Laurie C. regularly experiences vivid dreaming at sleep onset. Some of her sleep-onset dreams are like the “snapshots” people typically think of as characteristic hypnagogic imagery. Others seem more like full-blown dream films, with her vividly felt presence and active participation in what are sometimes quite extensive sequences of scenes.
Knowing that Ouspensky had been able to maintain awareness in the hypnagogic state, I suggested to Laurie that she too ought to be able to be lucid during sleep-onset dreaming. I helped her practice by watching her fall asleep while she made the effort to retain consciousness. She would often fall asleep within fifteen to thirty seconds, as I could tell by her rolling or rapid eye movements and body twitches. At that point, I would wake her with the question, “What was just happening?” She almost always recalled a vivid dream scene, but rarely became lucid at the time. It seemed to me she needed a reminder. So I asked her to silently repeat the phrase “I’m dreaming” while counting to herself as she fell asleep. And it worked! She would be repeating “one, I’m dreaming; two, I’m dreaming; … forty-four, I’m dreaming,” until suddenly realizing she was dreaming.
After about a week of practice, Laurie was able to dispense with the “I’m dreaming” phrase, and found that simple counting to herself worked as well. In a surprisingly short time, she was able to become lucid in her sleep-onset dreams almost at will.
At this point, we decided to observe her in the sleep lab for three consecutive nights. On these nights, Laurie made an effort to retain consciousness while entering sleep-onset dream states.
On each of these experimental sessions, she repeatedly rested quietly, but vigilantly, and counted to herself (“one, two, three …”, until she began to dream. She usually awakened five to ten seconds later and tape-recorded a description of what she had just experienced. Laurie reported having been lucid in twenty-five of the forty-two resulting dreams. Visual inspection of the polygraph records showed that all of these “dreamlets” (I use the term because none lasted more than several seconds) occurred, whether they were lucid or not, during NREM Stage 1 sleep, with slow eye movements. The following is a sample: “I was in the grocery store, going down an aisle; only I was standing on a cart. It was whizzing real fast. As I went by the Coke and Pepsi bottles, I realized that I was dreaming. I remembered to look at my hands, but they wouldn’t move up to eye level.”
Laurie’s inability to look at her dream hands may point to a significant difference between these sleep-onset lucid “dreamlets” and REM lucid dreams. During REM lucid dreams, the dreamer normally has complete volitional control of his or her dream body. I had wondered if the same would be true at sleep onset, so I asked Laurie to carry out a prearranged dream action of putting her hands before her face when she found herself conscious of dreaming. This seemingly simple task proved impossible, at least in this one case; obviously, more research is needed in order to settle the issue.
…but there is always some other way.