Tricycle | Awake in the World

For centuries, people around the world have reported experiences of lucid dreams, in which they know that they are dreaming while they are in the dream state. But as recently as thirty years ago—a hundred years after the scientific study of the mind began—no scientific evidence existed that anyone could be conscious while dreaming, and most psychologists were still convinced that lucid dreams were impossible. There were philosophical reasons for such skepticism as well: after all, how could anyone be awake and asleep at the same time?

It just didn't make any sense, especially to those who never had a lucid dream and couldn't imagine anyone else having one.

Author and psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge was one of many people who had occasionally experienced lucid dreams since childhood, and as a young man it occurred to him that this would be a fascinating area of research. In 1977, he began his graduate studies in this new field at Stanford University, gradually developing methods for inducing lucid dreams and recording his own personal experiences, resulting in nearly nine hundred lucid dream reports over the next seven years. But how to persuade his scientific colleagues that we really can become awake in our dreams?

The challenge, he recognized, was to communicate from a lucid dream to people in the waking state. One obstacle was that during sleep, most of the dreamer's body is paralyzed, but psychologists had already discovered that the eyes move while dreaming and that the eye movements of a sleeping person correspond to the eye movements of the person within a dream. In one famous study done by Stanford University sleep researcher William C. Dement, a dreamer was awakened after making a series of about two dozen regular horizontal eye movements. When asked what he was dreaming about at that time, he replied that he had been watching a long volley in a ping-pong game! This gave LaBerge an idea. If he could become lucid in a dream, while his scientific colleagues were monitoring his brain states and rapid eye movements to ensure that he was indeed dreaming, he could then send signals to them by moving his dream eyes in a prearranged way. Since his physical eyes would track in the same way as his dream eyes, he could provide objective evidence that he knew that he was dreaming. Ultimately, LaBerge was successful in providing such empirical proof of lucid dreaming. His work and other related studies have now been widely accepted within the Western scientific community, and scientific researchers in the field of lucid dreaming have devised a number of ingenious methods for helping ordinary people awaken to their dreams. [See "Wake Up!" page 3.]

An astonishing range of possibilities is open to the lucid dreamer who is interested in exploring the nature of the mind. You may use lucid dreams simply for recreational purposes, with the range of possible events in the dream limited only by your imagination. Then, as you venture into more meaningful activities, you may learn to solve psychological problems in the dream or to explore the malleability of the dream by changing its contents at will. Or maybe you'll choose to tap into the depths of your own intuitive wisdom. You may, for example, invoke your own archetype of wisdom—a Greek philosopher, a goddess of wisdom, or any figure that represents your ideal of sagacity. As you converse with that person in your dream, you are not accessing any outside source of knowledge but unearthing hidden resources within your subconscious to which you don't normally have access.

BEYOND THESE EXPLORATIONS of the mind, lucid dreaming provides an ideal forum for examining the essential nature of dreams and reality and the relationship between the dreaming and waking states. According to recent scientific research, the principal difference between dreaming and imagination on the one hand, and waking perception on the other, is that waking experiences are directly aroused by stimuli from the external world, whereas imagination and dreaming are free creations, unconstrained by physical influences from the environment. According to Buddhist thought, however, Western science tells only half of the story. Buddhism and science both agree that although sights, sounds, and tactile sensations of the world around us seem to exist out there, they have no existence apart from our perceptual awareness of them. But Buddhism adds that mass, energy, space, and time as they are conceived by the human mind also have no existence apart from our conceptual awareness of them—no more than our dreams at night. All appearances exist only relative to the mind that experiences them, and all mental states arise relative to experienced phenomena. We are living in a participatory universe, with no absolute subjects or objects. With this primary emphasis on the illusory nature of both waking reality and dreams, Tibetan Buddhists formulated a system of teachings known as dream yoga over one thousand years ago that uses the power of lucid dreaming to break down our illusions and unlock the door to enlightenment. [See "Night Moves," page 3.]