Current research?

Hello, this is my first time visiting and posting on this site. I became introduced to lucid dreaming by a friend of mine who decided to track the incredibly odd dreams he would have after working longer, more arduous hours at the office.

The idea didn't seem very far fetched, I was actually quite envious that he had started to study something most of us just write off as 'time wasted' (sleeping that is, well probably not anyone here ;) ).

He continued to keep me updated but as time went on we didn't really speak of it anymore, until I eventually forgot about it. Today I came across an article about lucid dreaming while looking for journal articles and wondered who, if anyone was currently studying lucid dreaming.

I know of Stephen LaBerge, whom at one point was working on a Ph. D at Stanford, a creditable or interesting source to say the least indeed. I've also looked up work by Dr. J. Allan Hobson but their work isn't exactly complimentary from what I can discern.

The question I'm looking to have help with is, who exactly is currently studying lucid dreaming? It seems as if there was interest in it in the late 90's then it became this sort of close knit "underground" practice.

The reason I'm looking for something scholarly in terms of research is due to the fact that I strongly believe this is possible, but wonder why it seems so hard to find articles of studies printed in journals like Nature or Scientific American.

Why does it seem that LaBerge is the only researcher brave enough to explore the topic, where is he now?

Although I believe in the possibility, it's hard to take the information find seriously when it is next to the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland or a cheesy quote from The Matrix.

Thanks

You have a valid point - you don't see a lot of research being done today on it. More practice and less research :)

In a way, we all are studying it. But not in the strict scientific sense that you're looking for.
Perhaps someone else has more up to date info?

PS: Welcome to the forum!

Hi and welcome to the forum.

If you want research articles, maby you should check the Lucidity institutes website, I believe that's where Laberge is now. There are some of those articles on the bottom on the page. I believe they are also running some public experiments where you can contribute to their research. :o

Hope I helped, see you around.

Thanks for your replies, I appreciate them.

I went looking for more information and you are correct that Dr. Stephen LaBerge works with The Lucidity Institute Inc. as he was a speaker at their most recent workshop in Hawaii. The Stanford Psychology Department web page no longer lists any affiliation with Stephen LaBerge, researcher, speaker or otherwise. I'm sure he's busy with his own work now.

I've found lots of great resources and even some articles in Science which may touch on lucid dreaming. Most of the research I found on dreaming was about sleep in general (sleep disorders, patterns, etc.).

At least two researchers at The University of California, Santa Cruz have been studying dream states for some time, Adam Schneider and G. William Domhoff.

I'll include some pretty interesting links. I guess the main conclusion I'm coming to here is that there is still so much that is unknown about the mind (human, animal or otherwise) that it makes solid research of dreams and the extent to which people can control them difficult. Even if some type of solid "scientific evidence" were found, it would probably be a rather vague model since each mind is unique.

I have an idea that lucid dreaming will continue to lurk in the shadowy gray area of sleep/dream research until we understand more about the mind and dreams in general. I personally don't believe there is a universal interpretation of dreams. For example, dreaming of a bright red rose to some could mean love and passion, while it could be traumatic if someone experienced an event where a loved one beat them with a dozen bright red roses (Bad example? :p ) .

It seems like it comes down to a matter of personal exploration and understanding. I'm a frequent day dreamer and while I understand and even instigate my day dreams to fit my mood and the things I want to dream about, my actual dreams are far from controllable or even remotely understandable. I find this so interesting because no one knows me better than me - I should have control, or at least comprehend what my own self wonders shouldn't I?

Very cool, indeed. It's just an area where we simply don't seem to have the ability to show any hard, scientific data on someone's ability to dream in control. After all, we can only take someones word for it or try ourselves. With the way the science community deals with "facts", it seems there's no way that good, solid research or evidence will be submitted or accepted any time soon.

As we know, LaBerge didn't "invent" or discover lucid dreaming, he studied methods of 'training' to trigger them and what could possibly be done with the ability. Although I haven't read all of his work, this is what I get from the overall picture here.

