by Steve Volk
Remember educational expert Edward de Bono, whom I referred to in chapter 4? He insists that logic is actually a less effective means of problem solving than lateral or creative thinking. This is the source of the cliché—Think outside the box. But this exhortation to escape paradigmatic thinking arises from the truth. And there are numerous examples of times the dream found answers our logical, waking minds couldn’t: the chemist Friedrich Kekulé, who discovered the structure of the benzene molecule, dreamt of six snakes dancing in the air together, which finally coalesced into a ring, eating each other’s tails in a giant circle. Dmitri Mendeleyev had a dream that helped him establish the periodic table most of us forget from chemistry. Dr. Otto Loewi had a dream that eventually led to his winning the Nobel Prize for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses.
Elias Howe was near bankruptcy, living in poverty, after years of trying to invent an automated, lock-stitch sewing machine. Then he dreamed of being captured by spear-carrying savages, who demanded he create—what else?—a working, automated lock-stitch sewing machine! Now!
The savages of his subconscious carried spears, which Howe noticed had something odd about them; inexplicably, each spear bore a hole, near the tip. When Howe awoke, he designed a new sewing needle. He moved the hole in from the middle of the shaft to a spot near the tip. Goodbye poverty. All hail the dream.
In each case, the dream offered these men solutions outside the strictures of thought they had placed on themselves. When they awoke, they ran with these novel ideas, while allowing logic back in as a partner, to create models that worked. From this perspective, people who deny the dream are so in love with their rational minds that they won’t let the other guy—the other half of their brains—do its part.
Some readers, I’m sure, might want to reject all these anecdotes. And indeed, many accounts of insight found in the dream are hotly disputed. Psychologist Mark Blagrove argues none of these accounts could possibly be accurate because “the place for problem solving,” he writes, “is the waking, social, world.”
But fellow psychologist Deirdre Barrett put all this to a test, asking seventy-six college students to spend a week trying to have a dream about some particular problem. Half succeeded in dreaming of the topic they chose, and 70 percent of the successful dreamers reported the dream offered a solution.
I believe the resistance to LaBerge, to lucid dreaming, to Barrett’s findings, occurs simply because the dream continues to bear the stigma of that Paranormal Taint, especially when the story involved is like that of archeologist Hermann Hilprecht. In 1893, Hilprecht dreamt an Assyrian priest told him how to interpret two troublesome stone fragments he’d recently found. The priest also told him a third piece would never be discovered. When Hilprecht awoke and looked at the fragments again, he confirmed the dream priest’s interpretation was accurate. And no third fragment has ever been found.
Does this or any other dream represent actual communication between the dreamer and someone or something else? Well, it surely doesn’t have to, so my advice: don’t reject the power of the sleeping mind because some might use it to open the door, even a crack, to all the psychic hoo ha that doesn’t currently fit into your worldview. Dreams have inspired literary and musical compositions. Some musicians claim to emerge in the morning with entire songs written in the dream space.
LaBerge has spent a long time in consideration of the dream’s origin and its uses. And his primary insight starts with a deceptively simple premise: in LaBerge’s view, the dreamer is not, as long thought, unconscious. Instead, the dreamer is experiencing the continuation of consciousness—in the absence of sensory input.
He talked about this insight in Hawaii, taking us a bit further down the same path as Andrew Newberg, in chapter 7: human beings do not encounter objective reality directly; we experience the mental model of reality constructed by our minds. In waking life, that mental model is primarily made up of sense-oriented stimuli: we are touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, and smelling machines that only become consciously aware of a little bit of the buffet we’re sampling all day long. LaBerge’s added insight is that in sleep, the brain goes on creating mental models of the world. But with literally nothing to see, touch, or taste, no external input to influence our thoughts, our minds are free to create mental models from our entire internal inventory of memories, associations, and ideas. This is why, in dreams, we encounter everything from chocolate rainbows to flesh-eating zombies.
