{"id":69072,"date":"2024-07-01T11:17:59","date_gmt":"2024-07-01T11:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com"},"modified":"2025-07-20T16:32:26","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T16:32:26","slug":"living-in-a-lucid-dream","status":"publish","type":"wpm-article","link":"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/living-in-a-lucid-dream","title":{"rendered":"Living In A Lucid Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The first time it happened, it was an accident. But every dream is.<\/p><p>It would have been my last REM cycle of the night, had I been able to sleep. Instead, for the previous six hours, I had counted sheep, had dressed for imaginary occasions in my mind, had tried the Army sleep techniques, alternately imagined myself in a black velvet hammock and in a canoe on a calm, still lake. I\u2019d meditated. I\u2019d thought of my mother, a lifelong insomniac who has rarely slept more than four hours a night in her life. I\u2019d tried everything and given up. All I could do was wait for morning.<\/p><iframe id=\"noa-web-audio-player\" style=\"border: none\" src=https:\/\/embed-player.newsoveraudio.com\/v4?key=n0e13g&#038;id=https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/living-in-a-lucid-dream\/&#038;bgColor=F3F3F3&#038;color=6D6D6D&#038;playColor=F3F3F3&#038;progressBgColor=F7F7F7&#038;progressBorderColor=F3F3F3&#038;titleColor=383D3D&#038;timeColor=6D6D6D&#038;speedColor=6D6D6D&#038;noaLinkColor=6D6D6D&#038;noaLinkHighlightColor=039BE5 width=\"100%\" height=\"110px\"><\/iframe><p>The dream grabbed my ankles first, pulled at me like someone dislodging a drain. Out it tossed me through my sliding glass window, over the garden, over my quiet street, over the dark sleeping skyline, a ragdoll flung into the Santa Anas. I soared high enough to see Los Angeles\u2019s motherboard of electric light. I could see the city in perfect detail below. I was asleep \u2014 no, I was awake! I <em>felt<\/em> the cold whipping through my hair as I tumbled like a deflating balloon through the sky. I felt the miles beneath me. I felt the warm pillow beneath my cheek. I dove, flew, dipped, conscious of it all.<\/p><p>So <em>this<\/em> is a lucid dream, I thought.<\/p><p>More than half of adults will have this <a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/27337287\/\">experience<\/a> or one like it at some point in their lives. They\u2019ll go to sleep, and as their REM cycles accumulate, as night shades into morning, as their sports car turns into a banana, they will suddenly realize, as I did: This is not real. This is a dream.<\/p><p>The flash of lucidity can come as quite a shock, enough to startle a novice into waking. But if you can hang on and stay conscious, you\u2019ll be in for the ride of your life.<\/p><p>After the first one, my curiosity was piqued. I started lurking in online forums, reading accounts of similar experiences from communities of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/Oneironauts\/\">oneironauts<\/a>,\u201d or dream explorers. From them I learned that lucid dreams need not be a fluke experience: I could cultivate and, with some practice, control them.<\/p><p>The first thing I needed to do was establish a baseline awareness of the difference between waking and dreaming using a technique called \u201ccritical state testing.\u201d This is how it works: Several times a day, ask yourself if what you are experiencing is a dream. To make sure you\u2019re awake, count your fingers. Plug your nose. Look at your watch, then look again to see if the numbers have moved.<\/p><p>If you do this often enough, the habit will spill over into your dreams. And when it does, you\u2019ll find that your fingers are jelly. That you can breathe with your nose plugged. That your watch is unreadable. \u201cDream standard time,\u201d the psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge called it in his 1990 manual, \u201cExploring the World of Lucid Dreaming\u201d: asleep and awake at once.