Lucid Dreaming Part 3

After lying in bed for a few minutes in a quiet, darkened room you would likely become drowsy. Your subjective sensation of drowsiness is objectively registered by a change in your brain waves: Your formerly continuous alpha rhythm gradually breaks up into progressively shorter trains of regular alpha waves and is replaced by low-voltage mixed-frequency EEG activity. When less than half of an epoch (usually 30 seconds) is occupied by continuous alpha rhythm, sleep onset is considered to have occurred and Stage 1 sleep is scored. At this point, your EOG would reveal slowly drifting eye movements (SEMs); your muscle tone might decrease or remain the same. If you were awake at this point, you might well report "hypnagogic" (leading into sleep) imagery, which can be extremely vivid and bizarre, as the following report suggests: "I was observing the inside of a pleural [chest] cavity. There were small people in it, like in a room. The people were hairy, like monkeys. The walls of the pleural cavity are made of ice and slippery. In the mid-part there is an ivory bench with people sitting on it. Some people are throwing b.a.l.l.s of cheese against the inner side of the chest wall."4

Beyond the seemingly meaningless distortions of the preceding report, Stage 1 hypnagogic imagery can also take on a uniquely archetypal character and significance, as ill.u.s.trated by another subject's experience: "I saw the huge torso of a man," she reported, "rising out of the depths of a profoundly dark-blue sea. I knew, somehow, that he was a G.o.d. Between his shoulders, in place of a head, he had a large golden disc engraved with ancient designs. It reminded me of the high art of the Incas. He continued to rise out of the sea. The rays of light streaming out from behind him told me the sun was setting. People, clothed in dark garments, were diving into his face-the golden disc. I knew they were dead, and it seemed to me they were being 'redeemed' by this action. This image was very significant for me, yet I did not know exactly why."

Stage 1 is a very light stage of sleep, described by most subjects as "drowsiness" or "drifting off to sleep." Normally, it lasts only a few minutes before further EEG changes occur, defining another sleep stage.

As you descend deeper into sleep, Stage 2 occurs. The EEG is marked by the appearance of relatively high-amplitude slow waves called "K-complexes" as well as 12-14 Hz (the standard unit for frequency is the Hertz, abbreviated to Hz)5 rhythms called "sleep spindles." Your EOG would generally indicate little eye movement, and the EMG would show somewhat decreased muscle tone. Reports of mental activity from this stage of sleep are likely to be less bizarre and more realistic than those from Stage 1. Nevertheless, during Stage 2 sleep and particularly later in the night, you might report lengthy and vivid dreams, especially if you are a light sleeper.

At this point, high-amplitude slow waves gradually begin to appear in your EEG. When at least twenty percent of an epoch is occupied by these "delta" waves (1-2 Hz), Stage 3 sleep is defined. Usually, this slow wave activity increases until it completely dominates the appearance of the EEG. When the proportion of delta EEG activity exceeds fifty percent of an epoch, Stage 3 becomes Stage 4, the "deepest" stage of sleep. During stages 3 and 4, often collectively referred to as "delta sleep," your EOG channel would show no eye movements, but only the brain's delta waves. Muscle tone is normally low, although it can be remarkably high, as when sleep-walking or sleep-talking occurs. Recall of mental activity on arousal from delta sleep is generally very poor and fragmentary, and more thought-like than dreamlike.

After about an hour and a half, the progression of sleep stages is reversed, and you cycle back through Stage 3 and Stage 2 to Stage 1 again. But by the time the EEG reveals you have crossed the border to Stage 1 again, your EMG would show virtually no activity at all, indicating your muscle tone has reached its lowest possible level. Your EOG now discloses the occurrence of rapid eye movements, at first only a few at a time, but later in dramatic profusion. You are, of course, now in "dreaming"-or REM-sleep. This state has also been referred to as "paradoxical sleep," "ascending Stage 1 REM," and most recently, "active sleep," in contrast to which NREM sleep is called "quiet sleep." In the dream lab, eighty to ninety percent of all awakenings from REM sleep yield recall of vivid and sometimes extremely detailed dreams.