The thing is, though, the boundary between dreaming and wakefulness is not so thick as we might think. In fact, whichever state we’re in, waking or dreaming, the other overlaps.
In waking life, LaBerge explained, the overwhelming amount of input we receive forces the brain to take processing shortcuts in assessing the world around us. As a result, the brain must then fill in the gaps in perception using a mixture of past experience, expectation, and belief about what we’re seeing. He illustrated this aspect of the human condition dramatically. He showed us a series of slides in which the brain either eliminates input—say, a black dot—or creates it—a checkerboard square, and we “see” what isn’t there.
LaBerge even showed us a piece of writing in which one word was repeated, twice in a row, and asked us to tell him what we read. All thirty-two people in the room missed the repeated word the first time, and only after LaBerge asked us to read it a second time, more closely, did even a handful of us see LaBerge’s obvious, intentional typo.
In short, our brains prevented us from consciously registering the input we didn’t need or expect. “Sooooo,” LaBerge asked, eyebrows all screwy, “what is it you’re seeing, when you’re seeing what isn’t so?”
We waited for his answer, like schoolchildren—adult schoolchildren in a class like an LSD trip. “What you’re seeing is what you always see,” he said, “your mental model of the world”—a cocktail, that is, of perception and dream.
That’s waking life. But when we sleep, we receive little to no sensory input at all. So what we see and hear is virtually all dream stuff—and the inventory of experience at our disposal is as vast as our imaginations. Just as dream intrudes in waking life, however, direct, real-time sensory input can find its way into the dream. That is why we sometimes hear a dream-phone ringing, only to wake a moment later and find our waking phone, really ringing.
Jim, a physicist at the workshop, reported one lucid dream in which his left arm was a rubber baseball bat. When he awoke, he found the same arm pinned under the rest of his body, cutting off his circulation. What happened was clear: his dreaming mind interpreted the sensory input coming from his numb arm, rummaged through Jim’s storehouse of mental associations and memories, and emerged, like a child at play, with a rubber baseball bat.
This admixture of reality and dream comprises our entire lives. And LaBerge, as Newberg does with religion, seems to take an operational view of the whole affair. Because dreams can be put to good use, why not do exactly that?
LaBerge ultimately asked us to consider using lucid dreams, broadly speaking, in two ways: One, for fun. As Gunter said, in lucid dreams we can get so blown away with the flying! During the workshop, the assembled Oneironauts reported lucid dreams in which they flew, walked through walls, and had guilt-free sex with strangers. One woman reported bumping into Jack Nicholson, who wore S&M gear and flashed her a jaunty smile. Another chased down Ellen DeGeneres for free VIP tickets to, quite literally, the Ellen show of her dreams.
LaBerge encouraged us to explore these pursuits but typified them as recreational. The other, richer purpose for these dreams is to learn more about ourselves and live better lives.
Keelin, LaBerge’s assistant, used her lucid dreaming to prepare for her first appearance as a public speaker. She dreamed of the room she would sit in and the people she knew would be there, then sat down in the dream space and gave her presentation. When she had to do the same thing in waking life, she had already done it once and her anxiety was gone.
Using t
he same concept of neuroplasticity we discussed in chapter 7, Keelin’s experience suggests we can use lucid dreams to rehearse waking life actions—and know that these mental rehearsals will make a real difference. A baseball player or golfer might use lucid dreams to perfect his or her respective swings. A surgeon could use the occasion of a lucid dream to practice a particularly difficult procedure. LaBerge laments that, because lucid dreaming has not been embraced by the larger scientific community, these applications have not been seriously pursued. Still, there is good evidence that mental imaginings bear real-world effects: researchers have found that subjects who imagine performing a physical exercise, including the sweat and strain, enjoyed comparable benefits in strength and physical capacity as the people who actually exercised. The increases in strength or dexterity likely arise from rewiring the physical structure of our brain to better accomplish the imagined task.
Neuroplasticity, in a nutshell.
