Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  For LaBerge, that meant pursuing a doctorate in psychophysiology at Stanford, in 1977, under the mentorship of sleep researcher William Dement.

  Psychophysiology was a kind of halfway house for LaBerge, concerning itself with the physiological basis of psychological responses. “It wasn’t what I wanted,” he told the group in Hawaii. “But at the time, it was the closest I could get.”

  LaBerge had it in mind to study lucid dreaming. But in scientific terms, this was a nonstarter.

  Lucid dreaming has long been a part of human history, yet here in the West it’s been relegated to the fringe.

  Aristotle had mentioned lucid dreaming. Buddhists had been actively pursuing mastery over the dream state, along with their meditations, for thousands of years, as had the Aborigines, who considered the dream time sacred. Lucid dreaming also turns up in Islam and Hinduism.

  A French researcher named the Marquis d’Hervey Saint-Denys wrote the first-ever book about lucid dreaming, in 1867, translated as Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them: Practical Observations, which he published anonymously because colleagues sneered at the topic. But it was Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden who first coined the term “lucid dream.”

  Van Eeden studied the phenomenon systematically in himself. But in 1913, having completed The Study of Dreams, he could only get a hearing from the Society for Psychical Research, an organization known chiefly for studying—what else?—the paranormal. And so by the time LaBerge determined to study the phenomenon, lucid dreaming was still, from the point of view of science, the bearer of much Paranormal Taint—and as real as the tribe of faeries living in Richard Dawkins’s garden.

  Sleep was considered a state of unconsciousness, and that was the problem. Lucid dreaming paradoxically required the dreamer to be both conscious and unconscious at the same time—an impossibility! But LaBerge had something on the scientists of the day. Experience. To him, the question wasn’t whether lucid dreaming was real. The question was whether or not technology and experimentation had caught up to lucid dreaming, whether science had grown enough in its capabilities to catch up to the Aborigines—and begin study of this intriguing state.

  LaBerge partnered with researcher Lynn Nagel, hoping to use a finding discovered by their academic director, Dement. In 1962, Dement was studying REM sleep—or rapid eye movement. REM is often described as a consistent left-right motion of the eyes. But LaBerge says REM would be more aptly abbreviated HJM—for “Herky Jerky Movement,” because the motion of the eyes is in fact so frantic and random.

  This is key, because one night, as Dement observed a research volunteer in REM, he noticed something odd. Suddenly, the sleeper’s eye movements shifted. The wild, jerky movements typical of REM suddenly did assume a regular rhythm. Left, right. Left, right.

  Dement was so curious, he woke his subject.

  “Do you remember what you were dreaming?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the subject replied. “I was watching a Ping-Pong match.”

  LaBerge still seems grateful, more than thirty years later, to Dement. Because this seemingly small discovery—that sometimes, in dreaming, our eyes follow the action in the dream—illuminated his path.

  The story of how lucid dreaming was confirmed by scientific experiment is well known among lucid dreamers, and LaBerge shared it in one of the Hawaii workshops.

  He came into the lab, a doctoral candidate, bent on doing something terribly audacious. He was going to conduct research while asleep. He arrived, changed into comfortable clothing, and Nagel outfitted his head and face in an array of electrodes, including an electrooculogram, or EOG, to measure his eye movements. The rig proved so sensitive that every time LaBerge moved the electrodes spiked—drawing sharp lines on the graph paper ticking in the nearby control room. The bed was uniquely uncomfortable—a gurney, really. And in addition to all these distractions, LaBerge suffered the ultimate performance anxiety.

  Yes, he had experienced lucid dreams somewhat regularly. But not on command. So precisely how he might become lucid by wishing it so was unknown to him. He also didn’t know whether he would remember the task he had in mind—or if deliberately moving his eyes in the dream would produce corresponding motions in his real eyes. Perhaps Dement had experienced some sort of anomaly. But he lay down, anyway. And on January 13, 1978, Stephen LaBerge had his first signal-verified lucid dream.