After a period of REM sleep lasting perhaps five to fifteen minutes, you typically go through the preceding cycle again, vividly dreaming three or four more times during the remainder of the night, with two major modifications. One is that decreasing amounts of slow-wave EEG activity (stages 3 and 4, or delta sleep) occur in each successive cycle. Later in the night, perhaps after the second or third REM period, no delta sleep appears at all, only NREM Stage 2 and REM.

The other modification of the sleep cycle is that as the night proceeds, successive REM periods tend to increase in length-up to a point. While the first REM period commonly lasts less than ten minutes, later REM periods often last thirty or forty minutes; an hour or more is not uncommon late in the sleep cycle. At the same time REM periods are getting longer, the intervals between them tend to decrease in length, from the approximately ninety minutes characteristic of the first part of the night to as little as twenty or thirty minutes in the late morning.

All of these details may be beginning to sound unnecessarily technical and perhaps of interest only to academics or specialists. Not so. The fact that REM periods get longer and closer together as the night progresses has the greatest practical significance for dreamers: In a night when you get seven hours of sleep, fifty percent of your dreaming time will fall in the last two hours. If you can afford to sleep an extra hour, it will be almost all dreaming time. So if you want to cultivate your dream life, you will have to find a way to sleep late-at least on weekends.

The New World of Lucid Dreaming

Although scientific interest in the study of dreams underwent an unprecedented period of rapid growth that started in the 1950s, this peaked in the mid-1960s and declined thereafter. However, at the same time scientific interest in dreaming was beginning to wane, popular interest in dreams, especially lucid dreams, began to wax. Most recently, we have seen a renewal of scientific interest in the dream state, as indicated by the first laboratory studies of lucid dreaming and by an extremely rapid, almost explosive, growth in scientific attention to the phenomenon. How did all this come about?

A number of factors have contributed to the birth of the science of lucid dreams. The psychophysiological dream research of the 1950s and 1960s was undoubtedly important, providing as it did the basic methodology for the laboratory studies of lucid dreaming destined to follow in the late 1970s and beyond. But it is as if the earlier research merely prepared the ground for what was to come later. Other events were more responsible for planting the seeds of interest in lucid dreaming that have recently begun to yield an abundant harvest.

One of the most important of these events was the publication in 1968 of a book ent.i.tled Lucid Dreams, by Celia Green, an English parapsychologist. The book was based upon the published accounts we have already largely reviewed as well as upon case material collected by the Inst.i.tute of Psychophysical Research, which Green directs. The Inst.i.tute's activities, it should be noted, are not actually in the field of psychophysiology, but in the field of parapsychology. Green's interest in lucid dreaming connects with an English tradition in parapsychology going back to Frederic W. H. Myers and the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in the nineteenth century.

However, it is important to understand the context in which most scientists put Lucid Dreams as a result of its author's professional identification. A decade later, Green could still a.s.sert, not without truth, that "lucid dreams are not studied except by those with an interest in parapsychology. "6 I am afraid that one of the reasons more conventional scientists remained uninclined to study lucid dreams was exactly because parapsychologists were interested in the topic, giving lucid dreams the unwarranted reputation of being somehow related to ghosts, telepathy, flying saucers, and other topics regarded by traditional science as superst.i.tious nonsense.

Whatever the reason, the time was evidently simply not yet ripe for the scientific study of lucid dreams. Even as recently as 1976, Green made the following eloquent appeal:

In the case of lucid dreaming, one might think that the paradoxical nature of the phenomenon would make a thorough investigation of it particularly interesting. It might be thought that it would be interesting to discover what the neurophysiological state of a person was when their mind was in a state of rational activity although they were physically asleep. If this state should turn out to be exactly the same as that of a person who was asleep and dreaming in the ordinary manner, this would be strange and interesting. If it should turn out to be different, the nature of the differences might shed light on the true nature of sleep and the true nature of rational mental functioning.7

Green's book represented the most extensive review of the available literature on the topic, and was also quite scholarly in its treatment of the subject. In spite of this, it had a cool reception in academic circles; ironically, its dry a.n.a.lytical style was probably a major factor limiting its popular success. Nevertheless, the book appears to have stimulated an interest in lucid dreaming in a number of individuals who were to play prominent roles in the development of the field.

