we had to do was say here is the mission. All right, make
one eye movements signal when you realise you are dreaming—left, right, left, right—
and then estimate 10 seconds while counting, like so—1,001, 1,002, 1,003, and so on up to
10—and then make a second signal. And there you've got two signals on the polygraph
in a certain amount of time and we can then measure how long that took.

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What we found when we repeatedly did this with a number of subjects, that essentially
it took the same amount of time to do something in a dream as it did to actually do it.
And that's not surprising once you think about it because you are using the same brain
of course in dreaming and waking. But it also shows the power of the lucid dreaming
paradigm, that you can find out things that you just couldn't have found out about
dreams before, because you have the lucid dreamer, participant observers. Their role is
so important in this kind of consciousness research because it wouldn't happen if they
didn't have the ability to wake up in their dreams, as it were, and then to remember that
they have a task and to carry it out and report it carefully. So there's a whole skill set that
goes with that.

Lynne Malcolm: And Stephen La Berge went on to develop devices, to help induce lucid
dreaming

Stephen La Berge: How to make it easier. Could we give a reminder, a hint while people
are dreaming that would say something like 'psst, this is a dream'. Well indeed, we played
tape recordings saying exactly that during REM sleep, and in about a third of the cases
people became lucid when that message from the outside world appeared in the dream.
For example, the alarm goes off but you don't wake up, instead you think there's a fire
alarm and you leave your house or something. That's called incorporation of external
stimuli, but means that there is sometimes leakage from the outside world, sensory input
gets through. We found that the auditory reminders woke people up too often. So we
picked another method, flashing lights that could be used as a reminder. So we got to the
sleep mask that is a comfortable, lightweight, flexible mask that you wear while you are
sleeping.

Lynne Malcolm: And it emits light to remind you to check if you are dreaming?

Stephen La Berge: Yes. First of all it's got a sensor that determines that your eyes are
moving and therefore you are in REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. And then it
flashes the lights, that appears in your dream. So if right now suddenly the lights in the
room just started to flash, flash, flash, you'd say, 'What's that? Oh right, I remember, I'm
wearing the NovaDreamer, and that's a reminder, and so I'm in a dream.' So it's a
particular dream sign that you can count on, and those we found were quite effective for
helping people to have lucid dreams.

Lynne Malcolm: A number of years ago Paul Davies tried out Stephen La Berge's dream
inducing mask.

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Paul Davies: I well remember when I got this face mask and it took a long time to train
myself to do it. And it works simply by…it detects the REM movement, rapid eye
movement, which is a signature of the dreaming state, and then it flashes lights. In the
dream state one's IQ is a little bit variable, and so I can well remember having a dream,
sitting at a dinner party, and the woman next to me said, 'Why are you wearing that
stupid mask?' So you'd think that the dream Paul Davies would think, 'A-ha, because I
paid £35 for this Stephen La Berge special mask and therefore I claim my lucid dream.'
But no, no, it didn't work. But eventually, yes, I finally accomplished this.

And I remember thinking to myself, ah, now I've achieved the lucid dream state, so I
won't be able to do anything without any money, that was my first thought. And the
thing about lucid dreams is that it's not like the real world where you are constrained by
all sorts of things, including the laws of physics, you can do magic, and so I conjured
some money into existence. And this took a little bit of effort, and it was on the pavement
in front of me. And again, a woman came along and she said, 'What are you doing there?
He's forging money!' And it didn't last very long.

But over the years I've had quite a variety of lucid dreams. I will even look at a bedside
clock and read the time. And then when eventually I really do wake, everything looks
the same, except the time is different. So it's not like my lucid dreaming state has the sense
to deduce what time it ought to be, it's all made up, and yet it appears as if real.

Lynne Malcolm: Physicist Paul Davies.

So this research on lucid dreaming provides a way of learning about dreaming

consciousness, and that's interesting from a scientific research point of view. But what are
some of the applications for individuals?

