Lucid dreaming

A short history of lucid dreaming

The experience is old, the word is from 1913, and the laboratory demonstration is from 1980. Those three dates are worth keeping apart.

6 min readbeginner

Before the word

Deliberate awareness within dreams appears in contemplative traditions long before Western psychology took an interest. Tibetan dream yoga is the most developed of these: a set of practices in which recognising the dream state is a step towards recognising the constructed quality of waking experience.

It is worth being accurate about the aim. Dream yoga is not a technique for flying or for lucid entertainment; it is a contemplative discipline with a soteriological goal. Borrowing its methods while discarding its purpose is common in modern lucid-dreaming material, and it is at least worth noticing when it happens.

The word

Frederik van Eeden coined "lucid dream" in 1913, in a paper describing several hundred of his own dreams. His use of "lucid" meant mental clarity, the dreamer thinking straight, rather than the dream being vivid, which is a confusion that persists.

The demonstration

For most of the twentieth century the state was untestable: a private report about an unconscious period. That changed in 1980 with the eye-signal method, which gave a lucid dreamer a way to mark the moment of lucidity on a physiological recording from inside the dream.

Since then

The research programme has been small but real, imaging studies, induction trials, and more recently two-way communication with sleeping subjects. It remains an under-funded corner of sleep science, which is part of why the evidence base for techniques is thinner than the volume of online instruction would suggest.

Sources and reviewed references

4 references. What these labels mean

  1. 1.A Study of DreamsHistorical dream record

    Frederik van Eeden (1913) · Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research

    Cited for: The origin of the term "lucid dream" and one of the earliest systematic first-person records of the state.

  2. 2.Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural LightReligious or philosophical text

    Chögyal Namkhai Norbu (1992) · Snow Lion Publications

    Cited for: The Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga tradition as described from within it, including its aims, which are contemplative rather than recreational.

  3. 3.Lucid Dreaming Verified by Volitional Communication During REM SleepPeer-reviewed research

    Stephen LaBerge, Lynne Nagel, William Dement and Vincent Zarcone (1980) · Perceptual and Motor Skills

    Cited for: The eye-signalling experiments that established lucid dreaming as a verifiable state rather than a self-report.

  4. 4.The Cognitive Neuroscience of Lucid DreamingPeer-reviewed research

    Benjamin Baird, Sergio A. Mota-Rolim and Martin Dresler (2019) · Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews

    Cited for: A review of what is and is not established about lucid dreaming: its neural correlates, prevalence, induction evidence and open questions.