  Inside his own mind, LaBerge was asleep. He dreamt of literally nothing, standing in a formless void, when suddenly he gained awareness. An instruction booklet for a vacuum cleaner floated by, and as he looked at it, he felt the contours of his own dream body forming. His arms, his hands. There are different levels of lucidity, and sometimes the dream is so vivid, so engaging, a dreamer can forget what task he set for himself. But in the void, with only weightless appliance instructions for company, LaBerge remembered his mission.

  Outside his mind, in the waking world, the wires attached to him monitored his brain activity, his muscle activity, and his eye movements. In the next room, Nagel stayed up all night, monitoring the accumulating data. And after eight hours, the dream world communicated to the waking world, in real time. The EOG went into the random, static-like jerks associated with REM. Then, suddenly, it registered two even, controlled movements—the signal LaBerge and Nagel agreed upon.

  During the next two years, LaBerge and Nagel repeated the experiment numerous times, perfecting their methods. They realized long, dramatic side-to-side movements of the eyes—in which the dreaming subject looked at his dream ear without moving his dream head—made for the best signals on the EOG. And they brought other subjects into the lab, to prove the positive results weren’t dependent on the team of LaBerge and Nagel.

  In 1981, LaBerge presented his research findings at the Association for the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep (APSS) and published them in the peer-reviewed journal Perceptual and Motor Skills.

  This achievement is often portrayed as a triumph. And it was. LaBerge had used modern equipment, unavailable in the days of Saint-Denys and van Eeden, to demonstrate that an experience reported for millennia was actually so.

  But the truth is, LaBerge’s victory has never been celebrated all that widely.

  When he tried publishing his research with more prestigious journals, his papers were rejected. One publication gave no reason for its decision, which is considered poor form; the other delivered the painful truth. “One of our judges said they couldn’t find any problem with your study’s methodology or controls,” he was told, “but they insist something must be wrong.”

  “In other words,” LaBerge told us, “they refused to publish my research because they simply couldn’t believe it.”

  Those days aren’t entirely over, either. Numerous sleep researchers continue to ignore LaBerge’s findings. The authoritative, exhaustive online database PubMed currently includes the 1981 issue of Perceptual and Motor Skills. But LaBerge’s article is omitted. Curious—was this an oversight?—LaBerge recently looked into the matter. As it turned out, PubMed reviews all the articles it posts, even from refereed sources. “They told me they weren’t sure by what criteria they had made the decision not to publish my article,” LaBerge told us. “But a decision had been made.”

  LaBerge rejects any idea that PubMed’s choice reflected anything beyond simple bias. “It is a hard science study,” he said, “primarily about physiology and not dream content.”

  He explained, “It is clear, science is a sociological construct, and what gets accepted is in part a function of what has already been accepted.”

  For the most part, LaBerge seems at peace with all this. But he admits: if mainstream science had embraced his findings, if he received research funding through ordinary scientific channels, he wouldn’t be running a workshop in Hawaii.

  This might come as something of a surprise.

  As it is, LaBerge writes books and serves as the director of the Lucidity Institute. The institute publishes an electronic newsletter, and has inspire
d a small band of dreamers to aid LaBerge’s research. He calls them “Oneironauts” (oh-nigh-ro-knots)—which comes from the Greek and means “explorers of the dream world.” He also runs these workshops, one or more per year. At the workshop I attended, he put on a big show, stalking around the front of the room, waving his hands and making pronouncements in mock-dramatic tones: “Ah, but who is the dreamer?” he might say, wagging a finger at us, to make us doubt our own existence. Then he would smile his thin smile and raise his bushy eyebrows.

  His books have sold well. And the people who follow his work don’t merely respect him. They love him for what he has done. They feel that when those vacuum cleaner instructions floated by, and he remembered his task—to scientifically verify lucid dreaming—he changed their lives for the better. From a distance, then, it might seem that LaBerge has happily embraced a role as pied piper, leading his followers into the depths of the dream. And he could, easily, be a guru. He could conduct workshops all over the place and pose as the Deepak Chopra of the dream space. But LaBerge just isn’t built for the guru business.

