Lucid Dreaming Part 4

I slept very well indeed, and after seven and a half hours in bed had my first lucid dream in the lab. A moment before, I had been dreaming-but then I suddenly realized that I must be asleep because I couldn't see, feel, or hear anything. I recalled with delight that I was sleeping in the laboratory. The image of what seemed to be the instruction booklet for a vacuum cleaner or some such appliance floated by. It struck me as mere flotsam on the stream of consciousness, but as I focused on it and tried to read the writing, the image gradually stabilized and I had the sensation of opening my (dream) eyes. Then my hands appeared, with the rest of my dream body, and I was looking at the booklet in bed. My dream room was a reasonably good copy of the room in which I was actually asleep. Since I now had a dream body I decided to do the eye movements that we had agreed upon as a signal. I moved my finger in a vertical line in front of me, following it with my eyes. But I had become very excited over being able to do this at last, and the thought disrupted my dream so that it faded a few seconds later.

Afterward, we observed two large eye movements on the polygraph record just before I awakened from a thirteen-minute REM period. Here, finally, was objective evidence that at least one lucid dream had taken place during what was clearly REM sleep! I sent a note to the 1979 meeting of the APSS in Tokyo mentioning this and other evidence suggesting that lucid dreams are a.s.sociated with REM sleep.24 Of course, I did not expect anyone to be convinced of the reality of lucid dreaming by this brief summary. But I wanted to share our results with other dream researchers as quickly as possible.

Our early success was not easy to repeat. The next six nights I spent in the sleep lab yielded no lucid dreams. I had not yet developed MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams), the method that allowed me to induce lucid dreams on command, which I describe in Chapter 6. After I had become proficient at MILD we tried again, and in September of 1979 I had two more lucid dreams at the Stanford sleep lab. I was still having many more lucid dreams at home than at the lab, which was probably due to the fact that I was more relaxed about it at home. So we arranged to install a polygraph at my home for six weeks. During this Christmas vacation, I successfully captured another dozen lucid dreams, and again, my eye movement signals showed them all to have taken place during REM sleep.

By 1980, word was getting around about our interest in lucid dreaming, and several other lucid dreamers volunteered to try signaling lucid dreams in the lab. Roy Smith, a resident in psychiatry, was the first to succeed; his lucid dreams also took place in REM sleep. Two women, Beverly Kedzierski, a computer scientist, and Laurie Cook, a dancer, completed our initial group of lucid-dream subjects. We referred to ourselves as oneironauts, (p.r.o.nounced "oh-nigh-ro-knots"), a word I coined from the Greek roots, meaning explorers of the inner world of dreams. The results of these first experiments formed the major part of my Ph.D. dissertation, Lucid Dreaming: An Exploratory Study of Consciousness during Sleep.

Let us return now to the APSS and the story of my efforts to publish this new method of communication from the dream state and proof that lucid dreaming can occur during unequivocal sleep.

It was too late for Lynn Nagel and me to present our results to the 1980 APSS meeting. Instead, we submitted a brief report of our preliminary findings for publication in the journal Science in March 1980, ent.i.tled "Lucid dreaming verified by volitional communication during REM sleep." We were excited about our discoveries and eagerly awaited the response.

Two months later we received a reply from Science. The editors of scientific journals base their decisions largely upon the opinions of anonymous reviewers, specialists in the relevant area. One of our two reviewers had written, "This is an excellent report, giving a new discovery validating lucid dreaming under laboratory conditions. The implications of lucid dreaming are interesting and important, and a major new field of research could flow from this discovery. The report is very clearly and concisely written, and I give it my highest recommendation for publication."

The second reviewer's response was, however, a polar opposite. Viewing our paper in the light of Rechtschaffen's work, this reviewer found it impossibly "...difficult to imagine subjects simultaneously both dreaming their dreams and signaling them to others," as was said of another study. It seemed he was basically unable to accept, on what were essentially philosophical grounds, that our results were possible. Consequently he managed to come up with a number of "interpretive problems"-all possible explanations of how we might have arrived at our obviously mistaken conclusions. Naturally, he did not recommend publication, and the editor deferred to his judgement.

In September, we submitted a revision of our paper to Science, having extended our original study with twice as many lucid dreamers and observations and having clarified the points the second reviewer had found problematic. But the paper was rejected again, on the basis of what were once more inherently philosophical objections. The problem seemed to be that our reviewers-presumably members of the APSS-simply did not believe lucid dreaming was really possible.

