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Introduction

STEPHEN LABERGE and JAYNE GACKENBACH

After many years of neglect during the behaviorist period of modem psychology, the past decade has seen the reemergence of interest in consciousness as a topic of legitimate scientific inquiry (Natsoulas, 1978). Researchers interested in con­sciousness as well as sleep and dreaming have naturally turned increasing atten­tion to a new field of study: consciousness during sleep and the phenomenon of lucid dreaming (van Eeden, 1913), in which people are consciously aware that they are dreaming while they are dreaming. Lucid dreamers can apparently be in full possession of their waking faculties (this is the meaning of the adjective lucid) while continuing to dream vividly. Both subjective reports and physiologi­cal evidence indicate that these experiences take place during sound sleep.

While being fully asleep to the external world, lucid dreamers are conscious of and, in a certain sense, are fully awake to their inner worlds. This paradoxical fact challenges traditional beliefs about "sleep" and the presumed limitations of sleep mentation. The discovery of REM sleep (also originally called "paradoxical sleep") required the expansion of our concept of sleep. The evidence associating lucid dreaming with REM sleep seems to require a similar expansion of our concept of dreaming and a clarification of our concepts of sleep and con­sciousness.

This introduction will provide an outline and orientation to the book and the field of lucid dreaming. The field is very young, and much of what is presented here should be regarded as speculative. Consequently, much of this book is closer to a record of works in progress than a collection of final and definitive statements. The book is divided into four sections that describe a variety of approaches to lucid dreaming, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

STEPHEN LABERGE • Department of Psychology, Stanford, CA 94305. JAYNE GACKEN-BACH • Department of Psychology, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0505.

J. Gackenbach et al. (eds.), Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain© Plenum Press, New York 1988

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The first section deals with the historical, anthropological, philosophical, and religious perspectives on lucid dreaming in several different cultural con­texts. The significance attributed to dreams and lucid dreams varies tremen­dously with the assumptions of the culture in question. Stephen LaBerge surveys lucid dreaming in Western literature, tracing the changing view of lucid dreams during the development of Western culture, from the fourth century B.C. to the mid-1960s. His review reveals that lucid dreaming has been known in the West at least since the time of Aristotle but remained an academic curiosity until very recently.

We often find well-developed systems of applied psychology in the East in areas we in the West are just beginning to explore. Lucid dreaming is no excep­tion. In "Lucid Dreams in Tibetan Buddhism," George Gillespie discusses lucid dreaming in the literature of Tibetan Buddhist meditation. Remarkably, for a thousand years, Tibetan Buddhists have been practicing a form of yoga aimed at the maintenance of full waking consciousness during sleep and the control of the dream state.

Sometimes, however, it seems we find it all too easy to believe in the marvelous ways of the East. The writings of Kilton Stewart led many Westerners to believe the Malaysian Senoi tribe had a widely cultivated proficiency in dream control and that the emphasis on dreams in their culture was responsible for their peaceful way of life. Robert K. Dentan's chapter, "Lucidity, Sex, and Horror in Senoi Dreamwork," suggests that this is a misconception. Dentan notes that "recent publications have made it plain that much of the 'Senoi' ethnography with which Western dreamworkers are familiar is of dubious reliability." He points out that, although the Senoi do place a high value on dreams, dream control expertise in the culture is the province of the few rather than the many.

The second section of the book presents empirical approaches to the study of lucid dreaming. In 1969, Charles T. Tart reprinted Frederik van Eeden's (1913) classic essay on lucid dreaming in Altered States a/Consciousness, giving many their first exposure to the concept of lucid dreaming. Part II begins with an updated version of Tart's "From Spontaneous Event to Lucidity: A Review of Attempts to Consciously Control Nocturnal Dreaming" (1979). Tart discusses dreaming and lucid dreaming from a systems perspective and reviews studies using, among other techniques, various forms of suggestions to affect the content of dreams, including overt presleep and posthypnotic suggestions. He concludes that lucidity may present the greatest potential for the control of dreams.