In the United States, Charles Tart's 1969 book Altered States of Consciousness probably generated even more widespread interest in lucid dreams than Green's less well-known book. Tart's anthology reprinted thirty-five scientific papers on a variety of subjects, including the hypnagogic state, dream consciousness, hypnosis, meditation, and psychedelic drugs. These were all very topical issues during the late 1960s, and the book generated widespread interest. It was undoubtedly influential for many young scientists developing an interest in the rich research possibilities presented by altered states of consciousness. I was certainly one of these, and I could not have failed to notice the words with which Tart introduced the volume: "Whenever I speak on the topic of dreams," he wrote, "I mention a very unusual sort of dream, the 'lucid' dream in which the dreamer knows he is dreaming and feels fully conscious in the dream itself." Aside from briefly introducing the topic and testifying to having had a few lucid dreams himself, Tart reprinted van Eeden's cla.s.sic paper "A Study of Dreams." He thereby did a whole generation of future lucid dreamers a valuable service by making this work available, and provided for many (including myself) their first acquaintance with both the term and concept of "lucid dreams."

Ann Faraday's popular books had a great impact on the public awareness of dream consciousness in the early 1970s. Faraday, a psychotherapist and former sleep researcher, treated lucid dreaming in unreservedly positive terms. "This remarkable state of consciousness," she wrote, "is in my view one of the most exciting frontiers of human experience. ..." Faraday believed that lucid dreams were occasioned by a movement toward self-integration in waking life, and stated that " ...one of the most thrilling rewards of playing the dream game is that this type of consciousness, with its feeling of 'other worldliness,' begins to manifest itself much more frequently as self-awareness grows through dream work."8

Probably only one other author has influenced public opinion regarding dreaming as much as-and perhaps even more than-Ann Faraday. I am referring to Patricia Garfield, whose 1974 book, Creative Dreaming, contains a wonderful collection of tools for lucid dream work as well as a great deal of fascinating information, including a survey of approaches to dream control in a variety of cultures. Garfield also gives an account of her development of fairly frequent (approximately weekly) experiences of lucid dreaming that I found personally valuable. Her pioneering efforts at learning lucid dreaming were some of the inspirations that helped me when I was attempting to do the same. As for Creative Dreaming, I would venture to say, without fear of contradiction, that it was inestimably influential in stimulating the current revolution in lucid dream work.

There is one more author whose books have contributed significantly to the development of contemporary interest in lucid dreaming, and that is Carlos Castaneda. Whether his entertaining and immensely popular works are "fictional nonfiction" or "nonfiction fiction," as various defenders and detractors have claimed, is a controversial question. However, several of his books mention an unusual state of consciousness that bears a definite resemblance to lucid dreaming. Castaneda refers to this state as "dreaming." Incidentally, I am perhaps not alone in wondering how the distinction between "dreaming" and "dreaming" was maintained in the original conversations, since italics are rather more difficult to achieve with the spoken word than with the written. Maybe the explanation is that "Carlos" and "don Juan" never felt it necessary to talk about "ordinary" dreaming at all. The broad appeal of his books provided many people with their first introduction to the concept of lucid dreaming, so perhaps it doesn't much matter how Castaneda set his type.

Whenever I lecture on the topic of lucid dreaming, someone always brings up the topic of Carlos Castaneda, usually mentioning the famous incident in Journey to Ixtlan in which the character "don Juan" teaches the character "Carlos" to find his hand in a dream, ostensibly as a means of stabilizing dreaming. Since "Carlos" is consistently presented as a b.u.mbling idiot, learning to find his hand anywhere at all may be considered an improvement. But for most other would-be lucid dreamers, remembering to find your hand might be useful as a lucidity cue, but once you are lucid, there are a number of more interesting things to do.

What, my audience further wants to know, do I think of the Castaneda books? I generally imply that we owe Castaneda a debt of grat.i.tude because his "tales of power" have served to inspire so many readers to explore their inner worlds and to open their minds to the possibilities of alternate realities. That is the good news. As for the bad, the weight of evidence seems to contradict the notion that these books are "nonfiction," as their author claims. For example, an ethn.o.botanist has argued that based on the flora and fauna Carlos claims to have encountered in the Sonoran desert, it would not be outrageous to conclude that Castaneda, the anthropologist, has never been there. In any case, the desert that Castaneda, the author, describes is apparently not the one he claims it is.9 Similarly, based on Carlos's account of the world of dreaming, I am led to wonder whether he has ever really been there either.10

The seminal contributions of Green, Tart, Garfield, Faraday, and Castaneda during the late 1960s and early 1970s combined to produce a highly favorable climate for the development of widespread interest in lucid dreaming, not only among the general public, but among graduate students and others in training to become experimental psychologists and researchers. But in order to understand the difficulties that had to be overcome before lucid dreaming became scientifically acceptable, we must also find out how the topic was viewed from the establishment side of the wall.

