Lucid dreaming around the world – Greeks, geeks and the Columbus of Hull
Let’s take a look now at some of the various lucid dreaming traditions around the world – both historical and present-day – which take us from semi-mythical experience to scientifically verified fact. The world’s a big place and this is a small book, so I won’t attempt a chronological study of them all, but I’ll try to give you a flavour of a few key ones, starting with those found in the West.
The first substantial venture into dream work in Europe came, unsurprisingly, from the ancient Greeks. Aristotle famously wrote about lucid dreaming in his treatise On Dreams, saying: ‘when one is asleep, there’s something in consciousness which tells us that what presents itself is but a dream.’1
The ancient Greeks even had purpose-built temples in which people would spend the night engaging in specific dream incubation techniques, hoping for a dream of healing. In the fifth century bce, Greece had at least 350 temples dedicated to healing and most of these had specific areas dedicated to healing dream work.2
The dreamers would fall asleep on stone beds while incense burners diffused the smoke of what may have been psychoactive herbs to aid dreaming. Thanks to the dozens of positive testimonials inscribed onto the temples’ walls3 we can assume that the dream-work techniques being practised were overwhelmingly effective.
When the Romans arrived in Britain in AD43, they brought with them many of the dream traditions they’d absorbed from the Greeks. Consequently there was even a dream temple built in what is now Gloucestershire in the southwest of England. The ruins of this temple are still visible today and they’ve been studied extensively by contemporary British dream researchers Paul and Charla Devereux, who have even run guided tours around them.
One of the weirdest aspects of the Greek dream temples was the use of non-venomous snakes to lick the eyelids of those hoping for a dream of healing. The priests in Britain’s dream temples had to adapt to local conditions, though – they used dogs to lick the patients’ eyelids instead!4
The original Christians were quite open to dream work (it was, after all, a series of dreams that heralded Jesus’s birth). The early gnostic Christians even used the metaphor of the lucid dream as one of their central images for unity with God, and in the fifth century Greek bishops would tell people that while they dream, ‘the soul is taken to a superior region where it can come in contact with true things’.5 After the fifth century however, things start to go downhill fast for Christian dreamers.
One of the most ardent of these downhill enthusiasts was the man who became St Jerome – a Latin Christian priest who had a dream that had far-reaching consequences. In it he was given a message to stop studying the pagan literature that so fascinated him. Many of these texts were about dream work and so he interpreted this message to mean that he should turn his back on dream work as a whole.
It just so happens that St Jerome was also one of the first translators of the Bible into Latin. His prejudice against dream work was reflected in his fifth-century translation, as he selectively mistranslated many passages mentioning witchcraft as also mentioning dream work. Suddenly the Bible was full of passages saying that working with dreams is wrong,6 and with that, the history of dreaming within Christian culture changed forever.
Then in the thirteenth century the influential Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas suggested that ‘some dreams come from demons’7 and in the 1500s Jesuit priests even said that ‘the devil is most always implicated in dreams’.8 Due to these opinions, and those of many more influential Christians, by the end of the medieval era dream work within Christianity was lost for good. However, its revival is well underway with thousands of Christians around the world today using lucid dreaming to further their relationship to God. Amen to that.
The traditions we’ve explored so far were engaging dream practices, but they weren’t primarily lucid dream practices. It’s not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that we get the first major outings into Western public consciousness of the concept of lucid dreaming.
It was a Frenchman, the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint Denys, who, with the publication of his 1867 book Dreams and How to Guide them, offered the first publicly available book on the subject of lucid dreaming. The work contained chapters on increasing dream recall, being aware of dreaming, awakening at will and conscious interaction with the dream narrative: a pretty comprehensive lucid dreaming guide which is still relevant today. The marquis’ dream record covered 1,946 nights of practice and was a thorough exploration of the potentials of lucidity.
