Becoming a Lucid Dreamer

Surveys have show that about 50 percent of people (and in some cases more) have had at least one lucid dream in their lives. (see, for example, Blackmore 1982; Gackenbach and LaBerge 1988;
Green 1968.) Of course surveys are unreliable in that many people may not understand the question. In particular, if you have never had a lucid dream, it is easy to misunderstand what is meant by the term. So overestimates might be expected.  Beyond this, it does not seem that surveys can find out much.  There are no very consistent differences between lucid dreamers and others in terms of age, sex, education, and so on (Green 1968; Gackenbach and LaBerge 1988).

For many people, having lucid dream is fun, and they want to learn how to have more or to induce them at will. One finding from early experimental work was that high levels of physical (and emotional) activity during the day tend to precede lucidity at night. Waking during the night and carrying out some kind of activity before falling asleep again can also encourage a lucid dream during the next REM period and is the basis of some induction techniques.

Many  methods have been  developed (Gackenbach  and  Bosveld 1989; Tart  1988; Price and Cohen  1988).  They roughly fall into  three categories.

One of the best known is LaBerge’s MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming). This is done on waking in the early morning from a dream. You should wake up fully, engage in some activity like
reading or walking about, and then lie down to go to sleep again. Then you must imagine yourself asleep and dreaming, rehearse the dream from which you woke, and remind yourself, “Next time I dream
this I want to remember I’m dreaming.”

A second approach involves constantly reminding yourself to become lucid throughout the day rather than the night. This is based on the idea that we spend most of our time in a kind of waking daze. If we could be more lucid in waking life, perhaps we could be more lucid while dreaming. German psychologist Paul Tholey suggests asking yourself many times every day, “Am I dreaming or not?” This sound easy but is not. It takes a lot of determination and persistence not to forget all about it. For those who do forget,
French researcher Clerc suggests writing a large “C” on your hand (for “conscious”) to remind you (Tholey 1983; Gackenbach and Bosveld 1989).

This kind of method is similar to the age-old technique for increasing awareness by meditation and mindfulness. Advanced practitioners of meditation claim to maintain awareness through a large proportion of their sleep. TM is often claimed to lead to sleep awareness. So perhaps it is not surprising that some recent research finds association between meditation and increased lucidity (Gackenbach and Bosveld 1989).

The third and final approach requires a variety of gadgets.  The idea is to use some sort of external signal to remind people,  while they are actually in REM sleep, that they are dreaming. Hearne first tried spraying water onto sleepers’ faces or hands but found it too unreliable. This sometimes caused them to incorporate water imagery into their dreams, but they rarely became lucid. He eventually decided to use a mild electrical shock to the wrist.  His “dream machine” detects changes in breathingrate (which accompany the onset of REM) and then automatically delivers a shock to the wrist (Hearne 1990).

Meanwhile, in California, LaBerge was rejecting taped voices and vibrations and working instead with flashing lights. The original version was laboratory based and used a personal computer to detect the eye movements of REM sleep and to turn on flashing lights whenever the REMs reached a certain level.  Eventually, however, all the circuitry was incorporated into a pair of goggles. The idea is to put the goggles on at night, and the lights will flash only when you are asleep and dreaming.  The user can even control the level of eye movements at which the lights begin to flash.

The newest version has a chip incorporated into the goggles.  This will not only control the lights but will store data on
eye-movement density during the night and when and for how long the lights were flashing, making fine tuning possible. At the moment, the first users have to join in workshops at LaBerge’s Lucidity Institute and learn how to adjust the settings, but
within a few months he hopes the whole process will be fully automated. (See LaBerge’s magazine, DreamLight.)

LaBerge tested the effectiveness of the Dream Light on 44 subjects who came into the laboratory, most for just one night.  Fifty-five percent had at least one lucid dream this way. The results suggested that this method is about as succesful as MILD, but using the two together is the most effective (LaBerge 1985).