In the academic world, the reigning att.i.tude regarding lucid dreams starkly contrasted with the att.i.tudes we have just surveyed, and can be summarized in a single word: skepticism. Among professional sleep and dream researchers, the orthodox view seemed to be that there was something philosophically objectionable about the very notion of lucid dreaming. Because of the philosophical nature of this skepticism, it would be informative to consider first what the philosophers of the time had to say on the topic.

The most influential philosophical writing on dreaming since the 1950s is probably Norman Malcolm's monograph Dreaming,11 a book containing quite a number of remarkably provocative a.s.sertions. Professor Malcolm, an a.n.a.lytic philosopher, promises at the outset to challenge common sense and the generally accepted view that dreams are experiences we have during sleep and may or may not later recall upon awakening. On the contrary, he claims, what is ordinarily meant by a "dream" is not in fact an "experience during sleep" at all. Instead, examination of the common usage of the word "dreams" indicates that it refers only to the curious stories people tell upon awakening from sleep. If you want to know what we call the experiences we have during sleep later reported as "dreams," Malcolm will only tell you that we don't call them anything and it would be nonsense to do otherwise. Why? Because, he claims, what we mean by "sleep" is not a condition in which we are experiencing anything at all. Writing in the heyday of psychophysiological dream research, the philosopher audaciously dismisses as "irrelevant" the findings of that entire field.

Finally, as a corollary to the notion that being "asleep" means experiencing nothing whatsoever, Professor Malcolm concludes that the statement "I am asleep" is meaningless. Moreover, he demonstrates (to his own satisfaction) that "the idea that someone might reason, judge, imagine or have impressions, presentations, illusions or hallucinations, while asleep, is a meaningless idea. ..."12 Having established the impossibility of making judgements in sleep, he reduces lucid dreaming to absurdity: "If 'I am dreaming' could express a judgement it would imply the judgement 'I am asleep,' and therefore the absurdity of the latter proves the absurdity of the former." Thus "the supposed judgement that one is dreaming" is "unintelligible" and "an inherently absurd form of words."13

These curious conclusions ill.u.s.trate that a valid argument can lead to an absurdly false conclusion if the premises upon which it is based happen to be wrong. In Malcolm's case, he has erred on two of his a.s.sumptions. The first is his misunderstanding of the everyday use of the term dream. We do use it in reference to stories or dream reports, but also in reference to the experiences we are reporting. Second, there are more varieties of being "asleep" than the hypothetical condition in which we are experiencing nothing at all. Dreams themselves provide an obvious example, but also there is sleepwalking and "fitful" sleep. I realize that the arguments I have offered would seem somehow deficient to Malcolm, but there is a simpler refutation of his views that will be obvious enough to you if you have ever had a lucid dream.

Common sense may well cry, Enough! Can't we dispense with philosophy entirely and get on with the dream? No, because "having no philosophy" is itself a naive philosophy likely to obscure one's vision. Scientists, including sleep and dream researchers, tend to think of themselves as "philosophy-free," but this doesn't mean it is so. Moreover, untested philosophical a.s.sumptions have until recently blocked the scientific study and acceptance of lucid dreaming. Up until the past few years, most dream experts considered lucid dreaming impossible on essentially philosophical grounds: it just didn't seem to be the sort of thing that could happen during what they meant by "sleep" and "dreaming." Five or ten years ago, the orthodox view regarding "lucid dreams" was essentially identical to the orthodox view of a century ago as expressed by Alfred Maury, that "these dreams could not be dreams."