Lucid dreaming has been shown to be a leamable skill (LaBerge, 1980; Tholey, 1983). However, as with all skills, the ease with which it is learned varies with the individual. For the purpose of laboratory investigation of the lucid dream state and to make any potential applications of lucid dreaming practical, it would be desirable for subjects to be able to have lucid dreams on demand. Consequently, there has been great interest in developing methods of inducing the lucid dream state reliably. In the chapter, "Lucid Dream Induction: An

INTRODUCTION 3

Empirical Evaluation," Robert F. Price and David B. Cohen present a the­oretical framework based on the concept of duality of thought, which they apply to lucid dreaming. After reviewing presleep, physiological, and dream-content conditions associated with lucid dream initiation, Price and Cohen divide induc­tion techniques into categories and examine them in detail. They conclude that "lucid dreaming appears to be an experience widely available to the highly motivated. "

Additional research on lucid dream induction has been conducted since the Price and Cohen chapter was written. Sheila Purcell has found that in a com­parison of the effectiveness of a hypnotic induction to a waking cue (i.e., a wristband worn by the subjects during the day to remind them of the intention to recognize when they are dreaming) that the latter was more successful in induc­ing dream lucidity (A. Moffitt, personal communication to J. G., June 1987). Jayne Gackenbach and her colleagues in Iowa, building on Henry Reed's (1977) finding of a positive relationship between the practice of meditation and subse­quent dream lucidity, have found a significantly higher incidence of lucid dreams among the practitioners of transcendental meditation relative to non meditating controls (Gackenbach, Cranson, & Alexander, 1986). And, recent findings sug­gest that a device developed by LaBerge, using light as a lucidity cue given to subjects during REM sleep, may be effective for inducing lucid dreams; in one study more than half of 28 subjects had lucid dreams on their first night in the laboratory (LaBerge, 1987). The work on the problem of reliably inducing lucid dreams continues.

Ten years ago the orthodox view in sleep and dream research was that anecdotal accounts of "lucid" dreams must be somehow spurious. The situation is different today because of laboratory proof of the occurence of lucid dreams during unequivocal REM sleep described in "The Psychophysiology of Lucid Dreaming," by Stephen LaBerge. He characterizes the lucid dream state as being associated with periods of highly activated physiology within the REM state and reviews studies of psychophysiological relationships found during REM lucid dreaming, concluding that lucid dreaming offers great potential as a tool in the study of mind-body relationships.

The next chapter, "Correspondence during Lucid Dreams between Dreamed and Actual Events," by Morton Schatzman, Alan Worsley, and Peter Fenwick, directly addresses the question of the relationship between deliberate actions performed in lucid dreams and their physiological manifestations. Their subject (Worsley) was able to execute a variety of complex dream acts planned before sleep, and observable physiological effects of his dream actions were as predicted. Additionally, he was able in certain circumstances to accurately per­ceive and respond to external stimuli, a fact that demonstrates the difficulty in unambiguously classifying all mental states as either "waking" or "sleep."

Lucid dreams differ in content from nonlucid dreams in one obvious way­as a matter of definition. But the question remains of whether and how dream

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lucidity affects other aspects of dream content. Is the only difference between lucid and nonlucid dreams that in the former dreamers know they are dreaming? Jayne Gackenbach explores this question in "Psychological Content of Lucid versus Nonlucid Dreams." She begins by reviewing past research with dreamer evaluations of the content of lucid and nonlucid dreams and then presents new results, using the Hall and Van de Castle (1966) system of analyzing manifest content. Gackenbach concludes that lucid dreams are more similar to than differ­ent from nonlucid dreams but that there are some significant differences. Lucid dreams are statistically likely to contain more auditory perception and cognitive activities and have fewer characters than nonlucid dreams.

A major procedural consideration not addressed in Gackenbach's work has been brought up by recent findings presented by Price (1987) of a content analysis of a single subject's lucid dreams, pointing out the importance of sepa­rating lucid from nonlucid scenes in a dream sequence. Making this distinction is likely to result in a decrease in similarity between lucid and nonlucid dreams.

Although most people report having had at least one dream in which they knew they were dreaming, few people have lucid dreams with any regularity. Discovering ways in which those who frequently have lucid dreams differ from those who do not could reveal something of the nature of the mental processes involved in lucidity as well as the potential benefits of lucid dreaming to the individual. In the last chapter of Part II, "Individual Differences Associated with Lucid Dreaming," Thomas Snyder and Jayne Gackenbach approach the question of individual differences and lucid dream frequency by examining four sets of variables from different functional domains of psychology. Correlations were found between the incidence of dream lucidity and classical personality mea­sures, but this line of inquiry proved less productive than the consideration of the spatial skills of the dreamers. Snyder and Gackenbach review Witkin's model of psychological differentiation, from which the construct of field independence is derived, and find numerous parallels between it and the individual differences found to be associated with lucid dreaming ability. They interpret their widely ranging findings as generally supporting the model of the gifted lucid dreamer as field independent, relying on internal rather than external cues in perceptual and spatial judgments.

The third part discusses applications of lucid dreaming to self-growth and therapy and includes two personal accounts of lucid dreaming.

