Implications for Research on Sleep and Cognition

The fact of lucid dreaming presents conceptual difficulties for certain traditional beliefs about "sleep" and presumed limitations of dream mentation. In a certain sense, the anomalous appearance of lucid dreaming parallels that of the state that has been called "paradoxical sleep." The discovery of REM sleep required the expansion of our concept of sleep. The evidence associating lucid dreaming with REM sleep reviewed above would seem to require a similar expansion of our concept of dreaming, and a clarification of our concept of sleep. 

Fenwick et al. (1984) showed that a subject was able to perceive and respond to environmental stimuli (electrical shocks) without awakening from his lucid dream. This result raises a theoretical issue: if we take perception of the external world to be the essential criterion for wakefulness (LaBerge et al., 1981a; see above) then it would seem that Worsley must have been at least partially awake. On the other hand, when environmental stimuli are incorporated into dreams without producing any subjective or physiological indications of arousal, it appears reasonable to speak of the perception as having occurred during sleep. 

Furthermore, it may be possible, as LaBerge (1980c) has suggested, for one sense to remain functional and 'awake' while others fall 'asleep.' Similarly, Antrobus, Antrobus and Fisher (1965) argued "...that the question -- awake or asleep -- is not a particularly useful one. Even though we have two discrete words -- sleep and wakefulness -- this does not mean that the behavior associated with the words can be forced into two discrete categories. ... not only do sleeping and waking shade gradually into one another but there is only limited agreement among the various physiological and subjective operations that discriminate between sleeping and waking. At any given moment, all systems of the organism are not necessarily equally asleep or awake." (pp. 398-399) 

As long as we continue to consider wakefulness and sleep as a simple dichotomy, we will lie in a Procrustian bed that is bound at times to be most uncomfortable. There must be degrees of being awake just as there are degrees of being asleep (i.e. the conventional sleep stages). Before finding our way out of this muddle, we will probably need to characterize a wider variety of states of consciousness than those few currently distinguished (e.g. 'dreaming,' 'sleeping,' 'waking,' and so on). 

It may be helpful to consider lucidity from a cognitive developmental perspective. According to Piaget (1927), children pass through three stages of understanding of the concept "dream." In the first stage, they believe that dreams take place in the same external world as all other experiences. In the second stage, children treat dreams as if they were partially external and partially internal. This transitional stage gives way to the third stage in which children recognize the dream is entirely internal in nature, a purely mental experience. 

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