Links & Interesting sources:
The Quantitative Study of Dreams
http://www.dreamresearch.net/

DreamBank: Univ. of California, Santa Cruz
http://www.dreambank.net/

National Sleep Foundation (Link):
"Cycles of Sleeping and Waking with the Doze Family"
(A very good interactive unit on the processes of sleep)
http://www.resisoftip.com/resisoft/n.../preloader.htm

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Very cool, indeed. It's just an area where we simply don't seem to have the ability to show any hard, scientific data on someone's ability to dream in control. After all, we can only take someones word for it or try ourselves. With the way the science community deals with "facts", it seems there's no way that good, solid research or evidence will be submitted or accepted any time soon.

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Not so, laberge himself has proved the existence of lucid dreaming. As most know, while dreaming the body is paralysed, this is most likely to stop the dreamer moving around physically while dreaming. The eyes however arnt paralysed, and the rapid eye movement effect is supposedly generated by the movement of eyes in the dream. To cut a long story short laberge proved the existence of concious dreaming by getting dreamers to signal with specific eye movements while dreaming. The monitoring equipment showed that the participant was still dreaming, but they recieved the exact signals and the participant later confirmed sending them.
In effect its a method to allow the dreamer to communicate with the outside world.. heres a paste from wiki also:

Rapid eye movement (REM) and communication during sleep: during dreaming sleep the eyes move rapidly. Scientific research has found that these eye movements correspond to the direction in which the dreamer is "looking" in his/her dreamscape; this apparently enabled trained lucid dreamers to communicate the content of their dreams as they were happening to researchers by using eye movement signals.[31] This research produced various results, such as that events in dreams take place in real time rather than going by in a flash.

I highly recommend the following page.. It has graphs n everything! :D. It shows laberge's work on communication from lucid dreamers through eye movement and breathing etc.

http://www.lucidity.com/slbbs/index.html

Hope this helps,

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The eye-movement signalling methodology mentioned above forms the basis for a powerful approach to dream research: Lucid dreamers can remember pre-sleep instructions to carry out experiments marking the exact time of particular dream events with eye movement signals, allowing precise correlations between the dreamer's subjective reports and recorded physiology, and enabling the methodical testing of hypotheses.

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Wow, just wow. This certainly does help, this is exactly the type of study I was looking for. Not being a person who can actually engage in lucid dreaming myself, I never would have fathomed that the (no doubt very experienced?) lucid dreamer in this case would be able to physically control eye movement in their dream state. Let alone actually correlate thoughts and actions in a dream with memory associated with a wake state. I'm sitting here dumbfounded that this is actually possible.

While I originally believed that controlling the actions in your dreams a possibility, I never would have imagined (in my wildest dreams :D ) that both wake and dream states could, well sort of work together in a sense.

The idea that someone could have the ability to chose which information to remember before falling asleep then actually perform those specific eye movements from within the dream is just mind blowing.

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Figure 3. Voluntary control of respiration during lucid dreaming. LaBerge and Dement (1982) recorded three lucid dreamers who were asked to either breathe rapidly or to hold their breath (in their lucid dreams), marking the interval of altered respiration with eye movement signals as shown in the figure. The subjects reported successfully carrying out the agreed-upon tasks a total of nine times, and in every case, a judge was able to correctly predict on the basis of the polygraph recordings which of the two patterns had been executed (binomial test, p < .002).

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Again, amazing. The fact that a person could control breathing patterns from a deep sleep is... I don't even know the word to describe it.

What is really amazing about this paper is Figure 4.

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Morse code communication from the lucid dream. Evidence of voluntary control of other muscle groups during REM was found by LaBerge, Nagel, Dement, and Zarcone (1981) while testing a variety of lucidity signals. We observed that a sequence of left and right dream-fist clenches resulted in a corresponding sequence of left and right forearm twitches as measured by EMG. Here the subject sends a Morse code signal with left and right fist clenches corresponding to dots and dashes, respectively. Hence the message translates as "SL" (... .-..), the subject's initials.

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:eek:

Uh, oh wow. So there is spinal paralysis however signals or 'motor output' can still be voluntarily sent to chosen parts of your body while in REM sleep. Who were these people like S.L. who were involved in these studies? They had to have been extremely experienced with lucid dreaming I imagine correct?

I stand proudly and curiously corrected, thanks!

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The idea that someone could have the ability to chose which information to remember before falling asleep then actually perform those specific eye movements from within the dream is just mind blowing.