But as LaBerge also teaches, and as I found, just training to have a lucid dream is enough to start the process of changing a life, from the inside out.
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND LABERGE’S book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, for detailed methods of how to become lucid. The book is a direct product of LaBerge’s scientific research: for the average lucid dreamer, just having a lucid dream or two a week is a worthy goal. But the need to have lucid dreams on command, in order to be studied in a laboratory setting, shaped LaBerge into a kind of lucid dreaming superhero. Avid lucid dreamers speak in reverent tones about his ability to have a lucid dream “any time he wants one.”
As LaBerge himself noted to us, repeatedly, his research indicates that lucid dreaming is like any other skill. Some people may have greater natural aptitude than others. But the more the beginner practices, the easier it becomes. I share a couple of his methods here that directly invoke the meditative process—a factor LaBerge himself addressed succinctly. “I understand that for many people meditation might have some religious connotations,” he said. “Some of you might be fine with that. Others, not so much. But my advice is, Get over it.”
To LaBerge, rejecting meditation or lucid dreaming because of its spiritual connotations is, well, scientifically counterproductive—holding us back from the knowledge and experience that might be ours.
According to LaBerge, lucid dreaming involves attaining a heightened state of awareness in waking life, which naturally bleeds over into dreamtime. And the awareness arises from asking yourself a simple question: Am I awake, or am I dreaming?
This question may seem easy to answer, and often it is—but ask yourself, How do I know when I’m awake? How do I know when I’m dreaming?
Well, for one thing, more unusual things happen in dreams. And these events—like flying without the aid of an aircraft—are called dream signs. But the key to lucid dreaming is to become aware of your true state and surroundings as often as possible; and one thing you’re bound to discover is how often unusual and interesting things occur in waking life.
In other words: Remember the mongoose.
My first morning in Hawaii, that strange brown blur of the mongoose caught my attention, providing a perfect opportunity for me to conduct what LaBerge calls a reality or state test. I must warn you: at first, in practice, the reality test feels awfully silly. But whenever something unusual occurs in waking life, take the time—six, eight, ten, or twelve times a day—to ask yourself that central question: Am I awake, or am I dreaming?
Don’t answer automatically. Take a moment to think: What evidence would you look for to really answer that question?
Over the years, LaBerge has developed some insightful answers. In a dream, anything you see in print is only written in your mind. So to conduct a state test, read something. Then look away. Now look back at the printed page in your hand. If you’re awake, what you see can only be what it was the first time you looked.
But if you’re asleep? Whatever you read in the first place was only a figment. And when you look again, your mind can and most likely will retrieve something different from your mental storehouse of written images.
The numbers on a digital watch can turn into words. The words of a great poem might turn into nuclear launch codes.
Machinery also malfunctions quite a bit in dreams, so if you’re conducting a state test, reaching for the nearest light switch is a good idea. If you’re awake, the light switch is connected to a power source. In a dream, the light switch is connected to anything you might associate with electricity—and, because it’s a dream, to absolutely nothing. So if you flip on a light switch and the light flashes like a disco ball, or if an elephant walks into the room, smoking a cigar, you, my friend, are dreaming.
In Hawaii, I cued myself to conduct a state test whenever there was a noticeable shift in the lighting and whenever I saw the brown blur of a mongoose go scrambling by. As I continued talking to a fellow workshop participant or my fiancée on the phone in Philadelphia, I read a nearby sign or the digits on my watch. I looked away, searching the landscape for some detail that might illuminate my condition. Am I dreaming, or am I awake? And more important, I found myself listening to whoever was talking even more intently than normal—really listening to what they had to say and the character of their speech.
The more state tests you conduct while awake, LaBerge told us, the more likely you are to question what state you’re in when you’re dreaming. And once you ask that question during a dream, it’s game on.
