What it is

The teaching

As LaBerge and Rheingold's Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990) teaches it.

Knowing that you dream

A lucid dream is a dream in which you know that you are dreaming. Nothing else is required. The dream may stay vivid or fade, you may steer it or simply watch, but the mark of lucidity is the knowing: the plain recognition, from inside, that this world is a dream and that your body lies asleep somewhere else. LaBerge is careful to keep lucidity apart from control. Many lucid dreamers change little in their dreams, and some ordinary dreams feel firmly steered.

Degrees of lucidity

Lucidity comes in degrees. At its faintest it is a passing thought, this might be a dream, which the dream then sweeps aside; Celia Green called a dream in which the question is raised but not answered a pre-lucid dream. In the middle the dreamer knows they are dreaming but forgets it again, or knows it and still treats the dream's people as real. At its clearest the dreamer remembers who they are, where they are sleeping, and what they meant to do if this ever happened, and the dream becomes a place to act in.

Two ways in

LaBerge sorts lucid dreams by how they begin. In a dream-initiated lucid dream, the commonest kind, the dreamer is already dreaming and notices it, usually because something odd gives the dream away. In a wake-initiated lucid dream, the sleeper passes straight from waking into a dream without losing awareness, entering it as the projectors enter the borderland. The second kind comes most often in naps and after waking in the night, and the house asks no one to break their sleep to seek it.

Where lucid dreams live

Nearly all lucid dreams happen in REM sleep, the stage of rapid eye movements in which the most vivid dreams come. A night passes through four or five cycles of about ninety minutes, and the REM part of each grows longer toward morning, so that the last hours of a full night hold the richest dreaming. That fact gives the art its first rule: the best ally of lucid dreaming is a long, unbroken night. Cut the night short and you cut away the dreams most likely to become lucid.

The dream as a model

LaBerge teaches that a dream is the same kind of thing as waking perception, a model of the world built by the brain, but built with little help from the senses. Awake, the model is checked moment by moment against the light and sound coming in; asleep, it is shaped by memory, expectation and feeling. That is why dreams are unstable in telling ways: printed words change when looked at twice, clocks show nonsense, lights refuse to come on, and people and places shift without warning. These instabilities are the dreamer's clues.

It is also why expectation is so powerful inside a lucid dream. What the dreamer expects tends to happen: expect to fly and you rise, doubt it and you sink. The dream body feels real, and what it feels is felt in earnest, but the physical body lies still throughout, held in the stillness of REM sleep.

The dream's eyes

One link between the dream body and the sleeping body is exact. When a dreamer moves their gaze in a dream, the sleeping eyes move with it. That is how lucid dreamers have signalled from inside dreams to watchers in the sleep laboratory, sweeping their gaze from side to side in a sequence fixed before sleep, and it is a reminder that a lucid dream, however free it feels, is still the work of the sleeping brain.

What lucid dreamers do

Once lucid, LaBerge's readers are encouraged to begin small: look around, notice how detailed the dream world is, and stay calm. Beyond that, the classic uses are exploring and flying, talking with dream figures and asking them who they are, rehearsing a skill or a hard conversation, and facing something that frightens one in ordinary dreams. Tibetan dream yoga uses the same knowing for another end, to see through the dream and, through it, the nature of waking experience; for its teachers lucidity is a step on a religious path, not an entertainment.

The ground

The methods on the other branches of this art are the ones the manual builds on. First, recall: a dream journal, without which no lucid dream is remembered. Second, dream signs, the personal oddities that recur in one's dreams. Third, the habit of asking by day whether one is dreaming, so that the question arises at night. Fourth, an intention carried into sleep. All four depend on sleeping enough. A first lucid dream usually takes weeks of patient practice, and for some people it never comes; nothing is lost if it does not.

Lucid dreaming is not for everyone. Anyone who has had psychosis, or who finds it hard to tell dream from waking, should leave it alone, and anyone should stop for a while if it brings sleep paralysis, nightmares or tired days. Nothing should ever be taken to bring it on, and the night is never broken on purpose.