The idea occurred to me that the most direct approach would be to use as a cue a sentence stating what the dreamer wishes to become aware of: \"This is a dream.\" I first tried this out in 1978 at the Stanford Sleep Laboratory, in collaboration with Dr. Lynn Nagel. Lynn got the short end of the deal, staying up all night monitoring my brain waves and REMs while I slept. When he observed me in REM sleep, he turned on a tape recording I had made earlier, playing it at a moderate level from a speaker next to my bed. The recorded message said, in my own voice, \"Stephen, you're dreaming\" and after a few seconds added the suggestion that I continue to sleep but realize that I was dreaming. At the time, I had not been sleeping too well, still being a newcomer to the sleep lab, and it seemed to me that I was lying in bed awake. Then from the next room, I heard the voice of a doctor commenting in Germanic accents, \"Amazing! Ze subject has had no REM sleep all night!\" Hearing this, I was not surprised. As far as I knew, I had had no sleep of any kind. But the next moment, I was astonished to hear my own voice coming over the PA. system, announcing, \"You're dreaming!\" I became lucid immediately. It had worked! I was very excited. In a dream world suddenly beautiful and more vivid than waking life, I was awake in my sleep! But a few seconds later, the recording continued with a voice now loud enough to wake the dead, to say nothing of the sleeping, \"Continue to sleep\"—and I awoke!
This first experiment showed us that lucid dreams could indeed be induced by direct verbal suggestion during REM sleep. The fact that in the dream I heard \"You're dreaming\" loud and clear, but did not hear my name at all, is interesting. Perhaps unconsciously hearing my name stimulated my attention, allowing me to hear the rest of the message consciously.
We used my own voice to record the message for two reasons. First, we hoped that being reminded by one's own voice would seem more like reminding oneself mentally, and second, because an earlier study found that when subjects heard tape recordings of their own voices during REM, the result was dreams in which the subjects were more active, assertive, and independent than when they heard recordings of other peoples' voices. Since these qualities are associated with lucid dreaming, we hoped that hearing my own voice would reinforce these qualities and facilitate the realization I was dreaming.
[/b]
Bookmarks