Lucid Dreaming Part 2

At about the same time van Eeden was carrying out his investigations in the Netherlands, the French biologist Yves Delage was engaged in a similar study of his own lucid dreams. Delage characterized his lucid dreams in the following terms:

I say to myself: here I am in a situation which may be troublesome or pleasant, but I know very well that it is completely unreal. From this point of my dream, knowing that I cannot run any risk, I allow scenes to unfold themselves before me. I adopt the att.i.tude of an interested spectator, watching an accident or catastrophe which cannot affect him. I think: over there are waiting for me people who want to kill me; I then try to run away; but suddenly, I realize that I am dreaming and I say to myself: since I have nothing to fear I am going to meet my enemies, I will defy them, I will even strike them in order to see what will happen. However, although I am sure enough of the illusory character of the situation to adopt a course of action which would be unwise in real life, I have to overcome an instinctive feeling of fear. Several times, I have in this way thrown myself on purpose into some danger in order to see what would come of it.21

This lucid dream could easily be taken for one of Saint-Denys' reports; the two Frenchmen seemed to have had similarly rational and experimental approaches to their lucid dreams.

On the other side of the English Channel, Mrs. Mary Arnold-Forster was also exploring the world of dreams. From her own experience she reached a conclusion that it would be well to remember even today: "There are dreams and dreams, and we must get rid of the a.s.sumption that they all resemble each other."22 A few of the dreams described in her book were lucid; what is of relevance here is her description of how she, too, learned to recognize that her frightening dreams were "only dreams." She also seems to have had success with teaching this method to children, a practice surely deserving wider application. It does not appear, however, that Arnold-Forster developed her consciousness in dreams very extensively, perhaps due to the fact that of earlier published accounts, she seems to have known only Myers' and was unacquainted with such much more informative sources as Saint-Denys and van Eeden.

At about the same time, Hugh Calloway, a compatriot of Mrs. Arnold-Forster, undertook much more extensive experimentation with lucid dreams and closely related states. Publishing his occultist writings under the pen name of Oliver Fox, he apparently discovered lucid dreaming completely on his own, developing a high degree of proficiency in it. In the summer of 1902, when he was a sixteen-year-old student of science and electrical engineering in London, he dreamed a lucid dream which he said marked "the real beginning" of his research. "I dreamed," he wrote,

that I was standing on the pavement outside my home. The sun was rising behind the Roman wall, and the waters of Bletchingden Bay were sparkling in the morning light. I could see the tall trees at the corner of the road and the top of the old grey tower beyond the Forty Steps. In the magic of the early sunshine the scene was beautiful enough even then.

Now the pavement was not of the ordinary type, but consisted of small, bluish-grey rectangular stones, with their long sides at right-angles to the white curb. I was about to enter the house when, on glancing casually at these stones, my attention became riveted by a pa.s.sing strange phenomenon, so extraordinary that I could not believe my eyes-they had seemingly all changed their position in the night, and the long sides were now parallel to the curb!

Then the solution flashed upon me: though this glorious summer morning seemed as real as real could be, I was dreaming!

With the realization of this fact, the quality of the dream changed in a manner very difficult to convey to one who has not had this experience.

Instantly, the vividness of life increased a hundredfold. Never had sea and sky and trees shone with such glamourous beauty; even the commonplace houses seemed alive and mystically beautiful. Never had I felt so absolutely well, so clear-brained, so inexpressibly free! The sensation was exquisite beyond words; but it lasted only a few minutes and I awoke.23

Fox called his lucid dreams Dreams of Knowledge, "for one had in [them] the knowledge that one was really dreaming." He pictured himself in his Dreams of Knowledge "free as air, secure in the consciousness of my true condition and the knowledge that I could always wake if danger threatened, moving like a little G.o.d through the glorious scenery of the Dream World."24

A Russian philosopher, Piotr D. Ouspensky, wishing "to verify a rather fantastic idea," which he says occurred to him as an adolescent, asked himself, "Was it not possible to preserve consciousness in dreams, that is, to know while dreaming that one is asleep and to think consciously as we think when awake?"25 The answer Ouspensky decided upon, as others had before him, was yes. His main interest in lucid dreaming, or "half-dream states" as he called them, was simply to observe the formation and transformation of ordinary dreams. He claimed:

The fact is that in 'half-dream states' I was having all the dreams I usually had. But I was fully conscious, I could see and understand how these dreams were created, what they were built from, what was their cause, and in general what was cause and what was effect. Further, I saw that in 'half-dream states' I had a certain control over dreams. I could create them and could see what I wanted to see, although this was not always too successful and must not be understood too literally. Usually I only gave the first impetus, and after that the dreams developed as it were of their own accord, sometimes greatly astonishing me by the unexpected and strange turns they took.26

Here is Ouspensky's description of one of his half-dream states:

I remember once seeing myself in a large empty room without windows. Besides myself there was in the room only a small black kitten. 'I am dreaming,' I say to myself. 'How can I know whether I am really asleep or not? Suppose I try this way. Let this black kitten be transformed into a large white dog. In a waking state it is impossible and if it comes off it will mean that I am asleep.' I say this to myself and immediately the black kitten becomes transformed into a large white dog. At the same time the opposite wall disappears, disclosing a mountain landscape with a river like a ribbon receding into the distance.

'This is curious,' I say to myself; 'I did not order this landscape. Where did it come from?' Some faint recollection begins to stir in me, a recollection of having seen this landscape somewhere and of its being somehow connected with the white dog. But I feel that if I let myself go into it I shall forget the most important thing that I have to remember, namely, that I am asleep and am conscious of myself. ...27

In a 1936 article, "Dreams in Which the Dreamer Knows He is Asleep" in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Aiwani Embury Brown reported on "almost a hundred" of his own lucid dream experiences. The article showed that he was familiar with most of the earlier writings, with the significant exception of Saint-Denys. Apart from testifying to "the very existence of the phenomenon," Brown was chiefly concerned with countering the position taken by some skeptics among his psychologist colleagues-that lucid dreaming was nothing more than "daydreaming." In any case, Brown demonstrated the difference between the two states on several occasions, by daydreaming (imagining) during his lucid dreams. He also introduced a valuable and subsequently widely used criterion for deciding whether or not one is dreaming: jumping into the air and testing the sensation of gravity. Significantly, Brown's is one of only two papers devoted to the topic of lucid dreaming to be found in the mainstream of scientific psychology, up to the past few years.

The second of those articles appeared in a German psychology journal two years later. The author, Dr. Harold von Moers-Messmer, reported and commented on twenty-two of the lucid dreams he had between 1934 and 1938. That Moers-Messmer possessed an unusually logical mind can be seen from the following report:

From the top of a rather low and unfamiliar hill, I look out across a wide plain towards the horizon. It crosses my mind that I have no idea what time of year it is. I check the sun's position. It appears almost straight above me with its usual brightness. This is surprising, as it occurs to me that it is now autumn, and the sun was much lower only a short time ago. I think it over: The sun is now perpendicular to the equator, so here it has to appear at an angle of approximately 45 degrees. So if my shadow does not correspond to my own height, I must be dreaming. I examine it: It is about 30 centimeters long. It takes considerable effort for me to believe this almost blindingly bright landscape and all of its features to be only an illusion.28

Whenever Moers-Messmer found himself awake within his dreams he made use of the opportunity to satisfy his scientific curiosity, carrying out a variety of experiments in his lucid dreams. After his "indestructable intellectualism" had emerged in a lucid dream, he continued:

... it suddenly gets dark. After a little while, it grows light again. After some consideration, the word that I have long borne in mind occurs to me: "Magic!" I find myself in a city, on a large, relatively uncrowded street. Next to one of the houses I see nearby an entrance gate; the doors are closed, and flanked to right and left by two wide, jutting pillars. These are composed of five squared-stone blocks piled on top of each other, upon which there is projecting relief work in the shape of garlands. I cry out, "This will all grow much larger!" At first nothing happens, even while I fixedly imagine that the gateway is larger than the way I see it. All at once, a great number of little pieces of stone come crumbling out of the second highest block on the left, which is set in slightly towards the inside. More and more keep coming, mixed with sand and larger stones, until there is nothing left of the block, while on the ground there now lies a whole pile of rubble. Through the open s.p.a.ce that has thus resulted, I can see a gray wall towards the back.29