  As the week wore on, in fact, it became clear how much the workshop wore on LaBerge. He turned up each morning well after his chief assistant started the session. He said his piece. He zipped out. He was nothing if not consistent, turning up late for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, striding into the communal dining area after everyone else had eaten.

  LaBerge was fully engaged during the daily workshop sessions. But the effort seemed to take all his energy. Over the course of the week, in between lectures, I got to know LaBerge’s chief assistant, a warm, empathic pixie of a woman who goes by one name, Keelin. She has known LaBerge for about twenty years, and she best put the scientist into perspective for me: “Stephen is an introvert,” Keelin said. “Public speaking takes a lot out of him. Especially here, where he has to present two lectures every day. He’s a research scientist. That’s his mentality. But the way things have gone, just staying in the lab isn’t an option for him.”

  In fact, Keelin explained, the advancing years have forced LaBerge to begin considering his legacy. “He’s really the only one I know of researching lucid dreaming at his level,” she said. “And the thing is, he really believes, as do I, that it can be of tremendous benefit to people. But after him, who will carry it on in the way he has, with such a devotion to scientific methodology? He promotes lucid dreaming because he has to.”

  There was something sad about all this. Like the mongoose, or the dream, it’s in LaBerge’s nature to run for the shadows. But in his case, he simply cannot have the life and career he wants. And so the experience of Stephen LaBerge provides an important lesson for the rest of us: that sometimes, for all its glorious success, the social construct of science doesn’t fulfill on the promise of the scientific method. Sometimes, an entire field of study gets neglected just because it originates on the margins—valuable information that gets stuck in that netherworld between wakefulness and dream.

  DREAMING ITSELF REMAINS A subject of controversy among researchers. We know sleep is universal. Even the primitive cockroach says good night (mostly during the day), slipping into a kind of stupor for long seconds, its constantly moving antennae going still.

  Many fish and reptiles engage in similarly fitful slumbers. But mammals and birds experience regular sleep cycles. And humans? We sleep like we were born for it, in ninety-minute phases, descending and reascending through four stages of ever-slowing brain waves before entering REM.

  While we dream in some form throughout the night, dreams in REM do tend to be the deepest and most vivid. And over the course of the night, our REM phases lengthen—from just a few minutes the first time around, to an hour or more in the last REM stage before we awake. This means, on an average night, we’re likely to experience somewhere between four and six REM periods, accompanied by vivid dreams, with the last the most prolonged of all. But this doesn’t answer the more fundamental question: Why do we dream? Sleep is restorative. But wouldn’t it be more restful if we weren’t seeing ourselves in strange predicaments—taking high school tests naked, or eluding the grasp of roller-skating zombies—in our minds?

  For a long time, science has seemed to hesitate in the bedroom doorway, so to speak, wondering if the irrational world of dreaming is a mystery worth solving. No doubt, the link between dreaming and mysticism stigmatized the dream with Paranormal Taint. But the seeming illogic of dreaming, the mystery of its function, is also its allure. Artists take inspiration from the dream. Mystics have long thought the dream a portal to literal other worlds—the Tibetans call it the “dream bardo.” For many practicing psychologists, even post-Freud, dreams are a gateway to our subconscious minds, a place where the collision of imagination and memory yields up insight. But for many scientists, the whole search begins along strictly material lines: What evolutionary purpose, they ask, does the dream serve?

  There are some potential answers there. Some research focuses on the role dreams might play in memory consolidation. In this view, our sleeping minds identify important information while we get some rest. But in a delicious twist, other research attempts to demonstrate that the dream is important for the exact opposite reason. Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the DNA double-helix in 1950, later looked for a second act in dream research. Crick formulated the “reverse learning” theory of dreams, in which the brain essentially goes to the bathroom, flushing away all nonsense and superfluous notions.