Then, in the early 1900s, the term ‘lucid dream’ was popularized by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik Willems van Eden, in part due to his 1913 presentation to the Society for Psychical Research in which he reported 352 documented ‘lucid dreams’. Up until that point a variety of other descriptions, such as ‘half dreams’ or ‘guided dreams’, were used to describe the phenomenon of conscious awareness within the dream state, a phenomenon which wasn’t to be verified by Western science until the mid-1970s.
In 1900 came Sigmund Freud’s seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Although it contained only a few passing references to lucid dreaming (and even those are only in later editions) it made an indelible impression in both public and scientific circles of the importance of dream work. The book opened up the possibility that dreams were beneficial, and that to understand them and be aware of them was something to be recommended.
Freud was so interested in the phenomenon of lucid dreaming that he reportedly tried to get hold of a copy of the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint Denys’ Dreams and How to Guide them, but was unable to do so.9 Imagine how different the path of lucid dreaming might have been had he managed to obtain the book, and perhaps even trained himself to lucid dream? With so much of Freud’s work being based on personal experience we can postulate that if he’d practised lucid dreaming the general public would have become aware of the phenomenon more than 60 years sooner, and would have perhaps even been encouraged to practise it.
Then came Carl Jung, the one-time student of Freud, whose work we looked at in Chapter 4. Jung felt that Freud had merely scratched the surface of the dream world: he came to believe that the sexual symbolism in dreams – on which Freud placed such emphasis – was often obscuring deeper, non-sexual, spiritual meanings and psychic functions. As we learned earlier Jung introduced the ideas of archetypes and the collective unconscious, which would lay the foundation for an entire movement of transpersonal dream work in which lucid dreaming would find a home.
Throughout the early twentieth century a growing wave of curiosity, fuelled by Western interest in dreams, orientalism and esoteric thought, led to the publication of an array of studies and personal accounts of lucid dreaming by occultist and esoteric writers. Many of these publications are being revisited and republished today and I encourage you to seek them out if you can.
The first major scientific advancement in the study of dreaming came in 1924, with the invention of a skull cap that could record electrical activity in the human brain through electrode sensors placed in contact with the subject’s scalp. This device would gather a record of brain-wave activity that became known as electroencephalography, or EEG. It was these EEG recordings of the brain in sleep that would provide the bedrock for all subsequent research into sleep, and even the final evidence that lucid dreaming was science fact, not fiction.
Then, in 1953, just as the structure of DNA was being unravelled, the structure of sleep and dreaming was being unravelled too, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago named Eugene Aserinsky discovered and verified the existence of REM sleep.
For the preceding couple of years Aserinsky had been struggling financially, in both his personal and academic life. Sleep science was viewed with indifference by most of the scientific community and so he’d been unable to attract funding for his research project. Without funding the indomitable sleep geek ended up finding and fixing an abandoned EEG machine and began conducting studies on his eight-year-old son10 (the only volunteer he could find who would accept sweets as payment).
Young Armand Aserinsky was hooked up to the EEG machine and eventually fell asleep while his father watched his brain activity from an adjacent room. For the first 70 minutes or so Armand’s brain wasn’t doing much, but soon it began to display activation similar to that of a waking brain. As his brain became active the boy’s eyes began to twitch under their lids, a phenomenon which soon became known as rapid eye movement. Aserinsky had just discovered REM dreaming sleep.
REM sleep is the phase of sleep in which the brain is actively engaged in creating our dreams, while the body is put into a state of muscle paralysis to stop us acting them out. During REM sleep the body is switched off while the brain is switched on, and its core principle is its direct correlation to the experience of dreaming.
The reason why the discovery of REM sleep was so instrumental in the scientific exploration and validation of dreams is that it provided the first substantiated connection between the objective measurements of neurological and optical activity with the subjective reports of those experiencing dreaming sleep. Finally, it was proven that dreams could be objectively measured, as well as subjectively described – criteria that would then be applied to the task of proving lucid dreaming some 20 years later.
