Dreams—the lucid experience

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All In The Mind 28 min 4 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 3 days ago

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What is a lucid dream and how does it differ from a regular dream?

Lynn Malcolm 0:02

Hello, you're with All in the Mind on RN. I'm Lynn Malcolm.

Unknown 0:06

Oops, this is a dream. We're on control

Paul Davies 0:13

The thing about lucid dreams is that it's not like the real world where you're constrained by all sorts of things, including the laws of physics. You can do magic.

Nano Damon 0:24

In a lucid dream everything is practically identical to your real life so that it's incredibly hard to tell whether it's reality or a lucid dream. But something is off.

Stephen LaBerge 0:36

Lucid Dreaming provides that extra perspective that gives a much broader view of the possibilities of life.

Lynn Malcolm 0:46

Have you ever had a lucid dream? You may well have had this intriguing and sometimes disturbing experience not realising what it is. Today we'll explore lucidity, which is sometimes viewed as an altered state of consciousness and quite different from a regular dream.

Stephen LaBerge 1:05

Well, lucid dreaming the basic idea is while you're in a dream, you know that it's a dream. You explicitly think to yourself, right now I'm in a dream.

Lynn Malcolm 1:16

Dr. Stephen LaBurge is a world leader in the scientific study of lucid dreaming and founder of the Lucidity Institute in the United States.

Stephen LaBerge 1:26

Sometimes you can't believe that I I know I'm dreaming because for example I'm just floating out of this chair. But everything else looks so real that it can't be a dream. So it's it's a a wonderful mind blowing experience to realize that you can have a simulation of reality that is as real as it ever gets while you're asleep in bed, but somehow your mind. Mind, your brain has constructed this. And it's a meta consciousness. It means that you know that you know it while it's happening. So you can control lucid dreams because you know that they are dreams.

Paul Davies 2:03

So I'm Paul Davies. I'm director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. I began lucid dreaming when I was a teenager. I'd always suffered from nightmares even as a very young child, and this was very terrifying. But in my mid to late teens I had what at the time was a very disturbing, if not terrifying, different type of dream, in which I thought I was awake. But actually I was asleep. It seemed so vivid, everything seemed so real and normal, I could see the bedroom around me, and yet I felt paralyzed. So I felt I was trapped in sleep and that this might very well go on forever. And then I realized in later years that these were what people call lucid dreams, and then once I realized that this was a particular type of dream state, I began to get interested in it.

Paul Davies 2:53

And began to try to induce these lucid dreams. And I should explain right away that a lucid dream is not just the same as a vivid dream. Everybody has vivid dreams. A lucid dream is where you can have all of the fine details. So, for example, you look at a tree and you can see individual leaves in all their glory, and you have the tactile sensation. You get the whole small range of sensory experience. And if you're aware it's a lucid dream, then you can say aha, I'm now in this dream state.

How do researchers prove that a dreamer is actually lucid during REM sleep?

Paul Davies 3:26

What next? And that's where the fun starts, the adventurous side of lucid dreaming. So it's got a scary side if you don't know what's happening, and an adventurous side once you gain control over it.

Lynn Malcolm 3:37

Physicist Paul Davies. Psychophysiologist Stephen LaBurge has studied the science of lucid dreaming at Stanford University for over 30 years.

Stephen LaBerge 3:48

The basic finding of all that time was that lucid dreaming occurs during the phase of sleep called REM sleep, a rapid eye movement sleep. And it's a particular part of REM sleep where the brain is more activated than usual. So it's like having sufficient memory for a complex program. And we don't always have that amount of memory energy, if you like, available. available during sleep and certainly not even during all REM sleep. In each REM period there will be several points at which you could become lucid. And these are the high periods when there's more intense eye movement activity. It's called phasic REM. Uh there's more twitching behavior. And then when you become lucid, you stay in this REM sleep as long as the lucid dream lasts.