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If you look over at the monthly challenge you'll see that many of the dreamers here often take the memory of tasks into the dream world and then attempt to complete them. Of course there's no direct proof such as that supplied in the laberge study, but from personal experience i can say that memory can be accessed from dreaming... though not as smoothly as in a normal waking state.

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So there is spinal paralysis however signals or 'motor output' can still be voluntarily sent to chosen parts of your body while in REM sleep.

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It appears so... Ever see a dog or cat while sleeping? when they begin twitching... it could be the same thing.

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Who were these people like S.L. who were involved in these studies? They had to have been extremely experienced with lucid dreaming I imagine correct?

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I think Laberge et al would have put a call out for lucid dreamers to participate in the study. To take part in such experiments Id imagine you would need a very high lucid success rate. If i was heading the study id want participants who could guarantee me at least 1 lucid a night so as not to waste hours of data gathering.

ohh, and welcome to the forum :mrgreen:

Thanks again RooJ! I can tell this is going to be a great place to further my understanding of lucid dreaming. ;)

You mentioned that Laberge did not invent lucid dreaming - True. I can tell you that Tibetan monks have been doing it for millenium. The other thing you'll want to take a look at if you're trying to appreciate Lucid Dreaming is the topic of Tibetan Dream Yoga. I have personally found this technique to be more powerful than anything discussed in western culture - and by no means do I consider myself an expert at it.

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If you want research articles, maby you should check the Lucidity institutes website, I believe that's where Laberge is now.

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I went looking for more information and you are correct that Dr. Stephen LaBerge works with The Lucidity Institute Inc. as he was a speaker at their most recent workshop in Hawaii. The Stanford Psychology Department web page no longer lists any affiliation with Stephen LaBerge, researcher, speaker or otherwise. I'm sure he's busy with his own work now.

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I would just like to note that Stephen LaBerge actually started the lucidity institute. Info here: http://lucidity.com/info.html

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Originally Posted by sekurit

... Not being a person who can actually engage in lucid dreaming myself, I never would have fathomed that the (no doubt very experienced?) lucid dreamer in this case would be able to physically control eye movement in their dream state...

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Why don't you want to engage in lucid dreaming yourself? You don't have to go all "hard core" about it. The simple act of observation of your dreams will probably lead to spontaneous LDs from time to time. There are also those simple techniques like staying still when waking up from a dream, that can also induce them.

Try it yourself, it's a very unique and amazing experience, a new kind of reality. Who knows, you might be successful on your first try.

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Wow, just wow. This certainly does help, this is exactly the type of study I was looking for. Not being a person who can actually engage in lucid dreaming myself, I never would have fathomed that the (no doubt very experienced?) lucid dreamer in this case would be able to physically control eye movement in their dream state. Let alone actually correlate thoughts and actions in a dream with memory associated with a wake state. I'm sitting here dumbfounded that this is actually possible.

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Why can't you engage in it? It's not as hard as it seems. It's much more possible than most people think. The proof is that most people in this website have already had a few lucid dreaming experiences.

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Originally Posted by sekurit

" Morse code communication from the lucid dream. Evidence of voluntary control of other muscle groups during REM was found by LaBerge, Nagel, Dement, and Zarcone (1981) while testing a variety of lucidity signals. We observed that a sequence of left and right dream-fist clenches resulted in a corresponding sequence of left and right forearm twitches as measured by EMG. Here the subject sends a Morse code signal with left and right fist clenches corresponding to dots and dashes, respectively. Hence the message translates as "SL" (... .-..), the subject's initials. "

Uh, oh wow. So there is spinal paralysis however signals or 'motor output' can still be voluntarily sent to chosen parts of your body while in REM sleep.

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That's not even the most impressive use of this ability I've seen. Some people here say that they're able, while lucid dreaming, to notice that they're alarm clock is ringing, and reach out and turn it off without ever waking up.

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That's not even the most impressive use of this ability I've seen. Some people here say that they're able, while lucid dreaming, to notice that they're alarm clock is ringing, and reach out and turn it off without ever waking up.

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Sometimes in lucid dreams people a "middle state" in which you feel your body in bed while lucid dreaming. Even so, if you move your body you come out of sleep paralysis and wake up. Never heard of any lucid dream "guru" that could do such a thing.