Stephen La Berge: The first thing is that people definitely like lucid dreaming, they find
it a rewarding experience. It's an unusual condition. I'm having this amazing control
where I can do things that I didn't think were possible. I can fly, for example. Walt Disney
says that doing the impossible is kind of fun.

The second general area might be simulation or using the dream state to practice, and
that ranges from things like athletic performance, musical performance, social
interactions. People have described overcoming shyness, using it as a means of cognitive
behaviour modification, overcoming fears. When you are lucid it still feels real, even
though you know it's not. So you know you are safe but you know if you are doing
something like you've got stage or performance anxiety, as one person described in our

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book, he is going to play the violin in front of this big audience, so he is doing it in his
dream. It still feels like he is in front of the big audience, and he feels a bit of trepidation,
but he does it and it all works well and he feels great, and that then relieves his anxiety.

Then a third area is creativity, enhancing the possibilities of new ideas. For example,
artists looking for a new painting would go in their lucid dream to open a door in the
expectation that on the other side of this door will be a gallery showing new art. And
indeed they open the door and there are these new paintings, and then you remember
and then reproduce when they wake up. People have described using that as a means of
getting new musical ideas, new ideas in computer programming and relationship
management, all kinds of things that are basically using a creative synthesis of our
abilities at night.

Paul Davies: So I am a theoretical physicist, I don't normally do any experimental work,

but in a lucid dream you don't have to apply for a research grant. But one of the things
that I did was to check to see if my mirror image was the reverse of the normal image, as
it would be in a mirror in waking life…

Lynne Malcolm: While you are dreaming you thought to check your image.

Paul Davies: Yes, I did it. You see, the extraordinary thing is…well, first I should say
that the image was the reflection as it would be in waking life, but I had never thought of
that in advance. And one day I intend to try Galileo's famous experiment of dropping
objects to see if they accelerate to the ground equally fast, because one of the persistent
effects of lucid dreams is a sensation of floating or levitation. And so the lucid dreamers,
people who do this very seriously, this is one of the things they like to do, they like to fly
like Superman. So you can do that in a lucid dream. So in a sense you are suspending or
manipulating the laws of physics.

Lynne Malcolm: Another way in which people use their ability to lucid dream is for
emotional healing.

Stephen La Berge: Dreams have long had the reputation for being the way that people
work through problems, get to the point of being able to let go of something, including
for example having experience with an encounter with a dead loved one and being able
to experience them in a way that lets you actually say goodbye and let go. So many
different applications of healing in terms of the mental health level of overcoming
nightmares, of facing your nightmares and working through them in a way that gives
you a sense of empowerment that you can handle these fears within yourself. Just one

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final broad area is the idea of knowledge that lucid dreaming can give you an opportunity
to have an encounter between the unconscious and conscious mind in the dream world
that is difficult to arrive at in other places. And so that means self-encounter, self-
exploration, then lucid dreaming is one of the ways to do that. It's the levels that you can't
get elsewhere that I think are most important, and that is dreaming the impossible dream,
doing what you can't do while you are awake.

Lynne Malcolm: Stephen La Berge has also found that his lucid dreams are helpful to
him.

Stephen La Berge: As I had a lot of lucid dreams I started to find that they had a personal
value. They were meaningful. I went from having, for example, frequent anxiety
dreams…it would be the angry mob was after me or the underworld mob was after me
or the police was after me. Somebody was always chasing the around, you know, the
peasants with their torches and pitchforks, and I would be getting away way, until I
became lucid and so, well, I'd just fly above them, that was a solution. But then was it?
After my fourth lucid dream I had a dream in which I was escaping in the same kind of
manner by climbing down a skyscraper, and I realised I'm dreaming, so I fly away.