The problem is that walking around conducting state tests all day might seem like a big distraction—and at first it is. But after a couple of days, even beginning practitioners will find themselves continuing conversations and silently carrying on state tests at the same time, with no ill effects. In fact, state tests lead to such a high level of awareness that, like meditation, the practice of lucid dreaming quickly leads to a fuller experience of life.
In meditative practice, this is known as the pursuit of “mindfulness”—of being immersed in the experiences of the moment. Andrew Newberg had spoken to his class about this: “When you take a shower,” he said, “don’t think about your homework or the conversation you just had or are about to have. Think about what you’re doing: feel the water on your skin. Think about each action you take as you take it. And nothing else.”
The practice also illustrates how alike dreams and waking really are, how many odd or unique experiences are available to us, all the time. I grew to love my state tests, and during my time in Hawaii, some of the most magical, revelatory moments occurred while I was upright and awake.
As a group, we were all alert to the behavior of digital clocks, which always malfunction in dreams. So when the digital clock in our meeting room began blinking, randomly, we all momentarily froze. Were we asleep? We all started conducting state tests, then burst out laughing.
I even had a terrific personal encounter with a tree. A cloud passed in front of the sun while I was walking to the general store, the shift in lighting being my cue for a state test. There was nothing around for me to read. And there was no machinery nearby for me to operate—no light switch to flick. So I seized upon the most interesting thing in my field of vision, a small grove of trees. Advancing upon them, I thought, I will try to magically bend the branches of the nearest tree. I quickened my pace, still self-conscious enough to be glad no one was in sight, and seized a branch as thick as my calf—maybe fifteen inches around. I didn’t believe the thing would bend, but I playacted and heaved to with the raw optimism of the dreamer, unconstrained by the laws of physics. And in a split second, I bent the branch easily—at almost a 90-degree angle. Whoa! I thought. Am I dreaming?
Just like I had expectations that Steve the Texan Tibetan was a simple hippie, I had expectations of how a tree that big would behave. But in a new environment, those previous experiences had left me with an inaccurate mental model of the world. In my mind, the tree was rigid. But in waking life, the Ficus Elastica planted near Kalani’s general store bent easily. It w
as, literally, a rubber tree.
The lesson in all this was profound: lucid dreaming allowed me to engage in a kind of waking meditation all day long. It isn’t easy. Maintaining that kind of awareness takes some effort. But it’s available to me all the time.
One of the workshop participants, Jeff Dalton, captured the benefits best, a few days in. “The mindfulness I get from practicing lucid dreaming,” he told the group, “makes me a better father. Things can get out of hand fast with kids because they are so emotional. And I can get caught up in that. But that act of stepping back and reassessing things, of saying, ‘All right, what’s really going on here?’ instead of just reacting, has helped me to really hear my children, and what they really want.”
The whole room responded to this, the energy of the workshop palpably picking up as Jeff spoke. And the truth was, by this point, we were all so engaged with the world around us—well, I think we were all high. Tuned in, turned on, and holding absolutely no intention of dropping out.
Understand: this was just the effect of trying to have a lucid dream. Actually getting lucid, in this context, is a massive, psychedelic cherry on the cake.
As I mentioned, I had by this time already experienced a lucid dream at home, and it was powerful enough that I knew I was ready to invest the effort it would take to have more.
I triggered that first dream a few weeks before the workshop, using one of LaBerge’s other means of incubating a lucid dream. The MILD technique, which stands for mnemonic induction of lucid dreaming, requires the practitioner to focus or meditate on a specific thought: The next time I’m dreaming, I’ll remember to recognize that I’m dreaming. One effective way of practicing this technique is by reciting this mantra and also remembering a dream in as much detail as possible. I used a recurring nightmare, imagining myself really in it—recalling all the images and sounds and associated emotions. Then, using LaBerge’s instructions, I’d imagine becoming aware that I was dreaming during some part of the dream—and what I would do as a result. This, too, is a meditative practice. And in my case, the nightmare I chose to meditate on had first appeared about twelve years earlier.