Chapter 2: History of Lucid Dreaming

[sourcejedi]

I think this chapter has stalled. I'm seeing if we can get anywhere on it by taking it one event at a time, then they can be combined later.

[sourcejedi]

The term "lucid dreaming" was coined by Dutch author and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in his 1913 article A Study of Dreams. The word lucid is derived from the latin word for clear; psychologists use it to refer to clarity of mind. For example, a patient might be said to suffer from prolonged bouts of schizophrenia alternating with brief lucid intervals. In a fully lucid dream you have access to all your mental faculties; your memory of what just happened, logical reasoning, skills and knowledge from waking life. If you read an account of a non-lucid dream [[insert example below]], the faculties of the dreamer often seem somewhat impaired, and it's easy to draw parallels with mental illness. -- It's interesting to know where the term comes from, and it helps demonstrate that lucid dreaming has been a subject of minority interest for quite some time. Please edit/comment mercilessly.

[Kromoh]

It's great to know someone released his sword and cut the first steps through this chapter. This is a dense one, so we might need to camp a few days. Nonsense left apart, the origin of the term "lucid dreaming" is a hell of a first topic for the chapter. Maybe I could develop something, but right now I'm going for my polyphasic nap. When I'm back I'll post whatever is worthy.

[Kromoh]

Ok ok, chapter 2 is a delicate (and potentially annoying) chapter to write. But I think I'll be picking it up: if I don't, I doubt other people ever will (typical perfeccionist heh?). I'll probbaly have time by the end of this week, so why not?

[sourcejedi]

Ok ok, chapter 2 is a delicate (and potentially annoying) chapter to write. Really? Maybe writing history isn't as interesting as the more instructive chapters, but I wouldn't have thought it was a very controversial one, and the history is well documented outside of, um, specific books (), so it's not hard to avoid plagarism (stealing :-)) for this one. But I think I'll be picking it up: if I don't, I doubt other people ever will (typical perfeccionist heh?). I'll probbaly have time by the end of this week, so why not? More power to you. You could post a timeline while you're doing the research, would let me help if I spotted anything interesting, before you'd described each event in detail and threaded it all together.

[Kromoh]

I like the idea of the timeline for organisation purposes, but I'm in favour of plain text for this chapter. Tomorow is friday and I'll have time to start writing it. Today is just not a good day.

[sourcejedi]

I like the idea of the timeline for organisation purposes, but I'm in favour of plain text for this chapter. Oh, definitely. There's a small chance theres something we don't want to cover in detail and can put as a timeline in a sidebar. A list of dates the length of a chapter would really suck though :-).

[Needcatscan]

Ok ok, chapter 2 is a delicate (and potentially annoying) chapter to write. But I think I'll be picking it up: if I don't, I doubt other people ever will (typical perfeccionist heh?). I'll probbaly have time by the end of this week, so why not? Oh thank god! Thanks Kromoh, between family, college, and work I really wouldn't be able to find the time until winter break.

[Needcatscan]

Here's some info I've gathered. Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys – 19th century Hervey de Saint Denys has recently started to be known for his introspective studies on dreams. He wrote down his dreams on a daily basis from the age of 13. In 1867, he anonymously published Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger; observations pratiques (Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Jeremy/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.gif[/IMG]ractical Observations). In this book, he proposed techniques to control dreams, and he described dreams in which the "dreamer is perfectly aware he is dreaming". This particular state of consciousness later came to be called lucid dreaming. In 1867, he first published his book Dreams and how to Guide Them, in which he documented more than twenty years of his own research into dreams. In the book, the Marquis describes the sequential development of his ability to control his dreams, first increasing his dream recall, then becoming aware that he was dreaming. Lastly, he tells us how he became able to awaken from his dreams at will. The Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys was probably the first person to demonstrate that it is possible for anyone to learn to dream consciously. Frederik Willems Van Eeden – 19th-20th centuries He coined the term "lucid dreams" to those dreams where the dreamer knows that they are dreaming. Though he was interested in all aspects of dreaming, he found that these lucid dreams aroused his keenest interest. At first he presented his ideas in a fictional book entitled The Bride of Dreams, because the fictional guise allowed him to freely deal with delicate matters. Then, in 1913, he presented a paper on lucid dreams to the Society for Psychical Research reporting on 352 of his lucid dreams collected between 1898 and 1912 In the paper, he describes the 8 classifications of dream, including wrong waking-ups (more commonly known today as false awakenings) and demon-dreams. It is in this work that he first uses the term "lucid" to describe those dreams where the dreamer is conscious of them happening. Although many of his conclusions contradict the findings of modern researchers, the paper remains a classic.

[Needcatscan]

Stephen LaBerge 1977 to Present 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. “Not all lucid dreams are useful but they all have a sense of wonder about them. If you must sleep through a third of your life, why should you sleep through your dreams, too?” Stephen: I had been interested in lucid dreaming, in a way, since my childhood experience. When I was five years old they had these adventure serials and I would go to the matinees. I had the idea, after a particularly fun dream where I was an undersea pirate, wouldn’t it be fun to go back to that same dream and continue it as in the serial? Nobody told me you couldn’t do that sort of thing, so that night I was back in the same dream, and I remember doing that for weeks. I would have the experience of seeing the surface of the ocean far above me and thinking, I can’t hold my breath this long! Then I’d think, but in these dreams I can breathe dream-water. (child-like laughter) That was all, at that point, that I made of the lucidity, in the sense that I knew it was a dream and that I could have fun in it. 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 took a workshop from Tarthang Tulku, a Tibetan Buddhist, at Esalen and I was surprised at the topic of the workshop, which was essentially asking us to maintain consciousness throughout the twenty-four hours. Tarthang’s English was limited at the time, he’d just arrived from India, and he would repeatedly say nothing more than, "This dream!" and laugh. He was trying to get us to think of our current experience as a dream and to see what it had in common with the nocturnal experiences and the day experiences. After focusing my mind in that way over the course of this weekend, I noticed on my way back to San Francisco, that I felt high. I associated it with the exercise and the expansion of awareness that came from thinking of my waking experiences as a dream and trying to maintain a continuity. A few nights after I came back from the workshop at Esalen, I had the first lucid dream I could remember since my childhood. I was climbing K2 dressed in short sleeves, going up the mountain through the snow drifts. I had the thought, look how I’m dressed, how could I be doing this? It’s because this is a dream. And at that point in my youthful folly, I decided to fly off the mountain and dream big. Personally, sitting here now, I would like to see what it’s like to climb to the top of the second highest mountain in the world. So that piqued my interest in the topic of lucid dreaming and it gradually developed over the next five years and along the way I had an experience that convinced me that developing lucid dream- ing could be something of great value to me. I had a dream in which I was going up a mountain path, and had been hiking for miles and miles. I came to a very narrow bridge across an immensely deep chasm, and looking down I was afraid to go across the bridge. My companion said, "Oh you don’t have to go that way, you can go back the way you came," and he points back an immense distance to the long way around. And somehow that just seemed the hard way of doing this, and I had the thought, if I were to become lucid, I would have no fear in crossing that bridge. Then I sort of noticed the thought, became lucid and crossed the bridge to the other side. When I woke up I thought about the meaning of that and saw that it had an application to life in general. Life is, in a sense, a kind of bridge, and what causes us to lose our balance is fear of the unknown, death, the meaninglessness around us, whatever it might be. Yet if we maintain the right awareness and context, it is possible to cross the bridge. About that same time I decided that I’d finished my seven years in search of the Holy Grail in hippydom and that I should get back to being a scientist. It occurred to me that lucid dreaming could be a dissertation project and that it could be scientifically researched. The experts at the time said it was impossible but I had thought of a way which it could be proven that it was possible.

[Kromoh]

thanks for the useful information. I'll start writing itself tomorow: now I'm going for my homework. Once again thanks and don't worry about not being able to write it. We all have our private lives to deal with. wolf tiger hugs,

[sourcejedi]

I know this is just research so I'm not spell-checking it :-). A few things jumped out and mugged my attention though. The Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys was probably the first person to demonstrate that it is possible for anyone to learn to dream consciously. Tibetan yoga, ~ 5th century? In the paper, he describes the 8 classifications of dream, including wrong waking-ups (more commonly known today as false awakenings) and demon-dreams. It is in this work that he first uses the term "lucid" to describe those dreams where the dreamer is conscious of them happening. Although many of his conclusions contradict the findings of modern researchers, the paper remains a classic. "The 8 classifications of dream(s)" implies that we still use the same 8 categories, possibly under different names, but I don't think that's right. I'd drop the definite article (the word "the"). Stephen LaBerge 1977 to Present Don't forget to include Alan Woseley, the English experiments. These were carried out independently at about the same time LaBerge was doing his initial experiments, though only published later.

[Sugarglider11]

Hey, nobody wrote anything in a while, would you guys like to write some of this? Im putting together what the book has allready and I think we at least a small chapter 2, unless that info is what was supposed to be the chapter, I don't know.

[DeliriousDonkey]

You guys should try to incorporate some myths and folklore in it.. trace down some tribes that were known to lucid dream or something. Cause lucid dreaming isn't something someone invented.

[sourcejedi]

Sorry to sound like an out and out Wikipedian, but we don't have resources lined up for _original_ research, i.e. finding such people and interviewing them :-). My impression of the accounts of lucid dreaming in tribal culture is that they're all very self serving :-(. The canonical case would be the Senoi, who have a significant dreaming culture, but not of LUCID dreaming - despite the initial accounts. Now that's not the case with Tibetan Monks. They're certainly worth a mention. But from what I've seen, there's a fair amount of effort required to dig out anything concrete. It's true that e.g. "LaBerge says the monks have being practicing LDs for over a thousand years", but that's not an authoritative source. I scraped that off a web-page with no indication of where the information actually came from. It's an appeal to authority, and LaBerge isn't actually an authority when it comes to the history of Tibetan Buddhism :-). I definitely agree that we want to show that LDs are something natural though, so people don't go away thinking "lucid dreams were invented in the 1950s by Stephen Laberge"! Going back to Wikipedia, if you look in the history section there are three more Western historical accounts of LDs. I suspect they would be easier to trace. They are also more immediately useful. The first one (Augustine) goes through some philosophical implications of dreaming and LDs in particular. The second (Browne) elaborates on the fascination and fun of LDs. The third (de Saint-Denys) argues that LDs can be taught, and makes more of a considered study of LDs. To me, that's much more interesting than hearing that the monks of Tibet have been doing this for thousands of years. The available accounts are more detailed. I can relate to them better, without having to understand an alien philosophy. I don't worry so much about how much this is something being taken out of context and hyped up. I wouldn't be afraid to mention that LaBerge claims to have met the Dalia Lama and impressed him by explaining the NovaDreamer though! (IIRC that was on a radio show interview I downloaded - I can find the link if you like).

[el dude'arino]

wheres can i buy this lucid dreamings book. is it good.

[Jeff777]

wheres can i buy this lucid dreamings book. is it good. I'm glad you think so!!! Sadly it has not been finished. All the work/research is laid out within this forum...waiting for some noble lucid dreaming pioneers to pickup where the last guys left off. The mere fact that you want to buy it should make any and everyone want to pick this project up.

[Mr. Pig]

I realized that this kinda stopped about a year ago. I would like to help, but I need more info.

[ClouD]

Quote from a letter from Augustine to Evodius in 415 A.D.: On a second night, however, the same youth appeared to Gennadius, and asked whether he recognised him, to which he replied that he knew him well, without the slightest uncertainty. Thereupon he asked Gennadius where he had become acquainted with him. There also his memory failed him not as to the proper reply: he narrated the whole vision, and the hymns of the saints which, under his guidance, he had been taken to hear, with all the readiness natural to recollection of some very recent experience. On this the youth inquired whether it was in sleep or when awake that he had seen what he hadjust narrated. Gennadius answered: "In sleep." The youth then said: "You remember it well; it is true that you saw these things in sleep, but I would have you know that even now you are seeing in sleep." Hearing this, Gennadius was persuaded of its truth, and in his reply declared that he believed it. Then his teacher went on to say: "Where is your body now?" He answered: "In my bed." "Do you know," said the youth, "that the eyes in this body of yours are now bound and closed, and at rest, and that with these eyes you are seeing nothing?" He answered: "I know it." "What, then," said the youth, "are the eyes with which you see me?" He, unable to discover what to answer to this, was silent. While he hesitated, the youth unfolded to him what he was endeavoring to teach him by these questions, and immediately said: "As while you are asleep and lying on your bed these eyes of your body are now unemployed and doing nothing, and yet you have eyes with which you behold me, and enjoy this vision, so, after your death, while your bodily eyes shall be wholly inactive, there shall be in you a life by which you shall still live, and a faculty of perception by which you shall still perceive. Beware, therefore, after this ofharbouring doubts as to whether the life of man shall continue after death. " This believer says that by this means all doubts as to this matter were removed from him. By whom was he taught this but by the merciful, providential care of God?