<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-glimpses-from-the-dreamworld\"><strong>Glimpses From The Dreamworld<\/strong><\/h2><p>Lucid dreams are as ancient as the mind. They\u2019ve long been central to the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, which teaches the cultivation of conscious awareness even in deep sleep. In the West, the philosophical literature of lucidity reaches back to <a href=\"https:\/\/classics.mit.edu\/Aristotle\/dreams.html\">Aristotle<\/a>. Ren\u00e9 Descartes, in his first \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/yale.learningu.org\/download\/041e9642-df02-4eed-a895-70e472df2ca4\/H2665_Descartes'%2520Meditations.pdf\">Meditation<\/a>,\u201d famously proposed that it\u2019s impossible to prove the difference between dreaming and wakefulness on empirical grounds alone. Friedrich Nietzsche <a href=\"https:\/\/www.themarginalian.org\/2016\/04\/21\/nietzsche-on-dreams\/\">wrote<\/a> accounts of his own lucid dreams.<\/p><p>But in the modern sciences, the subject remained unexplored well into the 20th century. Even by the late 1970s, most scientists and psychologists believed that lucid dreams were the product of fleeting awakenings during sleep, misremembered in the morning. The very idea of conscious awareness during sleep was considered impossible to measure. After all, subjective accounts of dreamers couldn\u2019t be quantified \u2014 how could a dreamer really know the difference between <em>dreaming <\/em>that they were conscious and actually <em>being <\/em>conscious?<\/p><p>Anyone who has ever had a lucid dream knows this difference intuitively, but without a measurable physiological sign, lucidity was relegated to the anecdotal, subjective experience of dreamers. That is, until someone thought to dig deeper, and look \u2014 as though lifting a veil \u2014 behind their eyelids.<\/p><p>In the early 1950s, a graduate student named <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/science-nature\/the-stubborn-scientist-who-unraveled-a-mystery-of-the-night-91514538\/\">Eugene Aserinsky<\/a> hooked his 8-year-old son Armond up to a rudimentary brain-wave machine he had dragged up from the basement of a University of Chicago building. Aserinsky did not relish sleep research, at the time on the fringes of science, and the prospect of spending his nights awake, observing sleeping subjects, seemed \u201cas exciting as warm milk.\u201d<\/p><p>In the bleary morning, looking over a half-mile of polygraph paper, he despaired. The ink pens had drawn jagged lines that looked suspiciously like the <span data-note=\"The movement of the eye between fixation points.\" class=\"eos-footnote\">saccades<\/span> his son\u2019s eyes made when they\u2019d calibrated the machine. They showed the eye movements of a waking person. But his son had been out cold on the lab\u2019s army cot all night. \u201cThe research project was blowing up before me,\u201d he later recalled.<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      &#8220;The dream grabbed my ankles first, pulled at me like someone dislodging a drain. Out it tossed me through my sliding glass window, over the garden, over my quiet street, over the dark sleeping skyline, a ragdoll flung into the Santa Anas.&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/69072\"\n        data-a2a-title='\"The dream grabbed my ankles first, pulled at me like someone dislodging a drain. Out it tossed me through my sliding glass window, over the garden, over my quiet street, over the dark sleeping skyline, a ragdoll flung into the Santa Anas.\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>As it turned out, there was nothing wrong with the machine. Following further study, Aserinsky discovered that his son\u2019s sleeping brain was not \u2014 as believed by practically everyone, particularly his thesis advisor, the venerable sleep scientist Nathaniel Kleitman \u2014 simply <em>off. <\/em>Rather, brains roar to life in the darkness, in periods of active, \u201cparadoxical\u201d sleep that seemed to coincide with dreaming. Aserinsky considered naming the phenomenon \u201cjerky eye movements\u201d but, hoping to avoid being called a jerk himself, opted instead for \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.118.3062.273\">rapid eye movements<\/a>,\u201d or REM.<\/p><p>When Aserinsky left dream science behind in 1953, he passed the baton to a medical student, William C. Dement, who\u2019d go on to establish the world\u2019s first sleep disorders clinic at Stanford University. Years later, during a Stanford sleep study, Dement woke a subject during a period of unusually consistent back-and-forth eye movements. As LaBerge, once a student of Dement\u2019s, recounted it, the subject had been dreaming about a ping-pong match. His eye movements during REM sleep had corresponded to his dream-gaze: left, right, left, right, following the phantom ball.