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Theory: 'Lucid' dreamers say they can learn skills, cure ills,but is it safe? |
By VIRGINIA LINN
- Back in high school, Brenda Giguere would ice skate with her friends every week at a local shopping center. But she quickly got bored going in circles, while watching her more adventurous friends switch from skating backward to forward.
"I got really fed up with myself about being such a chicken, but I seemed doomed to skate in circles forever," she recalled.
One night as she was falling asleep, she realized that she could probably practice those backward moves in her sleep. She had been conscious before when she dreamed, although she didn't know at the time what that type of dream was called.
"Before long I was dreaming I was skating, and I got very excited. I knew it was a dream, so I knew it couldn't hurt me at all. ... It was so realistic. I got the very convincing sensation of skating backward - the movement of my legs, the cool air, the feeling of propelling myself this way. Suddenly, it made sense to me as a set of logical, fluid, sequential body movements."
And the next time she was out with her friends, she skated backward without hesitation.
Giguere, now 50 and a freelance makeup artist and wardrobe stylist in San Diego, later learned she'd experienced what's called a lucid dream.
Lucid dreaming occurs when the dreamer knows that she is dreaming. It's among the most controversial areas of dream research, partly because of misperceptions over how much individuals can influence dreams - or more importantly, whether they should.
Yet proponents say lucidity is an important step in understanding dreams and creates a vital bridge between people's sleeping and waking states.
Beyond the practical application of rehearsing a speech or learning a skill, advocates say, lucid dreams can take the horror out of nightmares, inspire new ideas, promote self-healing of physical ailments and unravel mysteries of the psyche that can improve people's overall well-being.
Lucid dreaming is hardly new. The technique has been practiced by Tibetan Buddhist priests for a millennium. Writings by the philosopher Aristotle also referred to lucid dreaming.
When the discovery of rapid eye movement, REM, sleep 50 years ago opened up new avenues of sleep research, it also allowed researchers to prove that lucidity actually exists.
The leading guru in this field is Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist and research assistant at Stanford University who founded the independent Lucidity Institute in 1987. He believes the state of awareness one reaches during lucid dreaming is very much like that of being awake.
He's conducted experiments in which participants were instructed before going to sleep to give signals in eye or hand movements when they became lucid in their dreams. They would give these signals during REM sleep, which was confirmed with brain waves. Later experiments had participants performing certain exercises during lucid dreaming.
With colleagues, he went on to develop electronic devices - the NovaDreamer and SuperNova - that give the dreamer a reminder during REM sleep to try to become lucid. The NovaDreamer (which sells for $493) is a sleep mask that emits a flashing light or sound cues when the user is dreaming - detected by eye movement. This increases by threefold the dreamer's chances of becoming lucid, his studies showed.
Ed Wirth of Ocean Beach, Calif., has used a NovaDreamer. He said the lights become incorporated into his dreams, for example, as a flickering image of a TV screen on a wall.
Wirth, 52, has had lucid dreams since 1977. Of the 600 or 700 dreams a year that he recalls, five or six may be lucid. But their effect is powerful and overwhelming.
"They, in effect, have changed my life." he said. "They've highlighted in my mind the things out there that people aren't aware of. It makes me wonder what else is out there and what we can do with our lives. For me, it's an exploration."
He flies in his dreams. He walks through walls. "You can turn a threatening situation into a funny situation. It eliminates the whole nightmare."
Not all who have achieved lucidity share that enthusiasm.
A 44-year-old Greenfield resident, who asked not to be identified, said she practiced lucid dreaming a few years ago.
"I was able to program myself to wake up in my dreams often. I had this little signal to myself to know that I was dreaming. I would throw a ball up in the air, and if I could 'command' it to stay floating in the air, I knew I was in a lucid dream.
"I got to the point, though, that I didn't like the feeling of being conscious while dreaming. I always woke up with bad headaches; plus, I began seeing it as manipulating the natural flow of dreams.
"I just abandoned it."
Rosalind Cartwright, the grande dame of sleep medicine research, echoed the dreamer's concerns. She said the whole concept has been "overblown" and sees something unnatural about lucid dreaming. "It's a wish to control things out of their usual function and time.
"I'm not a fan of lucid dreaming," said Cartwright, who directs the Sleep Disorders Service and Research Center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "It is trying to redesign the mind in a way I don't think is necessarily helpful. It gives people false hope."
While Gayle Delaney of San Francisco, the founding president of the Association for the Study of Dreams, believes that lucid dreaming can be thrilling and useful, she is skeptical of how effective it can be in dealing with bad dreams.
"I think lucid dreaming has been overplayed by many as (something that) solves your problems. It helps you understand your problems."
Most of the time, she said, bad dreams offer the dreamer the most direct and accurate information about feelings, attitudes and situations that are getting him into trouble. Learning to understand the dreams, rather that rewriting the ending to make them happy, will help the dreamer to overcome the problems that are causing the nightmare.
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