For this study, people were simply to note the times when they awakened *
in the night, and whether they had just awakened from a dream or a lucid *
dream. This was part of the effort to discover the relationship between *
lucid dreaming and biological clock cycles.
Sixty-four people contributed, making a data set of thousands of *
awakenings. In 79 percent, people had just had a dream. Ninety awakening *
were from lucid dreams (7.6 percent), meaning that about ten percent of *
dreams remembered were lucid. That is a very high number! It seems that *
simply sleeping with the intention to be aware of what is going on *
during the night, whether one is awake or asleep, is enough to stimulate *
lucid dreams for many people. Almost 60 percent of the participants had *
at least one lucid dream during the week in which they were collecting *
times of awakening.
As for the times, lucid dreams happened on average later in the night *
than non-lucid dreams, and non-lucid dreams happened later on average *
than awakenings with no dreams recalled. This corresponds to previous *
work demonstrating that lucid dreaming probability increases with time *
of night. In fact, 90 percent all of the lucid dreams in this study *
occurred after 4 hours of sleep, and fully one half after 6.5 hours of *
sleep.
This is a very important finding. It clearly implies that, if we assume *
that lucid dream induction techniques are most effective when applied *
closest in time to the time when we hope to have a lucid dream, it would *
be best to focus our efforts as close to the optimal time for lucid *
dreaming as possible. The \"Back to the Nap\" experiment also indicated *
that wakefulness and induction exercises work better when practiced at *
6.5 hours into a sleep period than at the beginning of the night.[/b]
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