<\/p><p>This anecdote sparked an idea in LaBerge. The study of lucid dreaming had always been stymied by its dependence on subjective self-reports. But eye movements are measurable. If a subject could <em>deliberately<\/em> move their eyes in a dream, LaBerge reasoned, then they could signal to outside observers, in real-time, that they were <em>awake<\/em> in there.<\/p><p>He designed an experiment around this premise, tucking a group of experienced lucid dreamers into bed at the Stanford sleep lab and asking them to make a series of prearranged eye movements the moment they became lucid. The eye measurements, unmistakable ping-pong volleys on the polygraph paper, corresponded precisely with the dreamers\u2019 waking reports \u2014 all in the depths of REM sleep.<\/p><p>These \u201csignal-verified\u201d lucid dreams changed sleep research forever. Modern lucid dream studies rely on left-right-left-right eye signals to time-stamp experimental tasks and receive messages from the dreamworld. Lucid dreamers have been asked to signal before and after counting to 10, to measure if time unspools in dreams at the same speed as in waking life. (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.frontiersin.org\/journals\/psychology\/articles\/10.3389\/fpsyg.2013.01013\/full\">It does<\/a>.) They\u2019ve been tasked to signal, with their eyes alone, the answers to simple math problems piped into speakers in the sleep room to establish if two-way communication is possible between a dreamer and a waking experimenter. (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cell.com\/current-biology\/fulltext\/S0960-9822(21)00059-2?_returnURL=https:\/\/linkinghub.elsevier.com\/retrieve\/pii\/S0960982221000592?showall=true\">It is<\/a>.) Eyes, windows of the soul, open the door to dreams too.<\/p><p>But what is <em>behind<\/em> that door, exactly? And what is it the lucid dreamers see in there?<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-alive-and-mystically-beautiful\"><strong>Alive And Mystically Beautiful<\/strong><\/h2><p>I began my critical state testing without much expectation of what it might bring. At first, I felt weird counting my fingers. Would my friends think I\u2019d had a stroke? Had I been Reddit-brained? Was I no better than one of those people who believes life is a simulation? But the ritual was a good reminder to put down my phone. I began enjoying the blips of mindfulness it brought to my otherwise scatterbrained existence. My own hands took on the trippy quality that I remembered from being on mushrooms in college. It only took a few days for the habit to show up in my dreams.<\/p><p>Dreams are almost always phenomenally embodied. We look out onto the dreamscape and experience its uncanny forms and flavors largely from within an immersed, first-person perspective. Philosophers like to say that a dream is a \u201cself-in-a-world\u201d experience. Even as its fantastical physics support impossible actions like flying, it can never quite succeed in tearing mind from limb. You can never witness your own death in a dream, for example, because if you did, there would be no <em>you<\/em> left to dream it. As the philosopher <a href=\"https:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/books\/hardcover\/9780691220093\/when-animals-dream\">David M. Pe\u00f1a-Guzm\u00e1n<\/a> has written, \u201cThere is no dream without a dream ego, no dream ego without a dream body, and no dream body without a dream body-image.\u201d<\/p><p>But our dream bodies are only loose sketches of the real thing. When I\u2019m awake, my hands have ink stains and nagging splinters. I have 10 fingers, and the signet ring I wear on my right hand reads \u201cJB,\u201d my husband\u2019s initials. The first time I thought to examine my hands in a dream, though, they looked like a bouquet of wilting fingers. The signet ring was etched with unreadable glyphs. It\u2019s difficult to put into words the feeling this gave me. One of the key attributes of dreams is that they feel real in the moment. When I looked at my hands and saw the mutant flippers of a Midjourney hallucination, I felt the walls drop. My whole body flushed. Nothing was real here \u2014 least of all <em>me<\/em>.