  If this theory sounds almost personal, reflecting Crick’s own opinion that dreams are poop, maybe it was. The subject of dreaming is the ultimate Rorshach test. There are as many interpretations of why we dream as we can dream up. Some think, because we are rested by the early stages of sleep, evolution provided for us to remain at rest as a way to keep us out of trouble—our eyes not prepared for the rigors of staying alive at night.

  Jerry Siegel, director of UCLA’s Center for Sleep Research, thinks the brain repairs itself during sleep. The dream content is secondary—playtime for the kid while our parent-brains get some real, physiological work done.

  Others posit that dreams allow us to practice real-world actions through “simulated threats.” In this formulation, dreams comprise a virtual reality machine, where we train for upcoming missions.

  The underlying assumption of all these scientific theories is that specific dream content is meaningless. Even the threat simulation theory doesn’t hold that we are preparing to be chased by zombies or giant spiders. We just need to rehearse, in case we are chased at all.

  LaBerge, however, brings a line of thinking to this ongoing debate that seems particularly useful—in mystical, evolutionary, and practical senses. Working from his own research and that of others in the field, LaBerge subscribes to the theory that why we dream, from an evolutionary perspective, is interesting, but perhaps not so all-fired important.

  Consider, please, we did evolve and we are here; so any use we can find for the dream is fair game. In this sense, as individuals we can direct our own evolution and get everything we can out of the human machine.

  In Hawaii, workshop participants shared many stories of dreams, lucid and not, that helped them navigate some particularly difficult problem—or simply brought them joy. Gunter, from Germany, said he came to Hawaii to learn how to prolong his lucid dreams. “I get so blown away with the flying,” he said, in heavily accented English. “I wake up. I go so fast I cannot even take the time to look at the ground.”

  Keelin told us that at age eleven, she had a non-lucid dream about her father, who died two years earlier, which illustrated for her that she could continue a relationship with him, if only in her dreams.

  I’ll share a similar, personal story: in the immediate aftermath of my mother’s death, I resisted grieving. I marched through my days like a soldier, always finding some task to perform to keep my mind off what happened. The pain hit when something occurred that I ordinarily would have shared with her. Every time I had that automatic thought to call her, I had t
o face the realization all over again that she was gone. After a couple of months of this, I had a dream. I was sitting beside my mother, on a wheeled cart rolling slowly down a long, wide hallway. I was sitting up. But she was lying on her back. There was no one pushing the cart, yet still it moved, steadily forward. I looked down at my mother’s face. When she died, she was seventy-one years old and frail. In this dream, she looked maybe forty years old and healthy. But she was lifeless. And soon, I realized, I was going to have to get off the cart and allow her to be wheeled down this passage by herself, into death. Immediately, I started to cry. This was a non-lucid dream. But I behaved exactly as I would have chosen. I collapsed my dream body over hers and held on tight. She was still warm to the touch, and suddenly, in the strange manner of dreams, I felt her—there is no other word for it—loving me. She was dead. But I felt all the passion and caring she ever held me with as a child, even though her whole body remained still.

  Feeling all this love, emanating from her and into me, my dream tears came in a torrent, surging up so strongly, from such a depth, that I wondered if the pain of my grieving might actually kill me. But I submitted to it. And there in the dream, I couldn’t really differentiate me from my tears. I merged with my sorrow. And I remained collapsed over her body, holding her, for several more seconds before I woke.

  As I half-opened my eyes, all the grief and pain from the dream was there, waiting for me. The hairs on my arms stood up, as if I had just been through a long, passionate embrace. And I cried for a long, long, long time—while, I confess, cleaving tightly to my pillow.

  It was one of the worst mornings of my life. And in the ensuing days, I felt spent. But I also realized how numb I had become. And in the wake of this dream, I started to feel. I started to really live again.

  I suppose I could have dismissed the dream if I’d wanted to, but I have to ask, Why on Earth would I have wanted to?

  The dream has long served us, in ways both psychological and scientific. And it’s time we acknowledge this.