Among sleep (as opposed to dream) researchers, those whose studies were exclusively physiological had no more to say about lucid dreaming than about any other form of mental activity. On the other hand, most of those using psychophysiological methods (considering the dreamer's subjective report in a.s.sociation with physiological recordings) either ignored, or at most footnoted and dismissed, anecdotes of lucid dreaming as too irrelevant or inconsequential to merit further investigation. What was the reason for this rather ostrich-like behavior? I believe there were at least two contributing factors, present in varying proportions from one case to another. One of the factors, and I think the major one, we have already mentioned: the "philosophical" climate of the time made lucid dreaming an awkward notion because of the generally held set of theoretical a.s.sumptions about the nature of the dream state. There was also the Freudian conception of the dream as a seething cauldron of irrationality and primitive impulses. This was not the sort of place to expect rational waking thought, much less consciousness-a suspect concept anyway in a psychology ruled by dogmatic behaviorism for the past fifty or sixty years. Thus, through the lenses of mainstream psychology's accepted a.s.sumptions, lucid dreaming appeared as quite distorted or ghostly-that is to say, nearly nonexistent. Lucidity was the ghost in the dream!

The second factor is the result of a rather common and readily observable human tendency: the inclination to "pa.s.s the buck." How many times have you heard someone say, "It's not my problem" or "It's not my responsibility?" If reports of lucid dreaming actually derived from, say, waking fantasies, then sleep and dream researchers could say without qualm, "It's not my problem," and get back to their own interesting problems without further delay. As for lucid dreams, someone else was going to have to worry about them, whatever they might prove to be.

As for the footnotes (and the first two references are literally that), here is a sample: Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University called lucid dreaming an occasional exception to the usual acceptance by the dreamer of the bizarre and even the impossible in dreams, and hazarded the impression that "such events are not typical parts of dreaming thought, but rather brief partial arousals."14 Arousals, whether "partial" or "brief," meant waking states, and if this were so, lucid dreams would logically belong in someone else's field. On the other coast, Ralph Berger of the University of California at Santa Cruz noted the same exception: "Occasionally, the dreamer may 'realize' during dreaming that he is dreaming. But there have not been any experiments to determine whether or not these instances are accompanied by momentary physiological awakenings. ..."15 Again, here is the suspicion that lucid dreaming ought to belong to studies of waking rather than sleep.

In 1978 a well-known sleep and dream researcher, Allan Rechtschaffen of the University of Chicago, published an influential paper ent.i.tled "The single mindedness and isolation of dreams."16 This essay appears to have made, as he said himself, "perhaps too much of" nonreflectiveness as an almost constant attribute of dreams. Dr. Rechtschaffen treated lucid dreaming as a rare exception (which it is in our time and culture) that only shows how characteristic nonreflectiveness is of dreams. Rechtschaffen demonstrated his theoretical willingness to consider lucid dreaming as a legitimate phenomenon of sleep and dreams, by recording one or two self-reported lucid dreamers for a few nights in his laboratory. Unfortunately, his subjects produced no lucid dreams on those nights and his study of lucid dreaming went no further.

Not all sleep and dream researchers seemed to regard lucid dreaming with skepticism or virtual indifference. In 1975, while considering "some fanciful implications of the reality of dreaming," Dr. William C. Dement of Stanford University gave the impression that he regarded dream control as an intriguing, though unlikely, possibility. Dement also raised the possibility of lucid dreaming, wondering whether a person "...with the appropriate training or instructions," could "enter the dream knowing that it was a dream and knowing his task was to examine it."17 Five years later, Dement found out that the answer to his question was "yes," as the reader shall soon see.

The picture presented by these few references shows that as recently as 1978, although most contemporary psychophysiological dream researchers had heard reports or at least rumors of lucid dreaming, they did not consider it to be of any special significance, or a legitimate phenomenon of sleep. If pressed to explain how lucid dreams happened to occur, they would usually cite a French paper published in 1973 by Schwartz and Lefebvre.18 This study of patients with various sleep disorders revealed that they exhibited an unexpectedly high number of intrusions of wakefulness and partial arousals within their REM periods. Schwartz and Lefebvre proposed that these partial arousals, which they called "microawakenings," might somehow provide a physiological basis for lucid dreaming. Although the paper has been criticized for the fact that no direct evidence in support of this hypothesis was presented, and because its conclusions were based entirely on the abnormal sleep patterns of a few subjects, this explanation seemed to be generally accepted until very recently. It was not until 1981 that the "microawakening" theory of lucid dreaming was successfully challenged, and the majority of the members.h.i.+p of the a.s.sociation for the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep (APSS) came to accept lucid dreams as the legitimate offspring of paradoxical sleep.