<\/p><p>The imprecise texture of the dream-body is a marked contrast to the dream landscape, which can be extraordinarily detailed, even growing in complexity under close examination. One of the earliest written accounts of a lucid dream in medical literature, <a href=\"https:\/\/dreamscience.ca\/en\/documents\/New%2520content\/lucid%2520dreaming%2520pdfs\/vanEeden_PSPR_26_1-12_1913.pdf\">recorded<\/a> by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in the late 19th century, highlights this phenomenon:<\/p><div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\"><p>I was floating through a landscape with bare trees, knowing that it was April, and I remarked that the perspective of the branches and twigs changed quite naturally. Then I made the reflection, during sleep, that my fancy would never be able to invent or to make an image as intricate as the perspective movement of little twigs seen in floating by.\n          <div class=\"eos-subscribe-push\">\n            \n            <a target=\"https:\/\/shop.noemamag.com\/?utm_source=MiddleCTA&utm_medium=website\" href=\"https:\/\/shop.noemamag.com\/?utm_source=MiddleCTA&utm_medium=website\" data-wpel-link=\"internal\">Read Noema in print.<\/a>\n            \n          <\/div>\n        <\/p>\n\n<!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      &#8220;Lucid dreams are as ancient as the mind.&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/69072\"\n        data-a2a-title='\"Lucid dreams are as ancient as the mind.\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><\/div><\/div><p>In his dream, van Eeden experienced a moment of reflection as he observed the remarkable naturalness of each little branch and twig passing beneath his flying body. The trees didn\u2019t appear to him as imprecise, or \u201cdreamlike\u201d \u2014 quite the opposite. He even thought to himself that such a landscape, although fantastic, <em>must<\/em> be real because there was no way his own mind could have rendered those spare branches in such detail. Such reflections are considered \u201cpre-lucid\u201d because they signal the dreamer\u2019s stirring awareness \u2014 their nagging feeling that something is <em>off.<\/em><\/p><p>In another classic dream <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblio.com\/book\/astral-projection-record-out-body-experiences\/d\/1459779131\">report<\/a>, the early 20th-century occultist and researcher Hugh Callaway recounted observing that the paving stones outside his home had changed orientation, turning parallel to the curb. This act of noticing brought the true nature of his dream into focus:<\/p><div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\"><p>Then the solution flashed upon me: though this glorious summer morning seemed as real as it could be, I was dreaming! \u2026 Instantly, the vividness of life increased a hundred fold. Never had sea and sky and trees shone with such glamorous beauty; even the commonplace houses seemed alive and mystically beautiful.<\/p><\/div><\/div><p>In dreams as in waking life, attention makes the world alive. As many oneironauts have by now realized, critical state testing is not very different from mindfulness, meditation or similar practices of closely examining, sensing and being present with the world. These practices don\u2019t only help us distinguish between waking and dreaming; they enrich our experience of both states.<\/p><p>In my own lucid dreams, a ripe, summer stone-fruit from the market explodes with flavor. The sensation of someone licking my belly feels wet. Pain and pleasure unfold in their phenomenal fullness. But this is always the case. The sea and sky always shine with their glamorous beauty. The world is detailed and rich. How often do I really <em>taste <\/em>a peach? How often do I take the time to examine the paving stones? Of course it\u2019s trippy to examine my own hands: I never do it. I rarely look at <em>anything<\/em> so closely.<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-higher-consciousness\"><strong>Higher Consciousness<\/strong><\/h2><p>As the philosophers <a href=\"https:\/\/psycnet.apa.org\/record\/2007-09897-009\">Jennifer Windt and Thomas Metzinger<\/a> have observed, we travel through our lives as \u201cnaive realists,\u201d assuming that as we perceive, touch and taste the world, we\u2019re interfacing directly with some external, stable reality. But in truth, all experience, including our conscious experience of selfhood, relies on input from a chaotic world and is mediated by our limited sensory organs and shaped by our subjective internal landscape. Our model of reality is, in philosophical terms, \u201ctransparent,\u201d so convincing as to be invisible. In this sense, dreams aren\u2019t so different from waking experience: They\u2019re both illusions we take, falsely, to be real.