And what of Eugene Aserinsky? Strangely, rather than continue to move down the trail that he’d so far blazed, he chose to leave the University of Chicago to study the effects of electrical currents on salmon.11 Weird, eh? (I hope you’re doing a reality check.)
A few years later, in 1959, the first scientific studies into lucid dreaming began. A favourable 1940s report by the US psychiatrist Nathan Rapport inspired researchers at Goethe University in Germany to conduct a study in which they taught people how to lucid dream and then observed them as they were dreaming and became lucid.12
This study was pretty much ignored by the scientific establishment and, up until the mid-1970s, lucid dreaming was still scoffed at by most scientists. They believed it was a ‘paradoxical impossibility’ that had no credible data to support its validity. However, following the 1968 publication of Celia Green’s Lucid Dreams (one of the first scholarly studies of the practice) and then Patricia Garfield’s popular Creative Dreaming in 1974, the foundation stones were starting to be laid for that special day in 1975 when something amazing happened: lucid dreaming was scientifically verified.
In some scientific circles, there’s an almost religious belief that until science proves the existence of something, it simply doesn’t exist. This was presumably the same attitude that some people had towards the Americas before Columbus ‘discovered’ them and made a continent with millennia of rich history suddenly ‘exist’.
So too it was with lucid dreaming. Thousands of years of documented experience, and a whole faculty of Tibetan Buddhism dedicated to its research, were dismissed as ‘non-existent’ until science could prove lucid dreaming on its own terms. Up until the mid-1970s, many had tried but none had managed to convince the scientific establishment that being conscious within a dream was for real. That was until one man at Hull University in the UK set out to prove empirically what he already knew to be true.
The man was a psychologist named Dr Keith Hearne. Recently, I met up with Hearne at the Science Museum in London to see his original polygraph recordings and to hear first-hand his account of exactly what happened on that rainy spring morning in 1975 when he proved the impossible.
I started by asking Hearne to explain exactly how he set up the experiment – during which he needed to somehow send a signal from the lucid dream state to the sleep lab while the subject (a man named Alan Worsley) was still asleep and wired up to all the monitoring equipment.
‘Well, you see,’ he began, ‘I’d tried micro switches on the subject’s little finger, and all sorts of other things that we could use to communicate his awareness from within the dream, but none of them worked efficiently.
‘And then I thought, Ah! It’s rapid eye movement sleep; the eyes aren’t inhibited by the paralysis mechanism that affects the rest of the body, so perhaps he can communicate to me through the eyes? I said to Worsley, “When you have a lucid dream, move your eyes left and right in consecutive motions as a way to communicate with me in the lab.”’
‘A kind of optical Morse code?’ I said. ‘Yes, if you like,’ Hearne replied.
‘So when did you first get the signals?’ I asked.
‘I almost missed it actually,’ Hearne said. ‘The previous week I’d had Worsley wired up for the whole night and each time he entered a REM period I would sit there, goggle-eyed, staring at the polygraph machine and watching the readouts. He went the whole night with no lucid dreams so at 8 a.m. I switched off all the equipment and started to pack up. Then, five minutes later, I heard him call from downstairs: “I just had a lucid dream, did you get it?” No! I’d missed it by five minutes! Thank God we repeated the test the next week though.’
‘So a week later you did the same experiment?’ I asked.
‘Yes, that’s when it all came together. It was just gone 8 a.m., and he was in a REM period when suddenly the eye movement signals came through, distinct patterns on the EOG (eye movement records) while he was still sound asleep.’
‘So this guy was totally asleep, unconscious to the outside world and then suddenly he became conscious within his dream and was aware enough to think, Okay, I’d better do the eye signals, to communicate with Keith in the lab?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but in fact he was a bit annoyed that he had to make the signals because he was more interested in enjoying his lucid dream! I think I was much more aware that history was being made than he was.’