Hoping for a fresh consideration, we sent the paper to Nature, the British equivalent of Science. However, it was returned unreviewed. According to the editors of Nature, the topic of lucid dreaming was "not of sufficient general interest" to merit consideration! To make a long story short, after six months we finally did get our paper published in a psychological journal, Perceptual and Motor Skills.

I have emphasized at some length the initial difficulties we encountered, in order to bring a certain fact into clear relief: as late as 1980, dream researchers in general, and members of the APSS in particular, were nearly unanimous in rejecting lucid dreaming as a bona fide phenomenon of sleep-REM or otherwise. Lucid dreams were evidently still viewed as aberrant chimeras, brief daydreamlike intrusions of wakefulness into disturbed sleep; but not in any case as something sleep researchers need concern themselves with.

In June 1981, the same month our article appeared, I presented four papers on lucid dreaming to the twenty-first annual APSS meeting in Hyannis Port, Ma.s.sachusetts. Happily, by now, our data were strong enough to convince even the most skeptical that lucid dreaming was a bona fide phenomenon of unambiguous REM sleep. For lucid dreaming, the weight of the evidence was finally in proportion to the strangeness of the fact.

After all the resistance we had encountered, I was at first surprised and then gratified to observe the positive response my presentations received. Several scientists told me in private that before seeing our data they had believed lucid dreaming impossible, but were now compelled to change their minds. Among these were some who had previously expressed their disbelief in print; I was greatly encouraged to see these signs of sincerity and openness to new ideas, and gained a lasting respect for these scientists. Such openness is regrettably not always the rule in science-no more, for that matter, than it is in any other area of human endeavor.

But this does ill.u.s.trate something about how science works, when it works properly. "Science" is really a community of scientists who adhere to a common set of standards of verification. As such, science tends to be conservative-to resist the new perhaps too zealously, and hold perhaps too tenaciously to the accepted. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn has suggested that new theories in science do not replace old ones until the supporters of the old die off! I had feared this might be the case with the APSS and lucid dreaming, and was pleasantly surprised to find myself mistaken.

Lucid dreaming, once a.s.sociated in the minds of many scientists with the occult and parapsychology, had become an accepted part of mainstream science and as such, a legitimate topic for research. This was an important step toward broader exploration and the development of a science of lucid dreaming.

Robert K. Merton of Columbia University, one of the foremost theorists of science, has shown that almost all major scientific ideas are arrived at more than once, and frequently nearly simultaneously, by researchers working "independently." This is because all scientists working in a field draw upon the same set of previously established findings and stand, in Newton's phrase, on the shoulders of the same giants. Since they are reasoning, as it were, from the same premises, it is to be expected that they are likely to arrive at the same conclusions.

Probably the most famous example of independent discovery in science occurred in 1858, when, after twenty years of work, Charles Darwin was finally preparing for publication his epochal book on the theory of evolution, the Origin of Species. Imagine Darwin's astonishment when he received a letter from a virtually unknown biologist named Alfred Russell Wallace. While recovering from malaria in Malaya, Wallace had independently worked out the theory of natural selection in a form almost identical to Darwin's, as proven by a ma.n.u.script enclosed with the letter. So Darwin was not the first to develop a theory of evolution based on natural selection; Wallace had undeniable priority. However, priority is not always the most important issue; Darwin's work had the meticulous detail necessary to convince the scientific community. As Wallace himself stated with astuteness no less than generosity, in a subsequent letter to Darwin, "... my paper would never have convinced anybody or been noticed as more than an ingenious speculation, whereas your book has revolutionalized the study of Natural History, and carried away the best men of the present age." Wallace was not merely being modest. History shows that his work played no significant part in the scientific acceptance of the theory of evolution, and it is to Darwin's work alone that we owe this revolution in our thinking.

