Was Stephen LaBerge a natural lucid dreamer when he was a child? (+ some more questions)

I remember reading somewhere that when Stephen was a child, he had an enjoyable lucid dream where he was an undersea pirate, and that he liked that dream so much that he would often relive that dream and "keep doing that for days" - which sounds to me like he intentionally induced those dreams.
Does this mean that he was a natural lucid dreamer at that point?
And if he was, did he temporarily lose interest in lucid dreaming until his 20s?
Because according to himself, he attended a school that taught spiritual topics at around that age (I think he was in his mid-20s, or somewhere close to that), and then his teacher would start talking about waking life as a dream, by pointing at stuff and going "this, dream!" - and apparently this was what made Stephen LaBerge start becoming interested in lucid dreaming for real.
Is this right so far?
I suddenly got very interested in LaBerge's first experiences with lucid dreaming for some reason, and I would love to hear more about it, but I can't find very much about it on the Internet.

I don't believe Stephen Laberge was a natural. He just educated himself and learned how to lucid dream, just like us mortals.

This is a quote from "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" which I believe you're referring too...

Quote:

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Twenty years ago I attended Tarthang Tulku’s workshop on Tibetan Buddhism at the Esalen
Institute in Big Sur, California. Rinpoche (“precious jewel”), as we called the teacher, had been
forced to leave Tibet when the Chinese
Communists had invaded, and had “just gotten off the
boat” from India. He therefore spoke precious little English. The bits of his speech that weren’t
already broken
were frequently broken with laughter. I had been expecting esoteric
explanations of advanced theory, but what I got was something incalculably more valuable.
Rinpoche would indicate the world around us with a casual sweep of the hand and portentously
announce: “This... dream!” Then he would laugh some more and pointing at me or some other
person or object, rather mysteriously it seemed, he would insist: “This dream!” followed by
more laughter. Rinpoche managed to get the idea across to us (how, I don’t really know; I
wouldn’t rule out telepathy, considering how very few words were exchanged) that we were to
attempt to think of all our experiences as dreams and to try to maintain unbroken continuity of
consciousness between the two states of sleep and waking. I didn’t think I was doing very well
with the exercise, but on my way back to San Francisco after the weekend, I unexpectedly
found my world was in some way expanded.
A few nights later, I had the first lucid dream I remember
since the serial adventure dreams I
had when I was five years old. In the dream:
It was snowing gently. I was alone on the rooftop of the world, climbing K2. As I made my way
upward through the steeply drifting snow, I was astonished to notice my arms were bare: I was
wearing a short-sleeved shirt, hardly proper dress for climbing the second highest mountain in
the world! I realized at once that the explanation was that I was dreaming! I was so delighted
that I jumped off the mountain and began to fly away, but the dream faded and I awoke.
I interpreted the dream as suggesting that I wasn’t yet prepared for the rigors of Tibetan dream
yoga. But it was also a starting point, and I continued to have lucid dreams occasionally for
eight years before I began to cultivate lucid dreaming in earnest. Incidentally, my impulsive
behavior
when I became lucid is typical of beginners. If I were to have such a dream now, I
would not precipitously jump off the mountain. Instead, I would fly to the top of the mountain
and find out if I was climbing it for any reason besides “because it was there.”

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From his own words, and from Alan Wallace (a personal friend of his), he was a natural lucid dreamer. He lost this ability as he grew up.

Ah alright, thank you.

I was actually wondering about one rather curious sentence from LaBerge as well, which I found on this site;
I figured I might as well ask it here instead of creating a new thread. :P

"It wasn’t until my early twenties that I became interested in the mind.
At that point I was interested in the natural world and assumed I was going to become a chemist or something like that, and when I came to Stanford in 1967 I was a graduate student in chemical physics.
Being in the Bay Area in those days, you can imagine what kinds of things I got interested in (sly laughter) which told me that there was a world inside that was of as much interest as the world out there."

I find the bolded part a little mystifying, do you know what he means there?
The rest of the sentence seems to indicate that he was talking about drugs or spirituality or something.

He's probably alluding to LSD and other psychedelic drug experimentation. Or more generally, the hippie counterculture of the 1960's and all it entails (war protest, recreational drugs, free love, Transcendental Meditation, stuff like that). The "Bay Area" is the area around San Francisco, California, which is a liberal-minded area and home to Stanford University (which LaBerge attended) as well as Berkeley (another liberal-minded university).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sisyphus

He's probably alluding to LSD and other psychedelic drug experimentation. Or more generally, the hippie counterculture of the 1960's and all it entails (war protest, recreational drugs, free love, Transcendental Meditation, stuff like that). The "Bay Area" is the area around San Francisco, California, which is a liberal-minded area and home to Stanford University (which LaBerge attended) as well as Berkeley (another liberal-minded university).

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Thank you. :)
Yeah, the thing about LSD sounds very likely, there is actually a part in Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming where one of his examples of a Perception dreamsign is "Everything looks as though I have taken LSD" (page 44 in my book), so I assume he had some personal experience with that. :cheeky: