Warming Up | Module 2 | Lesson 6 | Part 1
Lucidity's Neurology
If you were to walk into any big name book shop right now to find something on the topic of lucid dreaming, annoyingly, you won’t find it on the neuroscience aisle.
Lucid dreaming is largely thought of as a spiritual practice or a pseudoscience – but I think it should be considered as something much more than that.
If you were to walk into any big name book shop right now to find something on the topic of lucid dreaming, annoyingly, you won’t find it on the neuroscience aisle.
Lucid dreaming is largely thought of as a spiritual practice or a pseudoscience – but I think it should be considered as something much more than that.
I firmly believe that the topic of lucid dreaming and the benefits that the practice has on mental wellbeing deserves so much more recognition, thanks to it being backed by an abundance of fascinating scientific study, research and evidence.
Earlier in this course, we looked at what Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought about why we dream and what it means to dream – but their focus wasn’t on lucidity. Fast-forward a few decades and we see how lucid dreaming has now become a subject of scientific interest.
Keith Hearne, a British psychologist, designed and conducted an ingenious experiment in 1975 which was based on a clever signal sent from the dream world to the waking world.
Hearne proposed that if a person became aware that they were dreaming, they could communicate this state of awareness to researchers through predetermined eye movements during the REM sleep stages experienced by the test subjects.
In this landmark experiment, Hearne instructed his subject (who was a highly experienced lucid dreamer by the way) to move their eyes left and right eight times in succession once they had become lucid in a dream.
Hearne found that the dreamer was able to perform the agreed eye movements exactly as instructed by recording them on a polysomnographic machine. This experiment provided the first solid evidence of a conscious mind being used in the setting of a dreaming mind.
Following on from this research was an American psychophysiologist named Stephen LaBerge – another pioneer in the field of lucid dreaming. LaBerge replicated Hearne’s experiment with more subjects and further cemented the scientific credibility of lucid dreaming.
LaBerge also examined the correspondence between what test subject’s did in their lucid dream and their physiological responses to the activity.
In one experiment, participants signalled that they were beginning to sing in their lucid dream – and then signalled when they had finished the activity.
The results showed that their respiration rate matched the exact timing of the signalled start and stop times of the singing. Pretty remarkable!
A similar experiment had participants signal when they began and ended a movement like counting or clapping. LaBerge found that there was again a corresponding increase in respiration and heart rate during the start and stop signal. These studies gave further weight to the reality of lucid dreaming, showing that not only could a lucid dreamer signal their awareness, but their physiological responses corresponded to their dream actions.
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