🍄 Conscious Dreamin'

Lucid adventures in the dream state.

Oct 13, 2023

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Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. If you must sleep through a third of your life, why should you sleep through your dreams too? Great question. In 2000 we decided to seek the answer from the world’s foremost expert on lucid dreaming, Dr. Stephen LaBerge.

Dr. Stephen LaBerge received his PhD in psychophysiology in 1980 from Stanford University where he studied consciousness, dreaming and waking for 25 years, and founded The Lucidity Institute in 1988. In addition to numerous scientific articles on lucid dreaming, he has published many books on the topic, including the classics “Lucid Dreaming” and “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming,” which have been published into eighteen languages. Widely regarded as the father of lucid dreaming, LaBerge continues his research as an independent scholar and scientist. He conducts research proving the existence of lucid dreaming, demonstrates that it is a learnable skill, and devotes his life to making this extraordinary state of consciousness widely available, with the belief that it transforms lives by providing direct experience of higher consciousness.

“Dreams are real while they last, can we say more of life? Dream research is a wonderful field. All you do is sleep for a living.”—Stephen LaBerge

But where you go and what you do in sleep is the playground of the lucid dream state—and it is becoming a trainable skill. In the field of oneirology (dream research), a lucid dream is a type of dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming while they are dreaming. Lucid dreamers have described it as like directing a movie in your dream—everything seems vivid and real, and you have some control on how the action unfolds. In previous publications, ALICE explored the new dream tech possibilities in “Can We Engineer Our Dreams?” and how to practice lucid dreaming in “When We Are Asleep in This World, We are Awake in Another.” Researchers have proposed that dreaming serves a role in memory consolidation, emotional regulation, and problem-solving, but we had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. LaBerge, the dreamworld’s frontier thinker, who addresses consciousness, the dream state and the idea of our extended mind.

The following interview transcript explores how lucid dreaming lets us make use of a new awareness.

The Lucid Inception

“Impossible, how can it happen that you’d be in a dream and know that you’re dreaming? After all, dreaming means being unconscious—being asleep.

So, how can you be conscious of what your state is? The trouble is that was a very loose sense of consciousness. It is true that while we are asleep we normally are not conscious of what is going on around us, in the sense we can’t report on it. But there is nothing to say that we might not be conscious of our processes, inner states—in fact, it’s the truth, we can. Our first scientific work was to prove that lucid dreaming did happen—by eye movement signals. Essentially there had been correspondences shown from earlier research that when people have a particular eye movement from Rapid Eye Movement sleep and you wake them up and ask them what they were dreaming—it’ll correspond to the eye movements pattern, dream imagery. For example, you observe this left-right-left-right eye movement, about 12 times the eyes are moving in the subject, and when you wake them up to ask ‘what were you dreaming?’ They say, “I’m standing on the side of a ping pong table watching a very long volley.” So that made it obvious that under certain circumstances, that by moving your eyes in a certain pattern, we’d be able to have something show up on the polygraph record at the computer—and that could be used as a sign to the outside world, that the person having the dream at the time, knew it was a dream. How can I prove that to a skeptical scientist who has never had the experience, who doesn’t remember his dreams? The answer was, in my dream I can look left-right like that and if we were measuring my eye movements on the sleeping body it would show a left-right eye movement.

When people have lucid dreams, they’re still in REM sleep. The brain is more activated than it is on the average, but it’s still relatively more activated brain than usual. The research we’re doing with mapping the brain with multiple channels of EEG to find out which parts of the brain are involved in the functional system that determines, equivalent to reflective conscious or reflective awareness, that lets us say ‘this is a dream.’ Or ‘here I am living the life with the habits I have and I want to try something new.’ If we can find which brain areas are involved in that, perhaps we can enhance their activity with biofeedback or some other mechanism which will then make lucid dreaming easier to achieve. I can see in the future we would have methods for both inducing lucid dreams with technology plus a psycho-technology—mental practice plus biofeedback elements and other neuroscience developments. Something like VR where we put our focus on the interface with the brain… able to run the programs that we want—namely, general purpose dreams or without external constraint, reflective consciousness. And then maybe perhaps to have artificial sensory input as requested.

To ask, “what good is lucid dreaming?” is to ask “what good is life?”
Depends on you—what you want to be doing with your life.

The potentials of the dream world are the potentials of your mind. The way I’d put it, lucid dreaming would be close to the idea of Holodeck from Star Trek. It’s a general-purpose simulating machine. That’s what consciousness does, it simulates reality. But normally while we’re awake those simulations are constrained by sensory input—by the reality principle that there’s light and people. So, we have much more freedom in the dream world than in this world.

We have the constraints of society, as well as physics of what can happen and what we can experience. In the dream world, the only necessary constraints of what is conceivable is what you can imagine. So, what we’ve got is something like a tool that any person can use for whatever they’re doing for their lives. If your biggest concern is giving this next speech, or writing this next article, or making your next film—that’s where you want help to get the most creativity in it to perform your best. If you are interested in self understanding, personal development, discovering more about yourself, your spiritual path, etc., that’s what you’d want to do with the dream state.”