I have dwelt on this example at some length, because I believe it bears a definite resemblance to the circ.u.mstances surrounding the acceptance of lucid dreaming over a century later. History does indeed repeat itself, sometimes on a greater scale and sometimes on a lesser. In this case, we are clearly dealing with the lesser scale, but bearing in mind Darwin and Wallace should help to put the events into perspective. When, in the fall of 1980, an article ent.i.tled "Insight into Lucid Dreams" was called to my attention, I was as astonished as Darwin must have been when he first read of Wallace's work. The article, published in Nursing Mirror, a little-known British magazine, described work that was remarkably similar to my own. The author, Keith Hearne, a talented British parapsychologist, outlined a brief account of his Ph.D. dissertation study carried out at Hull and Liverpool universities with the help of a proficient lucid dreamer. I later learned that Hearne's subject had been Alan Worsley, an extremely dedicated explorer of lucid dreams. Over the course of a year, Worsley had spent forty-five nights in a sleep lab while Hearne monitored him. During these nights, Worsley had eight lucid dreams, in each of which he marked the EOG with eye-movement signals whenever he realized he was dreaming.

At first the similarity between our work at Stanford and theirs at Liverpool seemed uncanny. Upon reflection, however, I realized that the idea of validating lucid dreams by eye movement signaling would be relatively obvious to anyone familiar with recent psychophysiological dream research and the possibilities of lucid dreaming. Viewed in this light, independent discovery no longer appeared uncanny or even unexpected.

The only odd thing about it was that Hearne finished his dissertation fully two years before I did. Yet, in spite of having made the most extensive review of the literature on lucid dreaming available in English, I had heard not so much as a rumor of Hearne and Worsley until after I completed my dissertation in 1980. One might have thought that Hearne would have been eager to share his findings with the scientific community. But evidently not. I understand from Worsley that Hearne "wanted to make a few discoveries first," before publis.h.i.+ng.25 In any case, it appears that as late as 1980 he was swearing to secrecy those few professionals who knew about his work. But whatever the explanation, six years after completing his dissertation, Hearne still has not published an account of his original study in any peer-reviewed scientific journal.

As a result of Hearne's reticence, or maybe just by accident, we at Stanford knew nothing of the English work until late 1980. By then, our own more extensive studies had gone considerably beyond Hearne's earlier dissertation work, and consequently his pioneering research only confirmed what we already knew. Had the results of the Liverpool experiments been available to us several years earlier, we could have built on what would have been Hearne's tremendous contribution to the field. But that isn't what happened. As a result, Hearne's pioneering study appears to have played a relatively minor role in the scientific acceptance of lucid dreaming. Having said that, I want to add that there seems little doubt that Keith Hearne is an innovative and energetic investigator from whom we may hope for new developments in the years to come. As for Alan Worsley, he has gone on to collaborate with other research groups in England, carrying out some intriguing experiments both in the laboratory and at home.26 Whatever else he may do, however, Worsley deserves the credit for being the first person, as far as I know, to successfully send a deliberate message from the dream world.

We have followed the story of lucid dreaming in the laboratory up to the point of its acceptance by the scientific world at the beginning of this decade. Since then, there has been a veritable explosion of public and scientific interest in lucid dreams. Dozens of papers on the topic have been published in the past few years, and the number of researchers in the area has been rapidly accelerating. All of this contributes to the impression of a highly exciting field of exploration that is unfolding now: the new world of lucid dreaming.

4.

Exploring the Dream World: Lucid Dreamers in the Laboratory Mapping Out the Dream World

The relations.h.i.+p between the dream world and the physical world has had a fascination for humanity that probably predates recorded history by many thousands of years. But like such questions as "Why is the sky blue?" or "What is on the other side of the moon?" the solution to the dream reality problem had to await the technological developments of the very recent past. Some progress had been achieved by the psychophysiological approach to dream research, but as long as the subjects were non-lucid dreamers, this method continued to have significant limitations.

If researchers were interested, for example, in whether reported changes in the direction of a dreamer's gaze were accompanied by corresponding physical movements of the eyes, they would have to approach the problem something like this: First, they would arrange to measure the dreamer's eye movements, easy enough with an EOG. Next they would have to observe the dreamer's eye movements during REM periods, waiting-and here is the problem-until by chance the dreamer made a sufficiently distinct and regular sequence of eye movements. Only very rarely would there be an unusual pattern that could be definitely linked to dream eye movements the subject could identify, as in the Ping-Pong dream of Chapter 3. In the thousands of sleep and dream studies conducted over the past several decades, instances as striking as this can be counted on one hand. In any case, if an experimenter were to design a study looking for this sort of event, it would take a great deal of waiting before the subject-by chance-did what the experimenter wanted.