I think it's definately possible to be free of sleep paralysis yet still be dreaming, after all, that's what sleep walking is. It's just a lot harder to induce and maintain while you're lucid dreaming. Here's the thread where I heard of the alarm clock thing.

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Originally Posted by Serith

I think it's definately possible to be free of sleep paralysis yet still be dreaming, after all, that's what sleep walking is. It's just a lot harder to induce and maintain while you're lucid dreaming. Here's the thread where I heard of the alarm clock thing.

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Very good point. Although in sleepwalking your body can move completely and the dream still continues and in the alarm clock case only the arm is moving and it's hard to keep the dream going, which gives evidence that moving during a lucid dream will ultimately wake one up.

Are you actually dreaming while sleep walking or just actually sleeping? I've also heard that it was "impossible" to snore while dreaming. I'm not sure I just wanted to note that.

Thanks for the information everyone, there's a lot of good points here.

The reason I'm 'not able to' or haven't tried as of yet is because I literally just found this site yesterday and was still trying to wrap my head around the possibilities and the science before I went jumping in. When I was first introduced to the subject I didn't really feel I had the time nor desire to devote to practicing it, I guess I just didn't really understand much about the subject to want to explore it further.

I did start a journal last night/this morning. I was able to remember 2 dreams, that's one or two more than I usually do. I kept telling myself I would remember my dream when awaking prior to falling asleep. I'm not sure if that had an actual effect or if it was just coincidence. But hey, I remembered. ;)

I'd love to be able to do this. I'm going to keep up with my journal and continue asking questions and reading all I can here and hopefully I'll be able to one day sky dive in my dreams since I never think I'll get up the courage to do it while awake. :)

Thanks!

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Originally Posted by sekurit

Are you actually dreaming while sleep walking or just actually sleeping?

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That's an interesting question, I didn't know for sure, so I looked it up. Apparently I was mistaken. According to this article, and what I read on Wikipedia, sleepwalking doesn't occur in dreaming, but happens when you spontaneously snap out of very deep sleep, and the brain state that causes it is a unique combination of that of being in deep sleep, and being awake.

Sleep walking is a pretty neat topic. I kind of assumed anyone who had experienced it in their lives did when they were children, and stopped as they grew older. That seems like it's not the case.

I wanted to throw a quick reply in and include a couple good resources for anyone interested in research surrounding lucid dreaming.

One is the pubmed search page, a service of the National Library of Medicine. Turns out I was looking in the wrong places for research on LD, I'm used to searching general science journals, not medical journals (doh!) :rolleyes: You'll notice 9 pages of studies returned on this search alone. You can search for 'lucid dream' to get specific results. Not all articles are accessible without some type of subscription however some people here may be able to access articles at their public library or university library if they are a current student.

This shows the diversity of the studies regarding LD by very reputable universities throughout the world. If you see an article you like, follow the link and look near the upper right hand corner of the abstract page for some type of 'free access' link, if one is available.

Another interesting source is the Journal of Sleep Research's free pages. Simply click on the year and issue you'd like to view. There are HTML pages and pdf's available.

Which leaves me to wonder why people find lucid dreaming as something extremely paranormal or impossible? Even journal articles not specifically pertaining to lucid dreaming make frequent references to it, albeit as a rare occurrence but it has been shown that with practice they can occur more frequently. As many people reading this can attest. ;)

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Originally Posted by sekurit

Which leaves me to wonder why people find lucid dreaming as something extremely paranormal or impossible? Even journal articles not specifically pertaining to lucid dreaming make frequent references to it, albeit as a rare occurrence but it has been shown that with practice they can occur more frequently. As many people reading this can attest. ;)

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I think it's mostly by association. Lucid dreaming can seem quite similar to astral projection and out of body experiences (many think that they are simply unusual forms of lucid dreaming), so many people interested in those things are interested in it. Since it is associated with AP and OOBEs, which are considered very paranormal by most people, and it is often practiced by people interested in the paranormal, people who don't know better assume that lucid dreaming must be paranormal as well.

Only relatively recently was lucid dreaming actually 'proven' by a firm scientific test. (note: proven used loosely)
Prior to that, it was considered a kooky bit of rubbish.