The preceding ill.u.s.trates Moers-Messmer's use of key words ("magic," in the example above) to remind him of what he wanted to do in his dreams. In another lucid dream, he wished to test whether people really speak in dreams:

... I am in a large street, with people pa.s.sing by. I repeatedly feel that I want to address myself to someone, but I always hesitate at the last moment. Finally I gather up all my courage, and say to a male personage who is just pa.s.sing by, "You're a monkey." I chose this particular phrase in order to provoke him into a harsh reply. He remains standing there and looks at me. It is so uncomfortable for me that I would have most liked to have apologized. Then I hear his voice saying, "I've been waiting for that; you've been weighing it over in your mind for a long time." Whether I even saw him speaking, I do not recall. He continues speaking with the intonations of a preacher; however, I realize that I will soon have forgotten everything. I therefore grab for my notebook and pull it out of my pocket. Then I realize the absurdity of my intentions, and I throw it aside.30

Ten years later, Nathan Rapport, an American psychiatrist, extolled the delights of lucid dreaming in an article ent.i.tled "Pleasant Dreams!" According to Rapport, "the nature of dreams may be studied best on those rare occasions when one is aware that he is dreaming," and I fully agree. His method for lucid-dream induction is similar to that used by Ouspensky: "While in bed awaiting sleep, the experimenter interrupts his thoughts every few minutes with an effort to recall the mental item vanishing before each intrusion by that inquisitive attention." This habit of introspection is cultivated until it continues into sleep itself. Rapport's enthusiasm for lucid dreaming is clearly conveyed by the terms in which he concluded his article:

As to the mysterious glories all too seldom remembered from dreams-why attempt to describe them? Those magical fantasies, the weird but lovely gardens, these luminous grandeurs; they are enjoyed only by the dreamer who observes them with active interest, peeping with appreciative wakeful mind, grateful for glories surpa.s.sing those the most accomplished talents can devise in reality. The fascinating beauty found in dreams amply rewards their study. But there is a higher call. The study and cure of the mind out of touch with reality can be aided by attention to dreams. And when secrets are wrested from the mystery of life, many of them will have been discovered in pleasant dreams.31

Although lucid dreaming has been known since antiquity, it was not until the nineteenth century that people in the West seemed to realize the phenomenon merited-and was accessible to-careful study. One can see a parallel with electricity: The Greeks knew of it, but for thousands of years no one regarded it as more than a curiosity. The scientific study of electricity gave rise to remarkable technological developments and an astonishing variety of unexpected applications; one of the most unexpected of these, as we shall see in the next chapter, was the scientific study of lucid dreaming.

3.

The New World of Lucid Dreaming.

Scientific Studies of Sleep and Dreaming.

In spite of humanity's perennial fascination with dreaming, the dream did not become a topic of widespread scientific inquiry until the second half of the twentieth century. One of the reasons for this is that scientific interest in dreaming had to await experimental psychology's nineteenth-century birth and twentieth-century development. Another factor was technological: until a short time ago, the scientific instruments for probing the dream world had not yet been invented. The sophisticated electronic instruments of modern sleep and dream research detect, measure, and record the minute electrical potentials a.s.sociated with all biological functioning. Scientists are now able to discern certain changes in bioelectrical potentials emanating from the dreaming brain which accompany (and perhaps generate) the psychological events experienced by the dreamer. A little background information and history will help you to understand and appreciate how this miracle is accomplished.

The beginning of the electronic age can be traced back to the eighteenth century and the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani's discovery of "animal electricity" in one of the most famous experiments in the history of science. Galvani was astonished to observe that when he brought a freshly dissected frog's leg into contact with two different kinds of metal, the dead leg jumped as if it were alive. Moreover, when Galvani connected wires from the frog's leg to devices capable of detecting electrical potentials, he found that electricity was indeed being generated. Galvani theorized that the nerves in the leg were the source of the electricity, and further speculated that all animal tissue gave rise to "animal electricity" as a result of the vital processes in living creatures. As it happened, Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist, proved Galvani wrong about the source of the electricity that made his frog's leg twitch. Volta showed that the electrical potential (or voltage, so named in the physicist's honor) was produced by the copper and iron wires in contact with the wet tissue-a primitive battery, in other words, powerful enough to stimulate muscle reflex action. (Galvani was later partially vindicated when it was discovered that muscle and nerve cell activity produced minute variations in electrical charge: animal electricity!)

