Lucid dreams
Knowing you are dreaming while you dream — and sometimes steering the dream. A lab-verified phenomenon, learnable with training.
A lucid dream is a dream during which you know you are dreaming. For some, that awareness makes it possible to steer the dream: fly, explore, talk with dream characters, rehearse a skill.
A measured phenomenon
Since the work of Keith Hearne and then Stephen LaBerge at Stanford (late 1970s), dream lucidity has been verifiable in the lab: dreamers signal their lucidity with pre-agreed eye movements, recorded during REM sleep.
The classic techniques
- Dream journal: dream recall is the prerequisite for everything.
- Reality checks: testing whether you are dreaming several times a day, until the reflex shows up inside a dream.
- MILD: repeating an intention before falling asleep.
- WBTB: waking briefly late in the night, then going back to sleep.
The border with out-of-body experiences is an open debate: some see two names for neighboring states, others two distinct experiences.