Let us take another example that shows this approach is limited by more than just the experimenter's patience. Suppose our researcher were interested in whether or not the dreamer's brain shows s.h.i.+fts in activity (as measured by EEG) dependent upon particular mental tasks, such as singing or counting. In the waking state, singing activates the right cerebral hemisphere of most right-handers, while counting activates the left. Could our researcher ever reasonably expect to find a case in which the non-lucid dreamer "just happened" to sing and count in the same dream? How could anyone know exactly when the dreamer was doing what?

The main problem with this version of the psychophysiological approach to dream research is that as long as dreamers are non-lucid, the researcher simply has no way of being sure they will dream what the researcher needs them to for the particular experiment. This is really little better than a shot-in-the-dark approach, and dream researchers have quite understandably been showing less and less interest in it as the years, and miles of polygraph paper, have rolled by with few results to show for it. As a result of these difficulties, some dream scientists have even been calling for the complete abandonment of the psychophysiological approach in favor of purely psychological studies. David Foulkes, an influential dream researcher, has written that "... psychophysiological correlation research now appears to offer such a low rate of return for effort expended as not to be a wise place for dream psychology to continue to commit much of its limited resources." This a.s.sessment seems justified as long as it refers only to the traditional practice of psychophysiological research, using non-lucid subjects. The use of lucid dreamers, however, solves the basic deficiencies of the old approach and allows the researcher to complete his designed experiments successfully. It well may be the answer to revitalizing the psychophysiological method.

The fact that lucid dreamers know they are asleep, can remember to perform previously agreed-upon actions, and can signal to the waking world, makes possible an entirely new approach to dream research. These specially trained oneironauts can carry out all kinds of experimental tasks, functioning both as subjects and experimenters in the dream state. For the first time, sleepers can signal the exact time of particular dream events, thus allowing for the convenient testing of otherwise untestable hypotheses. A researcher can ask a subject to perform any chosen action within the dream, and the lucid dreamer can carry these directions out. This signaling also allows a clear mapping of mind/body relations.h.i.+ps.

Our studies at Stanford cover considerable ground, showing the relations.h.i.+p between physiological changes in lucid dreamers' bodies and a variety of actions carried out by their "dream" bodies within the dreams. Our investigations addressed a range of relations.h.i.+ps: between estimated dream time and actual time; between dream action, including eye movements, speech, and breathing, and corresponding muscle action; between dreamed singing and counting, and relative activation of the left and right cerebral hemispheres of the brain; and between dreamed s.e.xual activity and changes in a variety of genital and nongenital physiological measures.

Dream Time

How fast can we dream a dream and how long do dreams take? These are questions that have intrigued humanity for centuries. The traditional answer has been that dreams take very little or no time at all. There is, for example, the story of Mohammed's Night Journey. The Prophet is said to have overturned a pitcher of water just before leaving (via flying horse) on a tour of the seven heavens, in the course of which he met and conversed with the seven prophets, numerous angels, and G.o.d himself. Having taken in all the sights of paradise, the Prophet returned to his bed to find that the water had not yet run out of the pitcher he had overturned.

Likewise, the nineteenth-century pioneer of dream research, Alfred Maury, recalled late in his life a dream he had had many years earlier, in which he somehow had gotten mixed up with the French Revolution. After witnessing a number of scenes of murder, he was himself brought before the revolutionary tribunal. After a long trial in which he saw Robespierre, Marat, and other heroes of the revolution, he was sentenced to death and led to the place of execution in the midst of the usual jeering mob. Waiting his turn among the condemned, he watched the quick and grisly work of the guillotine. Then his turn came and he mounted the scaffold. The executioner tied him to the board and tipped it into place. The blade fell ... and at this critical point, Maury awoke in terror, only to find his head still attached to his body. He realized almost at once what had happened: the headboard had fallen on his neck. He concluded that his lengthy dream must have been initiated by the impact of the headboard on his neck, and that the entire dream must have taken place in the briefest instant! (If you suppose that these are only the beliefs of centuries gone by, note that as recently as 1981 a well-respected dream researcher published a paper supporting the view that dreams take place during the brief time of awakening.1)

While dreams undoubtedly do occasionally occur in this fas.h.i.+on, evidence suggests that dreams normally take the same amount of time the actions would take in real life. In one study, Dement and Kleitman awakened five subjects at either five or fifteen minutes after the beginning of their REM periods, and asked them to decide which amount of time had elapsed. Four of the five subjects were consistently able to choose the correct time. The same study showed that dreams reported after fifteen minutes of REM sleep were longer than those following five minutes of REM. Such reports appear to contradict the notion of instantaneous dreaming. However, they do not prove that dream time is the same as "real time," but only indicate that they are generally proportional to one another.