<\/p><p>\u201cIn normal experience, we give ourselves over to the world without really questioning whether it holds at the seams or not,\u201d explained Pe\u00f1a-Guzm\u00e1n, whose work explores the dreaming lives of animals. \u201cWhat happens in lucidity is that you begin to attend to the seams and to the cracks \u2014 you begin attending to the fact that this is a constructed space, a model, a simulation.\u201d<\/p><p>The process of attending to the seams is what cognitive scientists call <em>metacognition<\/em>: the ability to think about thinking. Many philosophers believe that metacognition in dreams requires the capacity for language, since one cannot make the judgement \u201cI am in a dream\u201d without a subject and a predicate. But Pe\u00f1a-Guzm\u00e1n argues that animals may be able to recognize the oddness of their dreams in a more affective and embodied way \u2014 to feel, without forming a linguistic judgement, that their world\u2019s gone weird. As with lucidity in people, this is above all a matter of <em>noticing.<\/em><\/p><p>That\u2019s why techniques to cultivate lucid dreams, like counting fingers or examining the numbers on a clock, ask us to scrutinize the world. In people&nbsp;\u2014 and I sincerely hope in animals too \u2014 close attention sparks sudden clarity. This may take many forms. As Pe\u00f1a-Guzm\u00e1n said, a dog may dream in smell, a bird in song. \u201cThink about an electric eel that senses and produces electricity,\u201d he said. \u201cIt&#8217;s conceivable that eel will have electric dreams, and there\u2019s no way for us to even imagine what that is, because we don&#8217;t know what it means to experience electricity as meaningful. But they do.\u201d<\/p><p>For humans, this phenomenal feast has another, more specifically cognitive flavor, too: the pleasure of awareness itself. Dreaming and waking perception are both illusory; they\u2019re models constructed by our brains that turn sensory stimulus, or its absence, into meaning. In waking life, short of a heavy psychedelic experience, that illusion is all-encompassing; there\u2019s no other level of consciousness to \u201cwake up\u201d into.<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      \u201cIn dreams as in waking life, attention makes the world alive.\u201d    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/69072\"\n        data-a2a-title='\u201cIn dreams as in waking life, attention makes the world alive.\u201d'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>But in lucid dreams, we can examine the construction closely. Does this make a lucid dream <em>more <\/em>conscious than waking? Is it something, perhaps, just shy of enlightenment?<\/p><p>I asked the philosopher Jennifer Windt these questions when I reached her across the sleep-wake divide; as Los Angeles shaded into night, it was already the next morning in Melbourne, where Windt is senior lecturer of philosophy at Monash University. She winced. \u201cI would struggle with that description,\u201d she said. \u201cI think that really assumes that consciousness can be neatly ordered in levels.\u201d Windt is part of a school of philosophers painting a far less hierarchical, more multidimensional portrait of consciousness, one informed by close study of edge cases like out-of-body experiences, lucid dreams, mind-wanderings and hyper-realistic false awakenings.<\/p><p>\u201cTraditionally, it&#8217;s been thought that not only are sleep and waking opposites, but that they impose a kind of rift, a sharp distinction between conscious states,\u201d she explained. But recent empirical and theoretical work supports the idea that consciousness takes many forms along a spectrum between sleep and waking. Daydreams and mind-wanderings, for example, may be caused by spells of \u201clocal sleep\u201d in the waking brain, and lucid dreams, which are linked to the reactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex \u2014 the seat of executive ego function, which is turned off during normal REM sleep \u2014 can be thought of as shades of waking consciousness in the gradient of sleep.<\/p><p>According to Windt\u2019s work, a dream is an immersive, spatiotemporal hallucination, an experience of being present in a world where thoughts constitute reality. But perhaps such experiences can happen when we\u2019re awake, too. \u201cI think we should remain open to the possibility that if we define these states phenomenologically,\u201d Windt said, \u201cwe might find them occurring in different behavioral states as well.