Lucid Dreaming as a Second Life. Can We Control Our Dreams?
One in every two people in the world will experience at least one spontaneous lucid dream in their lifetime, but a great many people try to train themselves how to induce lucid dreams 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, UK. The psychologist Keith Hearne is nearing the end of a long night in the laboratory. Out of nowhere, the machine he has been monitoring for over an hour goes haywire. Fifty years later, Hearne will say in an interview: "I felt as though I had received a signal from outer space." That spring day marked a breakthrough: for the first time in history, communication had been established with a person while they were asleep.
When and How We Dream
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Aristotle who observed that people sometimes realize they are dreaming while still in a dream. This phenomenon has come to be known as lucid dreaming. Long before Hearne, many thinkers 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 these unusual states of consciousness. They had little choice: lucid dreams remained accessible only through the dreamer's subjective experience and impossible to measure objectively. For the fledgling psychologists of the early twentieth century, oneironauts — as "professional" dreamers capable of inducing lucid dreams are called — appeared no different from any other sleeper, despite the smoldering ember of consciousness within.