By the middle of the nineteenth century, scientific understanding of electricity and magnetism had progressed sufficiently to allow quant.i.tative measurement of the electrical activity of neurons anywhere in the nervous system. When one end of a peripheral nerve was effectively stimulated, it was invariably found to transmit an electrical impulse to its other end. Richard Caton of Liverpool University reasoned that what was the case for reflexes of the peripheral nervous system (that is, sensory and motor nerves outside the central nervous system) ought to be the case also for the central nervous system (the nerves in the brain and spinal chord). Thus if one were to measure the electrical potentials of a brain, they should show variation mirroring the sensory stimulation impinging on the brain. At this time, the brain was generally thought to be nothing more than a chain of reflexes, an organ acting entirely in response to external stimuli and doing nothing by itself-speaking, as it were, only when spoken to. If such a brain were not a tabula rasa, it was only because the senses had written on its slate. In 1875, Caton attempted to measure the brain's hypothetical evoked response to sensory stimuli. He administered anesthesia to a dog and surgically exposed the surface (cortex) of its brain. But when Caton connected electrodes to the dog's cortex, he received a shock-and not an electrical one. Since the anesthesized dog was receiving no sensory stimulation, Caton expected its brain to show no physiological variation. But instead of the expected steady potential, the dog's brain showed what seemed to be a continuously changing, rapidly fluctuating electrical potential. The evidence clearly indicated that the brain was no mere stimulus/response automaton: its neutral state was not rest, but activity. At least, this was the case for "man's best friend."

The recording of the brain activity of human volunteers had to await the development of an alternative experimental procedure-one not requiring surgery to expose the cerebral cortex. The bioelectrical potentials of the brain are extremely weak, on the order of millivolts or less. (A millivolt is a thousandth of a volt; for comparison, the voltage produced by an ordinary flashlight battery is 1500 millivolts.) Clearly, the brain's electrical potentials are minute enough even when measured on the surface of the cortex. But they are many times weaker when measured from the scalp, due to the electrical resistance presented by the intervening layers, especially the skull. Even the most sensitive instruments available in the nineteenth century were not sensitive enough to record brain waves with amplitudes on the order of microvolts (millionths of a volt). The invention of the vacuum tube amplifier in the early twentieth century provided the enormous degrees of amplification necessary for the job (and at the same time also made possible high-fidelity recording, radio, and television).

Hans Berger, a German neuropsychiatrist, was able, with the aid of this new invention, to record the electrical activity of the human brain through the skull and scalp of human volunteers. Berger was just as surprised by what he found as Caton had been fifty years before. Berger had been expecting to observe the same random fluctuations as had been recorded from the brains of many other animals-rabbits, dogs, cats, and monkeys. But his human subjects showed strikingly rhythmical oscillations. Berger called the record of these brain waves the electroencephalogram (EEG) and reported that when subjects were allowed to shut their eyes, lie back, and relax, their brainwaves showed very regular oscillations repeating about ten times per second. This was the famous "alpha rhythm" (so named by its discoverer), indicating a state of relaxation (as well as meditation). Berger found that its frequency (number of waves per second) fell within the range of eight to twelve per second, and the alpha rhythm disappeared when the subject received an unexpected stimulus, such as a handclap. At last science was in possession of a window promising a clear view of the mind.

It is interesting to note that Berger's observations were at first met with considerable skepticism in the scientific community. Most electrophysiologists felt Berger's alpha rhythm was merely the result of some sort of measurement error rather than a genuine product of brain activity. The experts had two reasons to be dubious. In the first place they believed the only kind of electrical activity the brain could give rise to was the "spike potentials" a.s.sociated with firing of nerve cells. Secondly, the very regularity of Berger's alleged alpha rhythm seemed to mark it as deriving from some malfunctioning equipment rather than the human brain-nature is seldom so tidy. After being replicated by scientists at Cambridge University, Berger's basic findings gained general acceptance, and the science of electroencephalography began to grow in earnest. Among Berger's pioneer explorations into the relation of the state of consciousness and the brain was the first EEG recording of sleep.