\u201d<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-what-a-good-hologram\"><strong>What A Good Hologram<\/strong><\/h2><p>Every time I go to sleep, I think a new world into being and put myself at its center. I used to take this nightly miracle for granted because in dreams we all think with an immediacy and directness that leaves no room for distanced self-awareness. When the lucidity comes on, however, autobiographical memories come rushing back. I can compare the dream to waking life or to previous dreams. I can see clearly that the dream phone in my dream hand is made of Jell-O because I have access to \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC2737577\/\">secondary consciousness<\/a>,\u201d or the meta-awareness of my own state.<\/p><p>I can\u2019t say I\u2019m putting that secondary consciousness to much use yet; mostly, I look for the seams. I find myself at a party in an unfamiliar house and I touch the walls, raid the fridge. What\u2019s in there? Do the vegetables vanish when I close the door or do they have a little hoedown, like in an old cartoon? I wander into the den and turn on the TV. On the news, there\u2019s a map of a country called \u201cOrovno.\u201d Did I name this country, draw this map? <em>Borges would love this shit<\/em>, I think. I ask a dream-character his name, trying to ascertain if he is, in some sense, me. He says: \u201cJeremy Allen White.\u201d Ok, maybe not.<\/p><p>Lucidity advocates like LaBerge, who parlayed his early Stanford lucidity research into a long career as a dream guru, advise their acolytes that dream-control is a learned skill. With time, they promise, I can become a master of my dream domain, commanding characters to my will and redecorating the landscape to my tastes. I can stock my own fridge, draw my own maps, use the dream as a rehearsal space, perfect my tennis backhand, conquer my fear of public speaking. This emphasis on control and optimization doesn\u2019t entice me much. It seems to diminish some of what makes dreams interesting to begin with \u2014 their weirdness and mystery, their associative logic.<\/p><p>\u201cThe thing that makes a dream exciting, at least for me, is that it&#8217;s <em>not<\/em> the waking world,\u201d said Adam Haar Horowitz, a dream researcher and cognitive scientist who, when I reached him over Zoom at his home in rural Alaska, is fittingly curled up on his bed. Horowitz is the co-inventor of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.media.mit.edu\/projects\/sleep-creativity\/overview\/\">Dormio<\/a>, a dream engineering device that makes it possible to intentionally incubate specific dreams. The Dormio takes advantage of the moments between being awake and falling asleep known as the hypnagogic state; just as visions begin to form in the darkness and you sense yourself falling, the device whispers prompts into your ear, like \u201cdream of a tree.\u201d<\/p><p>Hypnagogia is when the full-fledged visions of the dreamworld begin to appear against the background of perception. As they coalesce into immersive hallucinations, they are remarkably suggestible. Horowitz\u2019s technique involves waking sleepers at precise intervals, helping narrate the dream as it takes shape; he does so to foster creativity, treat recurrent nightmares in veterans and incubate bereavement dreams for people who have lost loved ones.<\/p><p>In these, he explained, lucidity would spoil the experience. Imagine sitting across the kitchen table from your deceased parent. \u201cYou don&#8217;t know it&#8217;s a dream,\u201d Horowitz said. \u201cThat&#8217;s the beautiful thing. You\u2019re sitting with them. Why would I want to be in a dream and <em>know<\/em> it&#8217;s a dream? I want to be in the room and want to have the conversation with the person. I don&#8217;t want to poke them and say, \u2018Wow, what a good hologram.\u2019\u201d<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      &#8220;No wonder so many cultures have rituals of group dreaming.&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/69072\"\n        data-a2a-title='\"No wonder so many cultures have rituals of group dreaming.\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>Horowitz finds the culture of lucid dreaming, with its emphasis on individuality and self-optimization, to be somewhat suspect. He asks me, rhetorically: What do people <em>do<\/em> in lucid dreams? They fulfill fantasies of control, seek personal thrills like flying, have sex with Jeremy Allen White.