‘What was it like when you first saw those eye signals come through?’ I asked.
Hearne’s own eyes lit up at this. ‘It was fantastic! I was overwhelmed by it. It was like getting signals from another world, from another universe, even. In fact it happened on 12 April 1975 and interestingly it was on 12 April 1961 that NASA received the first messages from a man in space. I felt like those guys at NASA, except that I was receiving the first messages from inner space!’
Hearne’s excitement turned to wistfulness for a moment as he said, ‘But you know how you see the NASA control rooms in films and they all give each other high fives and congratulate each other? I had no one to high five! I had just scientifically proven lucid dreaming and I had no one to high five…’
‘Oh no, give me a high five now, man!’ I interjected. ‘Forty years too late, but still…’ We shared an awkward high five.
‘I could have done with that 40 years ago, Charlie!’ Hearne said. ‘Thank you. You know, seeing these polygraph recordings makes me quite emotional actually, even now. To remember that we did it, we proved it, we proved the paradox…’ He gestured to the original polygraph readings that were on display in a Perspex box behind us.
The first ever recorded ocular signals from a person in a lucid dream: The two central bands above show the movement records for the left and right eyes. We can clearly see just how definite the eye movement signals were when compared to the jittery, short waves of rapid eye movement that both precede and follow them.
‘And thank you for the high five, Charlie, I’m glad you did that. You can put that in your book, too.’
‘So you got the results, but what happened next?’ I continued.
‘Well, I knew I’d discovered something big so I wrote to all the major sleep laboratories around the world – among them Chicago and Stanford – and then, after delivering my findings at a conference at Hull University, I moved to Liverpool to continue my studies.’
I then asked Hearne: ‘As we approach the fortieth anniversary of your discovery, what do you think have been lucid dreaming’s major contributions to the world?’
‘It’s a new form of recreation for one thing, and it doesn’t cost you anything,’ he replied. ‘It shows people new ways of exploring reality and also it gives people freedom. You know, I’ve always felt sorry for people serving life terms in prison. The idea of keeping people locked up for life frightens me. I think lucid dreaming can help them to experience freedom – and it might help them to integrate regrets from their past too.’
Visit www.keithhearne.com to learn more about Dr Keith Hearne’s work.
As we walked away, dodging the hordes of schoolchildren that thronged the Science Museum’s corridors, I looked back at Dr Hearne and realized that he too might have some regrets from his past. You see, the story of his discovery is not so simple. As with many great stories, there’s often another version.
Around the same time that Hearne was pioneering the scientific verification of lucid dreaming in the UK, a young American scientist called Stephen LaBerge was starting work on his PhD in psychophysiology in California. Working at Stanford University, LaBerge set out to prove the existence of lucid dreaming for what he thought was the first time in history.
Although Hearne delivered a paper to a conference on behavioural sciences in 1977, and then published his PhD thesis a year later, ‘the scientific establishment resisted accepting his results’.13 This meant that his findings were simply never widely circulated, peer-reviewed or disseminated across the Atlantic, so when LaBerge finally got similar results using similar methods, he naturally believed that he’d broken new ground.
Whether LaBerge knew about Hearne’s results or not is seen by many as inconsequential nowadays, for LaBerge became the man who invented the techniques, wrote multiple books on the subject and became the poster boy for lucid dreaming across the globe. Also, it was LaBerge who first empirically demonstrated that it’s possible to be self-aware in the REM sleep state13 using EEG, whereas Hearne only demonstrated it was possible to signal awareness from the dream state.
So, although it’s Hearne’s ground-breaking research that we must revere, without LaBerge’s tireless work over the last three decades, in both the public and scientific spheres, lucid dreaming might still be viewed as too ‘woo woo’ to be true. Personally, I think that both Hearne and LaBerge are brilliant men who stood on the shoulders of the giants who preceded them – and each saw as far as each other into a realm of possibility overlooked for so long.