However, subjective dream duration can be directly and easily measured by using lucid dreamers. Oneironauts are instructed to signal when they become lucid in their dream, and then to estimate an interval of, say, ten seconds by counting to ten in the dream. The lucid dreamer signals again to mark the end of the interval, which can then be directly measured on the polygraph record.

In our experiments,2 we found that the average length of these estimated ten-second intervals was thirteen seconds, which was also the average estimation of a ten-second interval while subjects were awake. On one occasion, a star subject of ours, Beverly, even performed this experiment for a BBC television crew. She described her experience as follows:

By this point, fairly late in the morning, I was very determined to have the expected lucid dream: I felt especially motivated by all the filming crew being there, waiting for me to perform. So, when I found myself at the transition point between being awake and asleep I "made" it happen: my dream body began to float up in the air out of bed, a bed very much like the one that knew my physical body was sleeping in. I waited until I was completely floating to be sure that I was really dreaming. But it seemed that I was being held back by something: my electrodes! However, I reasoned that these were only dream electrodes and I wasn't going to let my dream control me! At that point, I merely flew away not really caring about the "electrodes," which I presumed no longer existed. As I flew across the room, right through the wall, I signaled "left-right-left-right" to show that I was lucid. All of this so far took only a few seconds. I began estimating ten seconds, counting "one-thousand and one, one thousand and two ..." as I pa.s.sed through the wall into the lounge area. Everything looked very dark and I felt that I wasn't very deep into my sleep until I saw a weak reflection of my face in a mirror. When I stared at it the room became very clear and lifelike. Still counting, I decided that I'd like some action to report on later, so I grabbed a chair and playfully threw it into the air, watching it tumble and float. When I finished counting to ten, I signaled again. Next I was supposed to estimate ten seconds without counting, and this was when I got the idea that it would be interesting to fly to the polygraph room and actually watch a dream dramatization of my own signals being recorded. I needed to get there within ten seconds, so I flew right through the adjoining room, which was filled with boxes and chairs. For some reason, I let myself get caught up in avoiding stumbling on them, hoping to get to the polygraph before my next signal. In the distance, I heard a voice similar to mine doing the counting that I wasn't supposed to be doing! That puzzled me a little, but I found it intriguing. Just in time, I arrived at the polygraph machine where several people were crowded around watching. I announced, "Hey, everyone, I'm doing it live!" as I signaled for the third time, seeing the polygraph pens flas.h.i.+ng about wildly in my dream.

As these experiments indicate, estimated time in dreams seems very nearly equal to clock time-at least for lucid dreams.

I am sure many readers will object, saying something like "But I've had dreams in which I spent what seemed like years or lifetimes." So have we all, but I believe this seeming pa.s.sage of time is accomplished in dreams the same way it is in the movies or the theater. If we see someone in a movie turning out the light at midnight, and a few moments later see her turning off an alarm shortly after dawn, we accept that seven or eight hours have pa.s.sed even though we "know" it has only been a few seconds. I think the same kind of mechanism operates in dreams to produce the sensation of extended pa.s.sages of time. I have no argument with this sense in which dream time may not equal clock time. Nevertheless, the evidence of our lucid dream experiments with time suggests that it takes just as long to dream you are doing something as it does to actually do it.

This result ought not to surprise anyone. There are, after all, definite psychophysiological limitations to how fast our brains can process information. If I were to ask you if a canary can sing, it would take you over a second to reply; and if I were to ask you whether a canary can fly, it would even take you a little longer. Why can't we answer such obvious questions instantly? Because our brains need time to search through our billions of memories to determine whether or not the answer is in fact "obvious." This is why we cannot do things instantaneously in our dreams: our brains need time to dream them.

Breathing

We undertook an experiment to determine the extent to which lucid dreamers' patterns of breathing were paralleled by changes in their actual patterns of respiration.3 The dream body obviously has no need to breathe. It is, after all, only a mental representation of the dreamer's physical body. And in waking life, although we breathe every second, we are for the most part unconscious of it. Normally we only become conscious of the process when something draws our attention to it-if we are not getting enough air, or if we wish to hold our breath for some reason.