Berger's initial observation that the EEG shows consistent changes at sleep onset was extended by a series of studies at Harvard University in the 1930s.1 The Harvard group cla.s.sified waking and sleeping EEGs into five stages, and made observations suggesting that dreaming occurred during the lighter stages of sleep. A similar series of investigations at the University of Chicago during the same period studied variations in the mental activity reported by subjects awakened from various stages of sleep, concluding that dreaming seldom occurred during the deepest phase of sleep.2 These studies suggested the possibility that the study of dreaming might be made more objective and scientific if there were some way to be sure whether or not a given person actually dreamed, and if so, when. However, it was several decades before this possibility was pursued.

In the late 1940s, it was discovered that stimulating a network of nerves in the brain stem called the reticular formation led to cortical activation. For example, stimulation of the reticular formation caused sleeping cats to awaken; conversely, its destruction resulted in a state of permanent coma. Since sensory input is the major source of activation of the reticular formation, it was theorized that sleep might involve processes that somehow inhibited neuronal activity in the reticular system. Sleep onset could be due to the decreased reticular activity, as a pa.s.sive result of diminished sensory input.

The view of sleep onset as a pa.s.sive process has obvious merit: isn't it easier for almost anyone to fall asleep in a quiet, dark room than in a noisy, brightly illuminated one? But the theory of sleep as a mere pa.s.sive result of decreased sensory input also has obvious limitations: After all, no matter how dark and quiet the room is, if you don't feel sleepy, you are likely to remain awake. On the other hand, if you have been awake long enough, you will be able to sleep anywhere, even standing up at a rock concert! Obviously, sleep onset cannot be explained by this theory alone. It was, therefore, not surprising when evidence was later found for the existence of active sleep-inducing (hypnogenic) centers in the brain stem, forebrain and other areas, where electrical or neurochemical stimulation leads to sleep.

This was essentially the point scientific knowledge on the biology of sleep and dreaming had reached by the late 1940s. Sleep was viewed as one end of a continuum of arousal. At the other end of this continuum was wakefulness ranging in degrees from relaxation, through attentiveness and vigilant alertness, reaching the extreme of mania or panic. Where you were on this spectrum of arousal depended upon the degree of activity in your reticular formation. In this view, sleep was a unitary phenomenon; the deepest and shallowest stages differed only in their degrees of arousal. Dreaming, having been found to occur more frequently in the lighter stages of sleep, was regarded as the confused meanderings of a partially awake, and therefore partially functioning, mind. As for the onset of sleep, this was thought to be a pa.s.sive process caused by decreased sensory input, resulting in diminishing activity of the reticular system until the lower levels of arousal a.s.sociated with sleep were reached. As it turns out, this old view of sleep and dreams has been largely superseded by the new views created by the dramatic developments of the 1950s.

Dreaming and REM Sleep

In 1952, Eugene Aserinsky, then a graduate student working under Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago, made a serendipitous observation while studying the sleep patterns of infants. Aserinsky noticed that periods of eye movement and other indications of activity seemed to alternate regularly with periods of comparatively quiet sleep. These recurring periods of rapid eye movement, or REM, could be easily observed by means of electrodes taped next to the subject's eyes-the resulting record being called an electro-oculogram or EOG. Simultaneous polygraphic recording of the EEG and EOG showed the periods of REM activity to be accompanied by readings indicating light sleep. Furthermore, when subjects (adults in this case) were awakened from these REM (p.r.o.nounced to rhyme with "them") periods, they almost always reported vivid dreams; in contrast, they reported dreams only a fifth as often when awakened from other phases of sleep (collectively referred to as "non-REM sleep," or NREM)3

Science finally appeared to have the key to dreams in hand-or at least the key to such puzzles as how often and how long we dream, and whether there are people who never dream, or only people who never remember their dreams.

