What Can Lucid Dreaming Tell Us About Consciousness? (Part 1)

Can you manipulate your dreams? If so, you’re probably experiencing an interesting phenomenon called lucid dreaming! Lucid dreamers have the ability to become aware that they are dreaming, and sometimes even influence their dreams. For some people, this simply means recognizing that they are asleep, while for others, it could mean having a great deal of control over their unconscious actions. While the idea of lucid dreaming has been around for centuries, scientific advances within the last few decades have increased our understanding of what it means to have a lucid dream and what happens to us when experience them.

Stephen LaBerge is the first scientist to empirically prove the existence of lucid dreaming. His work has developed this technique into a powerful tool for studying mind-body relationships in the dream state, and he has demonstrated the potential for lucid dreaming in the fields of psychotherapy and psychosomatic medicine. His books Lucid Dreaming, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, and Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain, have received enormous popular interest. He is the founder of The Lucidity Institute an organization that promotes research into lucid dreaming, and offers courses on how to achieve a lucid dream.

Lucid dreaming provides a test case for theories of dreaming. For example, whether or not 'loss of self-reflective awareness' is characteristic of dreaming, it is not necessary to dreaming. The fact that lucid dreamers can remember to perform predetermined actions and signal to the laboratory allows them to mark the exact time of particular dream events, allowing experiments to establish precise correlations between physiology and subjective reports, and enabling the methodical testing of hypotheses.

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