Because we are seldom aware of our breathing while awake, we are seldom aware of it while dreaming. I first became aware of and interested in this problem at the age of five. At the time I was in the habit of dreaming a sort of serial dream on successive nights. In the dream serial, I was an undersea pirate, and on at least one occasion I worried for a moment about having been underwater for a very long time-much longer than I could hold my breath. But then I remembered with great relief that in "these dreams" I could breathe underwater. Or was it that I didn't need to breathe in dreams? I wasn't sure and wondered no more until almost thirty years later.

We were interested in the question of whether or not subjects holding their breath in dreams physically do so. Using the old methodolology of dream research, this would be a very difficult question to approach. But through the use of lucid dreaming, it was easy to answer. Three of our oneironauts agreed to join me in attempting to carry out (with our dream bodies) a previously agreed-upon pattern of breathing whenever we realized we were dreaming. We were to mark with an eye-movement signal the beginning and end of a five-second interval in which we would either breathe rapidly or hold our breath. The four of us spent two to three nights in the sleep lab while our respiration was monitored, along with the usual physiological measures used for determining sleep stages.

Altogether, the four of us reported having carried out the breathing task in twelve lucid dreams. The relevant polygraph records were given to an independent researcher to see if it was possible to determine whether particular instances were cases of rapid breathing or of breath-holding. The researcher was able to correctly identify every instance. Since the odds of doing this by chance are only 1 in 4096, we were able to conclude confidently that voluntary control of the mental image of respiration during lucid dreaming is reflected in corresponding changes in actual respiration.

This doesn't mean that every variation in breathing during REM sleep is related to dream content. For instance, a respiratory pause on a polysomnogram wouldn't necessarily imply that the dreamer was holding his dream breath. But if the dreamer was, we would expect to see a pause in breathing on the record. Many factors, on a variety of levels of psychophysiological organization, contribute to the pattern of breathing when we are awake, and the same holds true when we are asleep. Some of these respiratory influences are physiological, some psychological; together they form the consciously experienced content of the dream.

All that we have demonstrated in our research is that respiratory content in a dreamer's consciousness appears to affect the sleeper's actual pattern of breathing. The results are not surprising when viewed in the proper light. The same relations.h.i.+p would probably hold true for walking, talking, or any other form of behavior, except for the fact that most of our muscles are paralyzed during REM sleep. The brain-stem system that accomplishes the general suppression of muscle tone during REM dreaming saves us from running around with our eyes closed in the middle of the night-a practice almost as hazardous now as it was for our ancestors back in the jungle. However, not all muscle groups are equally inhibited during REM sleep. For example, there is no way we can harm ourselves with eye movements; consequently the extraocular muscles are not inhibited at all during REM. Quite the contrary: they give the active state of sleep its common name. Another set of muscles is exempted from the general paralysis of REM sleep, but for a different reason: the respiratory muscles, and they are not inhibited for obvious reasons.

Singing and Counting

The brain is divided into two cerebral hemispheres, and for most people the left hemisphere shows increased activity during language use and a.n.a.lytical thinking, while the right shows increased activity during spatial tasks and holistic thinking. Though the degree of lateral specialization of the brain has been exaggerated in the popular press, numerous scientific studies have demonstrated reliable differences in brain-wave activity between the left and right hemispheres and these differences depend precisely upon which mental activities the subject is engaged in at the moment.

All of these studies were, of course, done while the subjects were awake. A question that has intrigued dream researchers is, would similar relations.h.i.+ps hold during REM dreaming? Here again was a question that only lucid dreamers could answer. We decided to compare dreamed counting and dreamed singing-activities that are supposed to engage the left and right hemispheres respectively.4 Why these particular tasks? The choice was a practical one. Unlike many other possible tasks, counting and singing required nothing more than a dream body with a functioning dream tongue-standard issue for an oneironaut!

I was the first to attempt the experiment. Early in the night I spent at the lab, I awoke from a dream and practiced my memory method for inducing lucid dreams (MILD) before returning to sleep. Not long afterward, I awoke from another non-lucid dream and again tried MILD-with the same disappointing result. My third effort seemed to have failed as well. I was lying in bed awake for the fourth time that night, worrying and wondering what was wrong with me-was I losing my touch after all these years? Then, suddenly, I found myself flying high above a field. I realized at once-with great excitement-that this was the lucid dream I had been seeking! I made an eye-movement signal and began to sing: