Lucid Dreaming as a Second Life. Can It Be Controlled?
One in every two people in the world will experience at least one spontaneous lucid dream in their lifetime, but enormous numbers of people try to train themselves in techniques for inducing them on demand. What do psychology and neuroscience tell us about lucid dreaming?
By Piotr Szymanek
It is 12 April 1975. The sun rises lazily over the city of Hull in the United Kingdom. The psychologist Keith Hearne has a long night in the laboratory behind him. Out of nowhere, the machine he has been monitoring for a good hour begins to go haywire. Fifty years later, Hearne will say in an interview: "I felt as though I had received a signal from outer space." For on that spring day a breakthrough occurred: for the first time in history, communication had been established with a person deep in sleep.
When and How We Dream
It will surprise no one that Aristotle had already noted that people who are dreaming sometimes notice that they are in a dream. This phenomenon has been given the name of lucid dreams. Many thinkers long before Hearne reflected on what these dreams are, where they come from, and what potential they hold. They observed their own lucid dreams, attempting various methods of inducing in themselves these peculiar states of consciousness. They had no other option: lucid dreams remained a phenomenon accessible only to the subjective experiences of the dreamer, resistant to measurement. For the fledgling psychologists of the early twentieth century, oneironauts — as "professional" dreamers capable of inducing lucid dreams in themselves are often called — remained as motionless a shell as any other sleeper, despite the smoldering ember of consciousness within.
But, someone might ask, could a person in the middle of a lucid dream not simply move a hand or a foot to let the researcher know they were truly experiencing a lucid dream? They could not — for the same reason we do not leap out of bed every time something alarming happens in an ordinary dream. During sleep we are in effect paralyzed, and this paralysis usually disappears at the precise moment of regaining wakefulness — though it should be noted that a certain percentage of the population experiences sleep paralysis for a brief time even after waking, and many more have had the unpleasant experience of kicking the bedside table in their sleep. As a rule, however, sleep — lucid or otherwise — means that all our muscles remain indifferent to the signals sent by the brain. Well, almost all.
"The eyes," Hearne recalls in an interview. "I thought to myself: this is REM sleep. You can move your eyes!" Sleep — in the sense of a psychophysiological state — is divided into two basic phases, known as NREM (non-rapid eye movement, or deep sleep) and REM (rapid eye movement). These phases alternate throughout the night, with the NREM phase lasting three or even four times as long as REM. Dreams occur most frequently and most vividly during the REM episode, when brain activity increases sharply and the eyes begin to make spontaneous, flickering movements. When Hearne remembered this simple fact, he called his best experimental subject, the oneironaut Alan Worsley, and told him: "Move your eyes!" They agreed on a specific sequence of movements: left and right.
And so, at 8:07 on a spring morning, the electroencephalograph on Worsley's head registered, among the chaotic movements of the eyes, a series of horizontal movements performed deliberately by the subject during a lucid dream. It was a message from behind the curtain — the first communication ever sent from the world of dreams. Yet the true puzzles of lucid dreaming still awaited the psychologists.
Lucid Dreaming: How Time Passes in the Second Life
Hearne was the first person to record a lucid dream on an electroencephalogram, and 12 April has become, unofficially, "Lucid Dreaming Day." On the other side of the Atlantic, however, the American psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge, unaware of Hearne's breakthrough, conducted an analogous experiment in 1980 and published its results in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills. LaBerge later became the public face of lucid dream psychology. He studied, for example, the perception of time in sleeping oneironauts — and as it turned out, ten seconds in a lucid dream, measured by horizontal eye movements, takes the subject approximately the same amount of "real" time. This discovery challenged the widely accepted thesis that the perception of time in dreams is always inaccurate or distorted.
A Swiss-German team led by psychologist Daniel Erlacher recently found, however, that certain activities performed in a lucid dream — such as squats — take up to 40 percent longer than in reality. The authors of the study suggest that this may be caused by the absence of feedback from the muscles, which we receive when performing motor exercises while awake.
In the late 1980s, a boom in lucid dreaming begins. In 1987, LaBerge founds the Lucidity Institute, dedicated to exploring both the benefits of lucid dreaming and the techniques for inducing it. He also publishes his first book on oneironautics, in which he encourages readers to make use of "the power of awakening in dreams." He argues that lucid dreams are a tool for self-exploration, a source of inspiration, and even a means of training motor skills.
In the 1990s the evidence for the latter was anecdotal, but today we know — from a 2015 study by Tadas Stumbrys and colleagues, among others — that practicing simple tasks such as throwing at a target during sleep does indeed improve our skills (though not nearly as much as real practice). Nevertheless, LaBerge's work promoted lucid dreams as a kind of "second life" — why sleep unconsciously when you can control the content of your dreams every night, fulfill your fantasies in them, or at the very least prepare for a darts tournament?
LaBerge and his collaborators at the Lucidity Institute not only encouraged the world to engage in lucid dreaming, but also developed innovative methods for inducing lucid dreams. One of them was the DreamLight — the first lucid dream induction machine in history, designed at the Lucidity Institute — later replaced by an improved version, the NovaDreamer. The operating principle of the device is very simple, though it will not tell us much unless we first take a closer look at the nature of lucid dreams. Perhaps the time has come to set aside the history of ideas and turn to this key question: what, in truth, are lucid dreams, and where do they come from?
Reality Checks: Realize You're Dreaming
In Christopher Nolan's 2010 film Inception, Dom Cobb — a specialist in stealing secrets from people's subconsciousness during sleep — always carries with him a metal top: his personal device for distinguishing waking from the dream world. If the top keeps spinning, it means the protagonist is still asleep.
This motif was based on what oneironauts usually call "reality checks": methods that allow one to determine whether what is happening at a given moment might not, in fact, be a dream. The most popular are the watch test and the reading test: in a dream, the time on a clock usually changes with every glance, and written text is most often illegible — as though our brain, like a computer with a weak graphics card, is unable to generate all the details of the oneiric world.
Looking at a watch and noticing that it shows a different time with each glance can therefore trigger a lucid dream — though some researchers would be prepared to argue that if someone performed a reality check deliberately, they were probably already in a lucid dream beforehand. As with many research questions, the boundaries of the concept are rather murky. The parapsychologist Celia Green noted as early as 1968 that "pre-lucid dreams" occur — dreams in which the dreamer begins to suspect they are in a dream, but ultimately dismisses the thought. They might, for example, look up at the sky and be surprised to see hundreds of shoes floating across it, but instead of concluding "this must be a dream," arrive at the view that today is apparently "shoe day" (an example based on a real dream account).
Nevertheless, one in every two people in the world will experience at least one spontaneous lucid dream in their lifetime, and in the vast majority of these cases the whole thing begins with the realization: "this must be a dream." As questionnaire-based research indicates, this realization most often occurs in response to an exceptionally improbable event in the dream world — a massed dinosaur attack on one's hometown, for instance — an emotional shock accompanying a nightmare, or a feeling known as déjà rêvé (French for "already dreamed," analogous to déjà vu — "already seen"). What connects all these elements is the certainty that the dreamer, in response to the content of the dream, conducts a reasoning process in their mind and arrives at the correct conclusion that they are in a dream. For example: "I found a pirate treasure. I've dreamed about this before. It must be a dream!"
Neurobiological research confirms that during lucid dreams we do indeed perform some kind of reasoning, even though this reasoning often does not lead to correct conclusions (witness the shoe day). This is indicated by specific activations in the frontal part of the brain — in particular in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — that is, in areas involved in reasoning, critical thinking, thought monitoring, and decision-making.
The absence of activity in these regions during ordinary sleep means that even if the Vistula were to turn into a river of chocolate before our eyes, we would not bat an eyelid. During a lucid dream, on the other hand, the prefrontal areas activate and the dreamer gradually becomes aware that they are dreaming. This works in both directions: it has been demonstrated that magnetic stimulation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex increases the likelihood of a lucid dream occurring.