Creative Dreaming

Today’s dream engineers and researchers leverage the groundbreaking research of Dr. LaBerge, taking us deeper into not only tracking, but training in the dream state. In a study led by Kathleen Esfahany and Adam Haar Horowitz at MIT Media Lab, researchers investigated how guiding dreaming at sleep onset (the transition from wakefulness to sleep known as hypnagogia) could enhance creativity. They found that participants who underwent a nap with targeted dream incubation (TDI)—a method used to guide dreams towards a particular theme—performed more creatively than participants who napped without any intervention and participants who stayed awake.

The sleep onset state is often characterized as containing spontaneous, vivid dreams, suggesting that it could be an ideal state for creative idea generation. The researchers found that dreaming of a topic during sleep onset is directly related to increased post-sleep creativity on that topic.

You can practice your sleep onset even during the day—and is particularly useful when you get that creative block or brain fog moment. Michelle Carr, dream engineer and researcher at University of Rochester, explained a simple exercise to ALICE on how to initiate the sleep onset state using a spoon, a plate and a chair:

“You can sit in like a comfortable chair but hold a spoon or something in your hand over like a plate on the ground. So as soon as you fall into sleep, you'll drop the spoon and it will make a noise to wake you up.”—Michelle Carr, dream engineer and researcher.

It helps to think of what you are working on as you are preparing for that micro-nap. Dr. Carr explains “what you could do is, say you're working on a story and you want to interact with one of the characters in your story to develop the story. You can just think about them as you're doing this. And you'll start to kind of like weave an interaction with your creative kind of subconscious through this sleep onset state. And that's something that's been studied.”

🎧 listen to Dr. Carr here or 👁‍🗨 watch here.

MIT researchers cautioned that not all dreams are creative, but their study did show that an incubated dream about a particular topic may improve post-sleep creative performance on tasks related to that topic. Participants who napped with TDI performed 43% more creatively (in terms of the Creativity Index) than participants who napped without incubation. Additionally, the group which napped with TDI performed 78% more creatively than those who stayed awake without incubation.

But Is It Just a Dream?

Researching dreams are more than understanding imaginary, altered states. By identifying the brain activity in lucid dreams—that state of heightened awareness and sense of agency the dreamer experiences—neuroscientists and psychologists are gaining more clues in the quest to answer the burning question: What is human consciousness? In our ALICE interview, Dr. LaBerge explained his view of consciousness—and the experience of it.

“Common sense believes that we look out through the windows of our eyes and see the world and there’s nothing going on—just passive experience; there’s the world out there and with tricks, mirrors, or something, you just see it. But what modern psychology and ancient Tibetan Buddhism tell us is that process of seeing anything is a constructive process, it’s a projection—the mind guessing what is there. That can be best demonstrated with illusions—the blind spot and various psychological figures that show you what you’re seeing is not literally what is there, but what you think is there. Everything we see in our consciousness, it’s not just seeing, but hearing, feeling, etc., is already interpreted—it already means something.

So, we’re trying to use these brains to understand consciousness itself and it’s very difficult, that’s not what they were designed for. But just to make clear this point of what I mean by our consciousness being our model of the world; when we see something or feel something we are projecting into the world some particular experience. So, if I feel with my fingertips the texture of this box and compare it with the texture of the table and this cloth—I can distinguish three different textures. And you say well, that’s because I’m doing it with the fingertip—there’s nerves there, that’s what’s doing it. But suppose I take this tool here that extends my reach—I can now tell the difference between that texture, this one, and this. What do I have at the end of this pencil eraser? No nerves there. So, then it’s because the vibrations get transmitted through the hand, yes. But I feel the texture over there. The answer is:

Out there is your mind—this whole world we’re used to calling the physical world is our mind, it’s our mental model, our representation of space, time, all the properties of it.

We know when somebody loses an arm, they feel the arm is still there, the phantom limb. Why? Anyone can look and see that person doesn’t have an arm. But where that person feels their arm is in the brain. Part of the brain—a motor, sensory representation of our bodies—that’s what we experience as ourselves. So, when I feel like I’m rubbing my hands together here—where I’m feeling that, with what I’m feeling that, is my brain. Now where it is, is actually in my mind—projected as if it’s in the external world. But that external world is the mind.”

Thank you Dr. LaBerge and the many researchers for pursuing the dream.

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland books
🎧 Alice in Futureland podcasts
🎧 Benefits of Lucid Dreaming with Michelle Carr, dream engineer & Dr. Stephen LaBerge, psychophysiologist specializing in the scientific study of lucid dreaming (from the archives)
🎧 Creativity, Consciousness and Lucid Dreaming with Michelle Carr, dream engineer & Dr. Stephen LaBerge (from the archives)
🎧 Dream Yourself Well with Michelle Carr & Dr. Stephen LaBerge (from the archives)
👁‍🗨 Practice Your Sleep Onset State with Michelle Carr, dream engineer