Most scientific fields have professional organizations under whose auspices researchers present their results to be considered and critiqued. In the case of sleep and dream research, the international forum for scientific research is the APSS, founded in 1960.19 Nearly every professional sleep and dream researcher in the Western world belongs to it. At the annual convention of the APSS, sleep and dream researchers report the results of their work to their professional colleagues, who subject the findings to the critical evaluation which plays such a crucial role in the scientific process.

When Patricia Garfield enthusiastically sang the wonders of lucid dreaming to the fifteenth annual meeting of the APSS, in 1975, the response was somewhat mixed. Some dream researchers were intrigued and even excited by her reported successes with dreaming about particular topics, and especially by her claim to have voluntarily increased her frequency of lucid dreams. Most members, however, were skeptical. While amateur dreamers everywhere were buying her book, Creative Dreaming, the professionals were not; at least they weren't buying the idea of dream lucidity and control.

Scientists tend to follow a rule of thumb derived from the Marquis de Laplace, a French mathematician and astronomer of the eighteenth century. In matters of scientific judgement, Laplace held to the principle that "the weight of the evidence must be in proportion to the strangeness of the fact." In other words, he was willing to accept a hypothetical finding on the basis of relatively little evidence if the finding was consistent with other previously demonstrated results. However, if a claim were made that seemingly contradicted a body of accepted observations or theories, he would admit it to the body of scientific findings only after extensive evidence and the most rigorous proof.

To most dream researchers in 1975, lucid dreaming seemed so strange as to barely merit consideration, to say nothing of granting it the status of fact. Why was this? Following Laplace's principle, of the correspondingly weighty evidence required by the strangeness of the fact, there was none at all! That is, none but the fact that some people claimed to have lucid dreams sometimes, and also to be able to exercise a considerable degree of control over them. Anecdotes, however, carry very little weight in experimental science.

Adding to the negative side of the balance were the results of an experimental study David Foulkes presented at the next meeting of the APSS, in which he attempted to demonstrate that college students could dream about a topic of their own choice. Unfortunately, the students-all of whom had professed interest in dream control as described in Garfield's book-were unable to dream reliably about a preselected topic, and an apparently careful follow-up study yielded the same result.20

These studies considerably dampened whatever little enthusiasm there had been for Patricia Garfield and Creative Dreaming. Although dream lucidity per se was not tested in any of the studies, its plausibility seemed to suffer in equal measure-perhaps a case of guilt by a.s.sociation, or a result of Garfield losing credibility.

Things began to look up in 1978, when at the eighteenth annual meeting of the APSS, held in Palo Alto, a group of Canadian researchers reported a degree of success while "searching for lucid dreams"21 in the sleep laboratory. Two monitored subjects had reported one and two lucid dreams after awakening from REM periods. Unfortunately, no proof was given that the lucid dreams had actually occurred during the REM periods preceding the awakenings and reports. Consequently there was no way to know whether the lucid dreams had taken place during REM, as opposed to NREM, sleep or even before rather than during or after the awakenings. The subjects themselves were somewhat uncertain about just when their lucid dreams had taken place. The most they could say was that they had the "impression" their lucid dreams had taken place shortly before they awoke and reported them. But this was too weak an argument to persuade anyone even moderately skeptical of lucid dreams that they took place during sleep. The Canadian study was further undercut by the fact that its conclusions were based upon a total of no more than three alleged lucid dreams reported by only two subjects. The APSS did not seem particularly impressed, to say nothing of convinced. Certainly, "the weight of the evidence" was not yet in proportion to "the strangeness of the fact." One indication that this was the case was the publication later that year of Rechtschaffen's paper mentioned earlier. This widely cited and influential work, published in the first issue of Sleep, the new journal of the APSS, attempted to provide a theoretical basis for why lucid dreaming was unlikely. While stopping short of proving lucid dreams impossible (a la Norman Malcolm), Rechtschaffen made them seem peculiar aberrations.

