Benefits of Lucid Dreaming

Michelle Carr: A lucid dream is just a dream where you become aware of the fact that you're dreaming while you're still asleep. You just, you notice something bizarre in the dream and you kind of question for a second. You "Think this is real, this is really happening to me right now?" And then you realize, "No, this is a dream I'm dreaming."

ALICE: Michelle Carr is a dream engineer. She studies sleep and dreaming as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester in New York. There are descriptions of dreams and being aware of your dreams dating back to Aristotle.

Stephen LaBerge: 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; 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.  

ALICE: That’s Dr. Stephen LaBerge, a psycho-physiologist and pioneer in the scientific study of lucid dreaming. His groundbreaking experiments in the 70s while at Stanford University are still referenced today.

Stephen LaBerge: 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.

ALICE: Here’s a fun fact: Most people can recall at least one lucid dream, and perhaps one in 10 has them regularly.

Michelle Carr: Lucid dreaming happens most frequently in REM sleep, but especially in the morning, and especially in like naps, for example, these are states that are, seem to be more aroused. So sometimes people say it's like a hybrid state between sleep and wakefulness. 

ALICE: That hybrid state of lucid dreaming can feel like our very own virtual reality. 

Michelle Carr: I think actually we're always conscious while dreaming, so we're always having a conscious, subjective experience while we're dreaming and even throughout the night. The difference when you become lucid is that you become almost self-conscious, you you're aware of what you're experiencing. So that seems to have to do with perhaps areas of the brain that become more active when you were lucid dreaming, compared to when you were in what's called non lucid dreams. So most dreams, we don't question what we're experiencing. We don't realize we're dreaming. We just kind of go about interacting with the dream as if it's completely normal waking life without thinking about it. But when we're lucid, we, we become aware, we become self-conscious, self-aware, reflective. And it seems like it's areas of kind of the frontal areas of the brain that are associated with attention, with controlling our thoughts and controlling our cognitions, that these become more active when we're lucid.

ALICE: For fans of the Christopher Nolan film Inception, you get what a lucid dream is. While we don’t have that sleep machine the characters used in the film, we have ways of teaching ourselves techniques to lucid dream. 

Michelle Carr: Yeah, the main techniques, have been around for a while, a lot kind of developed Stephen LaBerge, some other researchers. One of them is called reality checking or reality testing, and it's really developing a habit in waking life of questioning, whether you were awake or dreaming. So, you know, maybe 10 times throughout the day, you remind yourself to look around and to observe your environment, to pay attention to what you're experiencing and just ask yourself, "Is this a dream? Am I dreaming right now?" And really kind of pay attention to what, what your sensory experiences are, is anything bizarre happening? And just kind of call that into question. So, this habit can then spill over into your dreams. And you'll start to ask yourself in your dream, if you're dreaming and realize, "Yeah, this is a dream." 

ALICE: Just checking in with everyone… are you listening to this in the morning? If so, pinch yourself and ask, "Is this a dream?"  "Am I dreaming right now?"

Michelle Carr: Lucid dreams tend to happen more in a more aroused, REM sleep. And so they often happen in the morning. There's a technique called wake back to bed and you wake yourself up maybe after five hours of sleep, or just generally a couple hours before you have to wake up in the morning. Good. And you just stay awake for like 10 minutes to 30 minutes, and it just increases kind of your arousal levels so that when you go back to sleep, you're in this more activated state. And what you can do while you're awake for that 10 to 30 minutes is set an intention.

Michelle Carr: Another state that I haven't really talked about is just the, the sleep onset state. So not even going fully into a nap, but just allowing yourself to kind of dip in and out of sleep. That's something that can be used, during the day or for creativity. So one technique is like, you're, you kind of, you can sit in like a comfortable chair, but hold like 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 and it will wake you up and you can do this over and over again, just kind of dipping into sleep and waking up. And 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.

So you can just think about them as you're, as you're doing this. And you'll start to, I don't know, to kind of like weave an interaction with, with your creative kind of subconscious through this sleep onset state. And so, so that's something that's been studied. And Adam Horowitz at MIT developed kind of a technology for going in and out of the sleep onset date. And he saw some evidence that, people are able to generate more creative ideas through, through the sleep onset state rather than just through waking thought. So that's like a technique that could be used by people.

ALICE: Ok listeners, some of you are thinking that you never remember your dreams. Like you, I want to know if there are ways to help recall your dreams? 

Michelle Carr: Lucid dreaming and a lot of kind of dream practices revolve around paying attention to paying attention to what we're experiencing during sleep and paying attention to as we wake up. So just as soon as you wake up in the morning, if you just try to recall exactly what you were experiencing, just like a second before, you might, when you first start doing this, if you're not someone who typically remembers dreams, it might be something very short. Like "I just remember I was, I felt a little bit emotional or negative about something," and that might be all you remember, but over time it seems like that attention builds. Keeping a dream diary or just, just making, even setting the intention to remember your dreams can increase dream recall.

ALICE: Part of keeping a dream diary is to put recognize your dream signs. 

Michelle Carr: A lot of us have kind of recurring elements in our dreams, and these are maybe themes or elements or characters that you wouldn't experience in waking life. And so you can use these as your own personal dream signs. Like for me, for example, I fly sometimes in my dreams and that's definitely not something that I can do in normal waking life. Learning like all of these different signs and dreams, can lead to lucidity, because it leads to the habit of, of paying attention and questioning what you're experiencing.

ALICE: We may one day be able to engineer our own dreams as a therapy. 

Michelle Carr: As the, the research develops and as more and more people pay attention to it in research, it will make its way into kind of consumer technology as well that people might start dream tracking for example, and you can see how your emotional wellbeing is fluctuating and, and see what your dreams are, are kind of pointing to you, current concerns that you have in your life, but things that you should maybe think about. So I think, I hope, I hope dream tracking kind of becomes a part of, of sleep tech and sleep health and the future.

ALICE: We’re excited for the future of sleep tech too! Thank you, Michelle and Stephen, for encouraging us to dream more!

That’s it for this mad tea party. Join us for our other episodes on lucid dreaming as we explore conscious in the waking state and the therapeutic possibilities of dreaming.