Lucid Dreaming: a State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking and Non-Lucid Dreaming
THE GOAL OF THE STUDY WAS TO SEEK ELECTRO-PHYSIOLOGICAL CORRELATES OF LUCID DREAMING. OUR WORKING HYPOTHESIS WAS THAT THE BRAIN must change state if the mind changes state.
Lucid dreaming is the experience of achieving conscious awareness of dreaming while still asleep. Lucid dreams are generally thought to arise from non-lucid dreams in REM sleep.1
An obstacle to experimental studies of lucid dreams is that spontaneous lucidity is quite rare. However, subjects can be trained to become lucid via pre-sleep autosuggestion.1–5 Subjects often succeed in becoming lucid when they tell themselves, before going to sleep, to recognize that they are dreaming by noticing the bizarre events of the dream. An experimental advantage is that subjects can signal that they have become lucid by making a sequence of voluntary eye movements. In combination with retrospective reports confirming that lucidity was attained and that the eye movement signals were executed, these voluntary eye movements can be used as behavioral indication of lucidity in the sleeping, dreaming subject, as evidenced by EEG and EMG tracings of sleep. Such signal-verified lucid dreams, in which dreamers not only realize that they are currently dreaming, but are also able to deliberately control their own behavior, enabling them to signal lucidity by making prearranged patterns of eye movements, constitute lucid control dreams. The current study, thus, targets lucid control dreams.
Because lucidity can be self-induced, it constitutes not only an opportunity to study the brain basis of conscious states but also demonstrates how a voluntary intervention can change those states.