How the Lucid Dreaming Machine Works
Since lucid dreams begin when the sleeper realizes "this is only a dream," the most popular methods of achieving these states are based on cultivating a skeptical attitude toward the surrounding reality. Just as Descartes argued that everything happening around us could be challenged as the content of a dream suggested by an evil demon, so the beginning oneironaut must learn to identify information that may indicate they are in a dream.
While any amateur may from time to time realize they are dreaming when confronted by a spider the size of a car, the professional leaves nothing to chance and trains in more subtle reality checks. They might, for example, set an irregular alarm on their phone and, at every sound, glance at their watch to check whether they are dreaming. After repeating this action many times, a person may one day hear the alarm, look at their watch, and discover that — indeed — they are in a dream.
Keeping a record of the content of one's daily dreams can also be helpful, to increase the chance of the déjà rêvé sensation occurring. Important, however, is the sheer will to find oneself in a lucid dream: research confirms that lucid dreaming can be induced simply by repeating to oneself before falling asleep: "The next time I am dreaming, I will recognize that it is a dream." Some fans of oneironautics, however, have decided not to limit themselves to the above methods and have begun combining them with the NovaDreamer already mentioned. It resembles an ordinary sleep mask, but the machinery concealed within monitors the eyeballs, and upon detecting rapid movements bombards the dreamer with a series of LED lights. Oneironauts are sometimes able to see these lights — woven by the brain into the currently unfolding dream narrative — and as a result realize they are dreaming.
There are also methods that do not engage the cognitive capacities of the dreamer at all, relying instead solely on psychophysiological mechanisms that are not yet well understood. One such method is "Wake Back to Bed." The recipe goes roughly like this: set an alarm for one or two hours earlier than desired, and after waking, try not to fall asleep for approximately 30 to 120 minutes — only then return to bed. A genuine nightmare!
The Drawbacks and Benefits of Lucid Dreams
We have already mentioned certain benefits of lucid dreaming that have led people to view it not only as a form of recreation but as a method of personal development and even self-help. Research does indeed suggest that lucid dreams can improve sleep quality and well-being, and even correlate positively with overall physical and mental health. They may also be a good candidate for a psychotherapeutic tool. A team of researchers led by Garret Yount, for example, observed that people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) coped better with nightmares and other symptoms after attending lucid dreaming workshops.
There are, however, darker sides to oneironautics. One of them is the lucid nightmare — a terrifying dream in which the dreamer is aware they are dreaming but has no control over the content of the dream and cannot wake up. These occur fairly rarely, but training in oneironautics probably also increases the likelihood of these disturbing states.
Other studies suggest that lucid dreaming can reduce sleep quality and lead to heightened anxiety. Additionally, some authors advise caution in oneironautic experiments for people suffering from hallucinations and delusions. As researcher Nirit Soffer-Dudek suggests in Frontiers in Neuroscience, even people not struggling with mental health disorders may, by practicing lucid dreaming too frequently, expose themselves to dissociative states — such as a feeling of separation from reality or a blurring of the boundaries between imagination and waking life.
Research into lucid dreams, however, continues. In 1975, Keith Hearne received the first message from the world of dreams. Nearly fifty years later, researchers at REMspace — a Californian start-up — announced that for the first time they had established communication between two sleeping people.
The subjects slept in their own homes, both connected to EEG equipment monitoring their brain waves. When the first of the sleepers entered a lucid dream, a single randomly selected word was sent to them through an earpiece; they heard it in the dream and repeated it to themselves. The system registered this brain activity and transmitted the same word to the second sleeper, who repeated it immediately upon waking.
The REMspace research still requires independent confirmation, but it may represent a breakthrough in the study of sleep and consciousness — and perhaps even fling wide open the door to our second life.
Orginally published in Tygodnik Powszechny, 12 August 2025. Translated with AI.