It was at this point that I entered the picture. But before I describe my own scientific encounters with the APSS, I need to put my lucid dream research in context, and explain how I became involved with lucid dreaming in the first place. I have had occasional lucid dreams since I was five years old, and over the years developed a strong interest in the subject. I came across Celia Green's book in the fall of 1976, while browsing through the Palo Alto Public Library. Until that point, I had only been acquainted with Frederik van Eeden and Tibetan yoga. I was excited to discover that van Eeden was not the only lucid dreamer in Western history. But even more important for me was the realization that if others had learned to have lucid dreams, then nothing prevented me from doing the same. Just reading about the topic had resulted in several lucid dreams for me, and before long, in February of 1977, I began my efforts in earnest, starting a journal that seven years later contained nearly nine hundred lucid dream reports.

From the very beginning, I had been interested in the possibility, first raised by Charles Tart, of communication from the lucid dream to the outside world, while the dream was happening.22 The problem was, since most of the dreamer's body is paralyzed during REM sleep, how could the dreamer send such a message? What might the lucid dreamer be able to do within the dream that could be observed or measured by scientists? A plan suggested itself to me. There is one obvious exception to this muscular paralysis, since eye movements are in no way inhibited during REM sleep. After all, it is the occurrence of rapid eye movements that gives this stage of sleep its name.

Earlier dream studies had shown that there is sometimes a precise correspondence between the direction of dreamers' observable eye movements and the direction they are looking in their dreams.23 In one remarkable example, a subject was awakened from REM sleep after making a series of about two dozen regular horizontal eye movements. He reported that in his dream he had been watching a Ping-Pong game, and just before being awakened he had been following a long volley with his dream gaze.

I knew that lucid dreamers could freely look in any direction they wished while in a lucid dream, because I had done this myself. It occurred to me that by moving my (dream) eyes in a recognizable pattern, I might be able to send a signal to the outside world when I was having a lucid dream. I tried this out in the first lucid dream that I recorded: I moved my dream gaze up, down, up, down, up, to the count of five. As far as I knew at the time, this was the first signal deliberately transmitted from the dream world. The only trouble, of course, is that there was no one in the outside world to record it!

What I needed was a dream lab. I knew Stanford University had an excellent one under the direction of the sleep and dream research pioneer, Dr. William C. Dement. I made inquiries in the summer of 1977 and found a researcher, Dr. Lynn Nagel, at the Stanford University Sleep Research Center who was very interested in the prospects of studying lucid dreams in the laboratory.

In September of the same year, I applied to Stanford University, proposing to study lucid dreams as part of a Ph.D. program in psychophysiology. My proposal was approved, and in the fall of 1977 I started my work on lucid dreams. Serving on my faculty committee were professors Karl Pribram and Roger Shepard from psychology, Julian Davidson from physiology, and Vincent Zarcone Jr. and William Dement from psychiatry. Since Lynn Nagel was not a member of the Stanford faculty, our relations.h.i.+p was entirely unofficial. However, Lynn was my de facto princ.i.p.al advisor and collaborator on my dissertation research.

Lynn and I didn't waste any time getting me into the sleep lab. On my first night we had, unfortunately, decided to see if it would be helpful to awaken me at the beginning of each REM period in order to remind me to dream lucidly when I went back to sleep. It is clear in hindsight that this was not a good idea, since the result was very little REM sleep. It was not very helpful being reminded to dream lucidly when doing so prevented me from dreaming at all!

Worse than that was what happened in my first dream. The Stanford sleep lab has its windows boarded up to allow for time-isolation studies. I felt a little claustrophobic because of this, and apparently, by way of compensation, had the following dream. It seemed as if I had awoken at dawn and was witnessing an exquisitely beautiful sunrise through the picture window next to my bed. But before I had time to be more than startled by this anomaly, I was awakened by Lynn's voice reminding me to have a lucid dream.

We decided that next time we would let me have more of a chance-both to sleep and to have lucid dreams. We scheduled our next recording night for a month later-the next available opening-which happened to be Friday the 13th of January, 1978. Every time I had a lucid dream (at home) while waiting for the fateful date, I would suggest to myself that I would do it again in the lab. Finally the night arrived, and Lynn hooked me up and watched the polygraph recording while I slept. I had been hoping that Friday the 13th would prove to be my lucky night, and that turned out to be the case.