In "A Model for Lucidity Training as a Means of Self-Healing and Psycho­logical Growth," Paul Tholey argues that the usual nonlucid dream state should be regarded as "a form of consciousness disorder" and that the mere induction of lucid dreaming is "a step towards healing." Tholey considers lucid dreaming an important tool in therapy because it allows the dreamer to "find his own way to the unconscious and its integration into the personality" without the need for interpretation by the therapist. He notes that in lucid dreams, unconscious con­flicts can be resolved through conscious behavior without the dreamer needing to

INTRODUCTION 5

understand the root of the conflict or the logic behind the dream. The basis of Tholey's technique is nonaggressive, courageous interaction with hostile dream figures. He advises that, for the purposes of self-growth, we should seek out threatening situations in our lucid dreams and reports that the majority of clients treated with his lucid dreaming therapy experienced "positive effects on their subsequent dreaming and waking lives. "

In the next chapter, Patricia Garfield, Peter Fellows, Gordon Halliday, and Judith R. Malamud individually present their ideas on clinical applications of lucid dreaming. In her introductory comments, Garfield lists 10 different poten­tial benefits of lucid dreams and proposes that lucidity can enable one to deliber­ately draw on the creative power of dreams. Fellows outlines a therapeutic approach and introduces his concept ofthe "dream speaker"; Halliday describes his use of lucidity as a treatment for nightmares; and finally, Judith R. Malamud offers a model for therapy using lucidity training in waking and dreams.

An important source of information about the phenomenology of lucid dreaming is individuals who have kept careful records of their experiences over an extended period of time. In "Without a Guru: An Account of My Lucid Dreaming," George Gillespie describes some of his personal experimentation within lucid dreams and their philosophical and religious significance to him. Gillespie's material derives from 435 lucid dreams he recorded over a 9-year period. He provides a unique account of his experiences with conscious "dream­less sleep" that followed his study of the Upanishads while teaching in India.

In the final chapter of Part III, "Personal Experiences in Lucid Dreaming," Alan Roy Worsley, the first person to signal from a lucid dream, describes his laboratory and home experiments and relates his childhood and adolescent expe­riences with lucid dreaming. He has had thousands of lucid dreams in his 35 years of personal experimentation; here he focuses on the results of a fascinating variety of experiments testing his capacities for voluntary control of dream content.

The fourth section of this book presents theoretical implications of lucid dreaming in several related areas. First are two chapters treating the controversial relationship of lucid dreams and out-of-body (OBE) experiences. LaBerge (1985) proposed that OBEs were hallucinated dream experiences misinterpreted as reality and warned that a strong feeling that "this is real!" is in no way proof of the objective reality of an experience, especially in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. In "Out-of-the-Body Experiences and Dream Lucidity: Em­pirical Perspectives," Harvey J. Irwin searches for an explanation for the statis­tical dependence between the occurrence of OBEs and lucid dreams and for the fact that, though this relationship is highly stable, the overlap in occurrence of the two phenomena is small, accounting for only 12% of the variance in the strongest case. He argues that the nature of the association cannot adequately be explained by hypothesizing a "functional connection" (that many OBEs are initiated from lucid dreams), or by proposing that the two experiences are phe-

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nomenologically equivalent and are simply interpreted differently at different times, or by the idea of a neurophysiological equivalence between the two subjective experiences. He suggests that OBEs and dream lucidity are sometimes reactions to high levels of cortical arousal that can be evoked by stress and that this accounts for the small but stable correlation between the incidence of these phenomena.

The one common factor between OBEs of all kinds, and lucid dreams, which seems to be most often overlooked in comparisons of the states, is the relative lack of sensory input to an awake and activated mind. Thus the cortical arousal theory proposed by Irwin is incomplete without noting that, at the same time as the arousal, the subject experiences loss of contact with his or her normal experience of reality. Sue Blackmore's" A Theory of Lucid Dreams and OBEs" describes how our way of developing cognitive maps and models of reality based on sensory input and our dependence on these models can account for OBEs, dreams, dream lucidity, and other altered states of consciousness. She answers Irwin's question of why the relationship between OBEs and lucid dreams is as small as it is, considering their similarity, by explaining that, though the two states "are both ways of entering a world of thought and memory unconstrained by sensory input and the restrictions of the body," they are constrained in different ways by the availability or lack of input from the senses and memory.

In "Lucid Dreams in Their Natural Series: Phenomenological and Psycho­physiological Findings in Relation to Meditative States," Harry T. Hunt and Robert D. Ogilvie, rather than treating lucid dreaming as an isolated phenomenon of human experience, attempt to place it into a "natural series" composed of related phenomena, including out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, autoscopic hallucinations, hypnagogic autosymbolism, and particularly "mind­fulness" meditation. Hunt and Ogilvie also describe their conception of the role of lucid dreams in experience and review their psychophysiological and phe­nomenological program of research relating lucid dreaming to meditation. Hunt argues here and elsewhere that dream lucidity may represent the sleep equivalent of waking meditation.

