ALICE: Hi I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI, and I’m always in a state of wonder. Here’s a question I’ve been asking myself: Are you conscious when you are dreaming?
Stephen LaBerge: 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: Dr. Stephen LaBerge is a pioneer in the scientific study of lucid dreaming. In the 70s, his groundbreaking laboratory work at Stanford University mapped mind/body relationships during the dream state.
Stephen LaBerge: Our first scientific work was to proof that lucid dreaming did happen – by means of these 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; this left-right-left-right eye movement, two dozen, wake the subject up “what were you dreaming. He says “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, you’d be able to – by moving your eyes in a certain pattern – have something show up on the polygraph record, later at the computer – 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.
Michelle Carr: Dreaming and lucid dreaming is kind of, it's like an altered state of consciousness. So, it's the way that we think and the way that we experience in that, in that state, it, it's different in some ways to normal waking thoughts. So we have access, it seems highly creative.
ALICE: Michelle Carr is a researcher and dream engineer in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester in New York.
Michelle Carr: One expression is "I am the dream and the dream is me" because you're both, you're, you're acting into the dream as yourself, but you're surprised by all of this amazing content that that's created before you, even though it's created by you.
Stephen LaBerge: it’s a very tricky issue to say “is the dream world real?”, or “more real?” or “does it have a different reality than the ‘physical’ world?”. When we say that this bottle is real. What we mean is that other real objects can interact with it. Such as this item – I tap it against it. Suppose this were a dream, here I’d have a dream pen and dream bottle, tap it against the other, “ah, it looks like they’re both real”. Experientially they’re both real and if we talk about when a person has an experience they’re really having an experience and if you take ‘experience’ to be a part of reality – then the answer has to be: dreams are real in the sense that they’re experiences which have a kind of reality themselves.
ALICE: Dream engineers like Michelle Carr continue the work of Stephen LaBerge, studying ways we can program or direct the content of our dreams.
Michelle Carr: And so, working dreams in like waking imagination, you can start to tap into that where rather than just thinking and directing your thoughts, I know it sounds unusual, but people, so we, we did waking dream work studies in swanzey and, and people are often like surprised at how quickly, you know, I'll just say, close your eyes. And just imagine that you're not you in the dream, you're a different character. And they'll say, "Can I, can I really do that?" And I say, "Yeah, just, just imagine you're a different character." And they imagine they're a different character. And then they say, "Oh my gosh, the dream looks completely different now." And it's like, as soon as you tap into it, you realize your imagination is it's always there. It's always ready to be active. Um, but you just have to allow it, you know, rather than trying to control it, which is what we're often doing in waking thought, we're trying to control what we're thinking of and find new ideas through, um, through control rather than just like, examining and letting it arise. So I think that, that technique of creative thinking and creative imagination is definitely something that, that can be learned, which is really a cool idea.
ALICE: You can be in a highly creative realm when lucid dreaming. And here’s a tip: try to sing. You will sound great!
Michelle Carr: The relationship between REM sleep and creativity that the REM state neurophysiologically is, is, is highly connected. There's a lot of cortical connectivity going on. So that might be linked to creativity and finding novel ideas and generating insights. Um, and there's been, you know, anecdotal stories of people using lucid dreams for creativity. Um, I had a couple of examples. One thing you should do if you become lucid is, is sing, or try to listen to music, because a lot of times, even if you're not someone who's musical in waking life, you can generate like full orchestral music and like, hear your voice will sound beautiful. And it's, it can be a really, really, um, creative and aesthetic experience that you can have in lucid dreams. And even just the visual aspect of lucid dreaming sometimes, entire environments, like a field of flowers or forests can appear before your eyes. And that can be, it can be creative, but it can also be, empowering because you realize that you are naturally a creative generative, expressive, um, I don't know, person that you have access to this. So that can be really exciting too.
ALICE: Need a creative boost? Who needs psychedelics? You can practice lucid dreaming right now.
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. Um, that's something that can be used during the day or for creativity. 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, kind of like weave an interaction with, with your creative kind of subconscious through this sleep onset state. So that's something that's been studied. 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, um, 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: When lucid dreaming, we become self-conscious. This can be a powerful tool for controlling our inner world.
Stephen LaBerge: The potentials of the dream world are the potentials of your mind. Each one of us are experiencing the world through a construction of our minds which – consciousness is a model of the world and our brains are figuring – what’s going on here, who is this? A person? What are they saying to me? And what we’re talking about offering people is to learn how to make the most of their own inner worlds – to change them in whatever way they want to. Lucid dreaming would be close to the idea of the 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” – there’s light and people. The light bouncing off my face limits what you’re able to see. It’s hard to see my eyes as red when they’re mainly blue. Because of the sensory input. If you’re dreaming you could look at the color of my eyes – it could change as you look to whatever colors – there’s no external structure that organizes the experience. So we have much more freedom in the dream world than in this world.
ALICE: I don’t know about you, but I have my spoon ready to practice lucid dreaming! Thank you Michelle Carr and Stephen LaBerge for helping us engineer our dreams.
To learn more, listen to our other episodes on lucid dreaming and the therapeutic possibilities of dream tech. Check out our books: “Tuning into Frequency” and “Hacking Immortality”, available everywhere books are sold.
And join us down the rabbit hole at Alice in Futureland dot com. We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned and keep wandering.
Share this post