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."

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.

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Dark Lucid Dreams