Among those working in Kleitman's laboratories was a second-year medical student named William C. Dement, who, after finishing medical school, eamed a Ph.D. in physiology under Kleitman. For his doctoral dissertation, Dement carried out an extensive program of experiments designed to further elucidate the relation of REM sleep (the term, incidentally, was coined by Dement) to dreaming. Dement's pioneering investigation revealed a number of the basic characteristics of REM dreams. Among these results was the discovery of a direct relationship between the amount of REM sleep allowed before subjects were awakened and the length of their subsequent dream reports: The longer the REM time before awakening, the longer the dreams. This provided the first (although indirect) evidence for a correspondence between physical time and dream time. Dement also presented evidence for a rather precise correspondence between the direction of eye movements and the direction of dream gaze changes reported upon awakening. The suggestion that REMs are the result of the dreamer looking about in his dreams has since generated considerable controversy.

I will only note in pa.s.sing that in the last 30 years, thousands of sleep and dream studies have resulted from the groundbreaking work of Aserinsky, Dement, and Kleitman.

The Psychophysiological Approach to Dream Research

Why did the study of dreaming become scientifically respectable and the subject of widespread interest after the discovery of REM sleep? This question was answered in a paper by Johan Stoyva and Joe Kamiya ent.i.tled "Electrophysiological Studies of Dreaming as the Prototype of a New Strategy in the Study of Consciousness." The studies of dreaming referred to in the t.i.tle are those correlating electrophysiological measurements with subjective reports. According to Stoyva and Kamiya, this is an instance of "converging operations," in which the agreement of objective measurements and subjective reports provides a degree of validation for a hypothetical (because not publicly observable) mental state.

Since the subject's report is the most direct account available concerning his mental processes, scientists would naturally like to make use of it. However, there is a problem. Herac.l.i.tus called the senses bad witnesses, and of these bad witnesses, the "introspective sense" seems to be the most unreliable. Given that the only "eyewitness" to dreaming is this introspective sense, we need a means of corroborating its testimony. Concurrent physiological measurements could sometimes provide the necessary circ.u.mstantial evidence to validate the subjective report.

The Stages of Sleep

In 1957 Dement and Kleitman introduced a new set of criteria for cla.s.sifying sleep stages that subsequently gained wide acceptance. However, because of certain ambiguities in the application of some of the criteria, disagreements arose between different groups of researchers about the precise scoring of the sleep stages. This meant that the results of studies from one laboratory could not necessarily be compared to studies elsewhere.

To remove what was becoming a serious impediment to growth in the field, the UCLA Brain Information Service sponsored a project to develop an absolutely unambiguous manual for sleep-stage scoring. A committee refined Dement and Kleitman's original criteria to the currently universally accepted formulations described in A Manual of Standardized Terminology, Techniques and Scoring System for Sleep Stages of Human Subjects. The manual's precision established a high degree of agreement between different laboratories regarding the measurement and scoring of sleep.

According to the Manual, standard sleep-stage scoring requires the simultaneous recording of three parameters: brain waves (EEG), eye movements (EOG), and muscle tension (EMG). All of this is ordinarily recorded on a polygraph machine, which takes a form much like the standard "lie-detector" polygraphs: tracings in ink of several channels of physiological data on a continuously moving strip of paper. When a subject spends the night in a dream laboratory, the machine uses up over a thousand feet of paper! The following is a synopsis of what this record might reveal to the trained eye of the dream researcher, and of what you might experience during a typical night of sleep.

As you lie in bed relaxed but awake, preparing to sleep, your EEG will probably exhibit Berger's alpha rhythm almost continuously; your EOG may show occasional blinking and isolated rapid eye movements; and finally, your EMG will probably indicate a moderate degree of muscle tension. If, on the contrary, you were for any reason particularly tense, you might show little or no alpha rhythm and very high muscle tension. Whether you are relaxed or aroused, terrified or calm is of no concern to the Manual; as long as you are awake, your state is termed "Stage W." Surprisingly, in spite of being "awake" in both subjective and physiological terms, subjects not infrequently recount vivid reveries when asked for reports of their mental activity during Stage W.