And then I wake up in an audience, and there a lecturer is telling about Stephen's dream
and saying, 'Well, it was good that Stephen realised that because it was a dream he could
fly. But too bad, he didn't realise that because it was a dream, there was nothing to flee.'
And then when I woke up and thought about this, of course, this doesn't make sense, to
use lucidity to escape better. That's like saying, all right, I become lucid, I know it's a
dream, a dream can't hurt me, so it's like running out of the movie theatre in fear of your
life because of what's going on the screen. So I said; in the future I'm going to face
whenever I find. If it's something frightening I will approach it. If there is a conflict I'll
resolve it, and that's what I'm going to do with the lucid dreams.

And then having done that I found that the nightmare frequency went from 40% of the
lucid dreams at the beginning were like that, starting with anxiety, and it went down to
20%, and then down to 2% and less. And basically what I found is that by being able to
approach what it was that I was afraid of or what I was avoiding in my lucid dream I
could resolve the conflict, and then somehow improve my degree of self-integration. So
it became an important inner therapy for me, as a means of a personal exploration and
discovery of what I was beyond the self.

Lynne Malcolm: But physicist Paul Davies points out that having a lucid dream can
sometimes be confusing and a bit disturbing if you don't understand what they are.
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Paul Davies: I think when some people have them they get remembered as if these are
real experiences. And of course very famous ones are the so-called alien abduction stories
and all the variations around that, where somebody will say, well, I went to bed, I was in
my bed and in the middle of the night I felt that there was an intruder or some malevolent
presence in the room and I woke to see standing at the end of the bed this monster or this
weird entity, and then I felt myself floating and levitating, and then I woke up and I was
back in bed and my partner was next to me and never noticed a thing. These are presented
as real experiences. Well, this seems to me absolutely straightforward lucid dream type
stories, and it's got all the components, like the flying, the levitation aspect, the tactile
sensations, the sense of malevolent presence. So a lot of my lucid dreams begin with me
thinking there's an intruder in the house, and that somehow induces the lucid dream. If
I wasn't a scientist I might well be reporting those as some sort of alien experience, close
encounter of the fourth kind.

Lynne Malcolm: Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Science at
Arizona State University.

Stephen La Berge feels strongly that we still need to work on making lucid dreaming
more accessible to a wider range of people. But with the new brain scanning technologies
now available, the future of lucid dreaming research is quite exciting.

Stephen La Berge: Now you can get much more information out of what's going on in
the brain. And so that knowledge is a very important element in what I'd like to see in
combination with an equivalent advance in the inner observational powers. And there
has been a growth of research in the past 15 years in consciousness. So I'm looking
forward to more trained neuroscientists taking on this kind of study, because I think it
has great potentials. The essential idea, by the way, for most people though of why have
a second state of consciousness? Isn't the waking state enough? And the answer can be
seen in a quotation from the poet Goethe. Goethe was observing about the importance of
a second language, and he said that 'who knows no second tongue has for one his own',
which is to say that if you don't know a foreign language, your own language is foreign
to you, you don't know what a language is. In the same way exactly, if you don't know a
second state of consciousness, the first state of consciousness, your everyday waking state
of consciousness is unconscious to you, you don't know what it is to be in a state of
consciousness. So lucid dreaming provides that extra perspective that gives a much
broader view of the possibilities of life.

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Lynne Malcolm: Dr Stephen La Berge, psychophysiologist from Stanford University and

founder of the Lucidity Institute.

Head to the All in the Mind website for links and book information relating to today's
program, and sign up for the All in the Mind podcast if you haven't already.

And we'd love to hear about your most powerful dreaming experiences. You can send
us an email via the All in the Mind website, tweet using the hashtag #rndreams, and join
us on Facebook to share comments and photos relating to the role dreams play in your
life. We'll be sharing your contributions on social media and in feature articles on the RN
website.

Production by Diane Dean and Judy Rapley.

I'm Lynne Malcolm, join me again next week, bye for now.

Guests

Stephen La Berge
Founder, Lucidity Institute
Paul Davies AM
Director of the Beyond Center, Arizona State University
Nano Daemon
Author: 'Fate or destiny?'

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Copyright : Australian Broadcasting Corporation

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