<\/p><p>The Dormio system is the only dream incubation tool of its type in experimental use, but there are plenty of consciousness-hacking <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC6517539\/\">devices<\/a> on the market intended to induce lucid dreams on demand. LaBerge has developed several over the decades with names like the DreamLight and the NovaDreamer. A well-funded AI startup,<a href=\"https:\/\/www.prophetic.com\/\"> Prophetic<\/a>, is currently training machine learning models on EEG and fMRI lucid dream data, hoping to beam their findings via transcranial-focused ultrasound directly into willing brains; their Halo device, \u201cthe most advanced consumer neurotechnology wearable ever created,\u201d will soon be available.<\/p><p>As the media scholar Aleena Chia has <a href=\"https:\/\/openpublishing.library.umass.edu\/cpo\/article\/id\/53\/\">written<\/a>, such technologies promise a \u201cyoutopia of automatized dream entertainment.\u201d In certain sectors of Silicon Valley, lucid dreaming is talked about like virtual reality without a headset. \u201cWhat a lame way to relate to your own consciousness,\u201d said Horowitz.<\/p><p>Dream incubation, on the other hand, he said, \u201cis a really holy, really humble, really hands-off tradition\u201d with ancient roots. In classical Greek antiquity, dream-seekers traveled to dedicated temples in order to seek specific dreams of healing or guidance; after rituals of purification and supplication, they slept, communally, in sanctuaries dedicated to this purpose. As the religious scholar Kimberley C. Patton has proposed in her work, these temples were \u201cgod-haunted\u201d places where the gods used dreams to speak between worlds. In the tradition of incubation, she has written, \u201cGods and human beings are the co-creators of dreams in the darkness of our mutual sleep.\u201d<\/p><p>In the morning, the temple dreamers interpreted their visions with the guidance of priests. Nothing about the dream was private; it was something to be plumbed in public alongside others upon waking with the morning. The dream\u2019s prescriptions, a cure proffered by the gods, were enacted in waking life, with the full support of the dreamers\u2019 communities. It is from this tradition, far more ancient than Freud, that we get dream interpretation. Similar rituals of public dream incubation have existed throughout history and all over the world, in medieval Japanese Buddhism, in Shia and Sufi Islamic traditions, in Bengal, among the ancient and modern highland Maya, and in many North American Indigenous cultures.<\/p><p>I\u2019ve had a few flying dreams since my first lucid dream. I\u2019ve taken swan dives off fire escapes, soared over fields of wildflowers, been pulled into the sun itself. It can feel exhilarating to fly, to feel velocity amid total stillness. To linger in the light of an imagined sky. But it\u2019s cold up there, too, trapped inside the dream. I can see it all, but I have nobody to share it with. No wonder so many cultures have rituals of group dreaming. No wonder they traveled far and wide to dream together, to seek succor and interpretation from oneiromantic priests. It makes the night less lonely.<\/p>\n          <div class=\"eos-subscribe-push\">\n          \n            <a target=\"https:\/\/shop.noemamag.com\/?utm_source=BottomCTA&utm_medium=website\" href=\"https:\/\/shop.noemamag.com\/?utm_source=BottomCTA&utm_medium=website\" data-wpel-link=\"internal\">Enjoy the read? Subscribe to get the best of Noema.<\/a>\n            \n          <\/div>\n        ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":6048,"featured_media":69073,"template":"","wpm-article-type":[4],"wpm-article-topic":[23],"wpm-article-tag":[],"class_list":["post-69072","wpm-article","type-wpm-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","wpm-article-type-feature","wpm-article-topic-philosophy-culture"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.0 (Yoast SEO v25.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Living In A Lucid Dream<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Recent research on lucid dreams suggests that consciousness exists along a spectrum between sleep and waking, between hallucination and revelation, between dreams and reality.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" 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