Since the beginning of modern dream science, researchers have been confounded by lucid dreams.
Freud scarcely mentioned them in his Interpretation of Dreams until a late edition, and even then he gave them short shrift. From his papers we know that his patients told him about their lucid dreams, but apparently LDs didn’t fit nicely into his theory so he neglected them.
LDs have also become a fraught issue for more contemporary neuroscientists, who typically need the help of sleep subjects to identify a lucid dream. Tholey, in Germany, and LaBerge, in the US, softened the attitude of psychologists and biologists toward lucid dreaming by demonstrating in the lab that a person could both be “asleep”—as measured by an EEG—and conscious, and that they could communicate this with eye signals.
Over time, both non-lucid and lucid dreams have shown themselves to be more complicated than originally thought. For instance, contrary to what was originally assumed, REM and dreaming are not synonymous. We dream, even lucid dream, during NREM. “Normal” dreams and lucid dreams are not readily distinguishable by looking at an electronic readout. Although the science is getting better. New equipment, and methodologies, can predict the lucid dream brain-state statistically well.
What deeper study is revealing, though, is that lucid and so-called normal dreams are not always so very different. Subjectively, first-hand, of course, a lucid dream is experienced quite differently from a “normal” dream. From the outside, though, a “normal” dream can have pre-frontal cortex activity, and bursts of the same kinds brainwaves exhibited in a lucid dream.
As a dedicated lucid dreamer I think that it’s important to see that lucid dreams and dreams of less lucidity overlap in a number of places. Lucidity isn’t on-or-off. Rather, what makes a fantastically clear lucid dream so distinctive is a critical level of consciousness—not the presence of consciousness per se.
The other, crucial part of realizing that “normal” and lucid dreams are not dichotomous, is considering the very word “normal.” The meaning behind the word is mathematical, statistical—and that’s it.
The body of anthropological research done on dreaming shows that some cultures have far more lucid dreams than others. If half, or even ten percent, of one’s remembered dreams are lucid, what’s the sense of thinking of lucid dreams as abnormal in any real sense?
Of course, most regular LDs don’t have a bias against LDs as being somehow “against the grain” of dreaming, but this attitude is still powerful. As a lucid dreamer I have sometimes ignored the symbolism of lucid dreams, under the assumption that only “normal” dreams can have any communicative content—that is, under the assumption that lucidity somehow interferes with “normal” dreaming.
Experience, and conferring with others, and with the research, has shown that this assumption is false. Lucid dreams, while experientially different, are not categorically different than “normal” dreams in all ways.
Research has also shown that the occurrence of LDs relates directly to a culture’s appreciation of dreaming in general. That is, if a society disregards dreams as unimportant, false and random, and as having no intra-psychological value, that society tends to experience fewer LDs. Meaning: LDs are statistically more normal in places where dreams are valued.
Last, it’s useful, of course, to distinguish between types of experiences. Obviously, in learning lucid dreaming, it’s useful to discern among hypnogogia, sleep paralysis versus light trance, between DILDs and WILDS and the classic out-of-body phenomenology. And it’s useful to discern between non-lucid, pre-lucid, sub-lucid, semi-lucid, and so forth.
But it can be a hindrance to dichotomize the two experiences—both scientifically and personally.
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