A current topic of interest is the relationship of lucid dreaming to other forms of consciousness in the dream state. For example, Gackenbach and col­leagues have recently begun investigations of the relationship of lucid dreaming to "witnessing the dream state," a phenomenon reported as a by-product of meditation in which the meditator is encouraged to "witness" the true nature of the waking, sleeping, and dreaming states. They argue that consciousness is present during sleep in both dream lucidity and dream witnessing but that there are qualitative differences in the role of consciousness in the two phenomena. Preliminary data (Gackenbach, Moorecroft, Alexander, & LaBerge, 1987) sug­gest that dream witnessing may be, psychologically and physiologically, a less active state than lucid dreaming.

INTRODUCTION 7

In "Action and Representation in Ordinary and Lucid Dreams," Wynn Schwartz and Mary Godwyn probe the fundamental question of the difference between waking and dreaming reality from the perspective of descriptive psy­chology. They assert that the central difference between dreaming and waking activity is that, while awake, our action is constrained by the demands of external reality; while we dream, we are limited only by semantic or pictorial constraints of what we can coherently imagine. Others (e.g., LaBerge, 1985) have empha­sized that lucid dreams are less constrained than waking reality but constrained nevertheless by psychophysiological limitations on what the dreamer's brain can do as well as the dreamer's expectations about what is possible. On the other hand, the Tibetan yogis of the dream state assert that complete control of dream­ing is possible, suggesting that the observed limitations of dream control are ultimately mental, not physiological. Which of these points of view is closer to the truth is one of the many questions remaining for future research.

In the final chapter of the volume, "Dream Psychology: Operating in the Dark," Alan Moffitt, Robert Hoffmann, Janet Mullington, Sheila Purcell, Ross Pigeau, and Roger Wells discuss the scientific significance of lucid dreaming for cognitive psychology, suggesting that the self-reflectiveness of lucidity is es­pecially important to understanding the function of dreaming. They point out two important consequences of lucid dreaming: first, the phenomenon of lucid dreaming renders our understanding of what it is to be awake relative rather than absolute, and second, it enables the development of unique forms of perception and intentional action in the dream state, facilitating "the creation of knowledge based on experience and of experience based on knowledge." Moffitt et at. make a strong case for the idea that dream self-reflectiveness and lucid dreaming comprise an essential part of any complete picture of human consciousness.

As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, the field of lucid dream research is still very young; the scientific study of lucid dreaming has been in progress for only a decade. But in that short time, lucid dreaming has shown potential for application in a variety of fields: research on the nature and function of sleep and dreaming, investigation into the relationship of mind and body, studies of the nature of consciousness and cognition, self-improvement, and psychotherapy. With development of more reliable methods of inducing lucid dreams, the accessibility of the lucid dream state will increase, and even more applications will likely be developed. Hopefully, this book will inspire a new generation of researchers to investigate this unique and fascinating state of con­sciousness and help to fulfill Tart's (1979) prediction that "given a few years of development and refinement of techniques for control of the content of dreams, especially the development of lucidity, we may enter an era of deliberate and controlled phenomenological and scientific exploration of dreaming ... which promises great excitement as well as great significance" (p. 264).

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REFERENCES

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Gackenbach, J. I., Moorecroft, W., Alexander, c., & LaBerge, S. (1987). Physiological correlates of "consciousness" during sleep in a single TM practitioner. Sleep Research, 16. 230.

Hall, C., & Van de Castle, R. (1966). The content analysis of dreams. New York: Appleton­Century.

LaBerge, S. (1980). Lucid dreaming as a leamable skill: A case study. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 51, 1039-1042.

LaBerge, S. (1985). Lucid dreaming. Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher. LaBerge, S. (1987, June). Seeing the light in dreams. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the

Association for the Study of Dreams, Arlington, VA. Natsoulas, T. (1978). Consciousness. American Psychologist, 33, 906-914. Price, R. (1987, June). Dream content within the partially lucid REM period: A single subject

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Reed, H. (1977). Meditation and lucid dreaming: A statistical relationship. Sundance Community Dream Journal. 2. 237-238.

Tart, C. T. (1979). From spontaneous event to lucidity: A review of attempts to consciously control nocturnal dreaming. In B. Wolman, M. Ullman, & W. Webb (Eds.), Handbook of dreams: Research. theories. and applications (pp. 226-268). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Tholey, P. (1983). Techniques for inducing and manipulating lucid dreams. Perceptual and Motor Skills. 57. 70-90.

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