Lesson 3 – Lucid Dreams Are Real

Before we start on any discussion of lucid dreaming, a quick trip to the science lab will be used as a prerequisite disencouragement of any potential skepticism.

Lucid dreaming has existed since, probably the beginning of dreams but has always been a thing of scientific fiction up until it was scientifically proved to exist about 30 years ago.

American scientist Steve La Berge, proved this by pre rehearsing certain eye movements with a team of observers prior to sleeping. The agreed movements would act as pre arranged signals to indicate that a particular event has occurred. So a “left, left, up, up, down” motion for example may signal that one has become lucid.

Needless to say, to prove one is dreaming one would have to be asleep. For this purpose, a device called an electric encephalograph (EEG) is used to monitor brainwave activity. When a certain type of sleep known as REM sleep occurs, the person is most likely to be dreaming.

At this point we would expect the person to be somewhat unable to move as during sleep most of our body is paralysed, from the chin down, apart from our involuntary muscles (lungs, heart etc.).

However, our eyes can still move and as a matter of fact they can mimic that of our dream eyes. So if we look left in a dream, then our real eyes do just that in our sleeping beds.

So a confirmation of the rehearsed eye movements at this point is a signal from the dreamer could say he/she has just become lucid.

This technique proved positive in dream science and a breakthrough was made. Today this technique is used in lucid dream labs to signal various activities to be recorded during dream exploration.

Make no mistake, lucid dreaming is very real and it is here to be explored!