Dreamwalking

Lucid Dreaming

Written by: Michelle Belanger

From the monks of Tibetan Buddhism to the 12th century Spanish Sufi Ibn El-Arabi, mystics the world over have proclaimed the benefits of lucid dreaming. Achieve in dream lucidity has been approached as a way to illuminate both the nature of the self and the nature of reality. As early as the eighth century A.D. Tibetan monks are comparisons between the ability to recognize the illusory quality of a dream and the ability to recognize the illusory quality of reality. By extension, if the dreamer could learn to control the imagery of the dream once that dream was recognized as an allusion, then a similar control could be gained over the elements of the waking world once that world was also recognized as an illusion.

Hervey Saint-Denys coined the term reve lucide (lucid dream) in 1867. Despite this, Dutch psychiatrist Frederik Van Eeden is usually credited with developing the concept of lucid dreams, based on research he performed between the years of 1898 and 1912.

The first written description of a lucid dream goes to Saint Augustine who, in 415A.D, recorded the dreams of the Roman physician Gennadius. Gennadius is the first recorded lucid dreamer, but considering the power and the meaning attributed to dreams by individuals in the ancient world, it is very unlikely that he was the first lucid dreamer.

Lucid dreams are such a consistent human phenomenon that, at the same time that Van Eeden was doing his work on lucid dreaming -- which included shouting and singing very loudly in his dreams to see whether or not any of this carried over to his sleeping body size to wake his wife -- 16-year-old Hugh Calloway was also recording and experimenting with lucid dreams. Calloway, who wrote under the pen name Oliver Fox, called his lucid dreams "dreams of knowledge," as they possessed/presented the knowledge that he was dreaming.

Carlos Castaneda introduced the modern American metaphysical community to the notion of lucid dreams in his 1972 publication "Journey to Ixtlan." Through his Yaqui sorcerer-teacher Don Juan, Castaneda offers up a helpful technique for achieving lucidity in dreams: look at your hands. Picking any predetermined object to focus on in dreams can help the dreamer achieve lucidity, but for Don Juan, pans were especially useful because he noted that they would always be there.

Although the reality of lucid dreams was long doubted by scientists, with the development of REM sleep monitoring systems, it has become possible for lucid dreamers to issue a prearranged signal of eye movements in a laboratory environment that can prove that they were at once fully asleep, fully dreaming, and yet aware enough on some level to transmit the sign agreed-upon while still in the dream. The foremost named in modern lucid dream research is Stephen LaBerge. A psychologist at the Stanford University sleep research center, LaBerge is the recognized expert on lucid dreaming. In fact, he wrote the book on it. Many Americans have successfully used LaBerge's MILD technique for lucid dreaming. MILD stands for mnemonic induction of lucid dreams, and it is a technique in which the dreamer wakes up from the dream and take some time to visualize the dream again. While putting himself back in the dream, the dreamer that reminds himself that the next time he dreams he will recognize the fact that he is dreaming. Robert Monroe of the Monroe Institute and several others have developed similar memory induction techniques, most of which rely on a kind of self hypnosis or neurolinguistic programming to encourage the subconscious to become conscious in dreams.