The dream academy

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a parapsychologist. I thought that this meant a person who examines supernatural claims and tries to find psychological or other scientific explanations for them. When I saw Ghostbusters at the age of 11, I realized I might be mistaken, and that if Dr. Peter Venkman was a parapsychologist, maybe I ought to rethink my career plans.

I continued to be enamored of the idea of scientifically testing or studying seemingly magical phenomena. In high school, this wound up intersecting perfectly with my fascination with dreams, when I picked up a copy of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. My experience with this book and LaBerge’s Lucidity Institute would become an early lesson in skeptical investigation.

A lucid dream is when you’re aware that you’re asleep while you’re in the dream. Not everyone has them, but they’re not that unusual. Carlos Castaneda wrote about them, and they feature in the movie Dreamscape (one of my favorites). My first lucid dream was “wake-initiated”: I was awake in a mauve-colored hotel room, and then suddenly finding myself in a lush green meadow made it obvious I was in a dream.

I found the experience amazing. My mind had broken the fourth wall of its nightly theatre and I was now a totally conscious participant inside an unconscious experience. How the hell was this possible? I was far less interested in the supposed mystical or healing properties of these dreams than the fact that the brain could allow such a thing to take place. So what attracted me to LaBerge’s book was that it offered step-by-step and sensible — not New Agey –  instructions on how to train yourself to have lucid dreams.

First, you learn to remember your dreams more clearly and more frequently. This means any time you wake up from a dream you must immediately write down as much as you can remember. Now, I’ve been an insomniac longer than I’ve been a skeptic, so frankly I hated this idea, since falling back to sleep was always so difficult. Also, the mechanism by which keeping this journal would increase dream recall wasn’t well explained, so I had no special expectation of a positive outcome. (A good skeptical position.)

But I did indeed find that forcing myself to keep the dream journal increased my dream recall, to a pretty remarkable extent in fact. So I embarked on the next steps, which involved training myself to do frequent “dream checks,” with the idea that the habit would continue into dreaming, where my dream check would fail and I would become lucid.

In the end, I didn’t have much success. I didn’t stick with the dream journal too well and, despite the notices my roommate and I plastered to our walls reminding us to check “ARE YOU DREAMING,” I was never able to induce a lucid dream. But I joined the Lucidity Institute so I could read their newsletter about lucky people who had become proficient at this technique, and the different studies that were done with these “oneironauts,” as LaBerge termed them. The study subject’s eye movements were recorded, and at the moment of entering a lucid dream he would perform a certain eye movement to signal this to the researcher, and then begin whatever experiment he was supposed to do in the dream.

Again, I found this amazing. Sleeping people making conscious contact with the waking world, and especially under lab-controlled conditions? Here, something prone to attracting spiritual nonsense was being examined scientifically — exactly what I had wanted to do as a kid. However, something about these newsletters bothered me. Along with all these reports, there were ads for various devices to facilitate lucid dreaming. All of them used lights in some way to facilitate the sleeper’s induction of lucidity.

All of them were also remarkably expensive, to the tune of hundreds of dollars. Of course I never seriously considered buying one, but they did have a certain appeal, given that I hadn’t had much luck with the other techniques. And then I started thinking about all the other people reading this newsletter, and how many of them might have the same intense interest in lucid dreaming, and how they might have the money for these devices. Soon, there were other insanely priced offers, such as seminars and retreats, and eventually I stopped getting the newsletter when it began to seem like nothing more than an ad for the things that were for sale.

On the one hand, I had great respect for LaBerge in discovering these techniques and making them both easy to understand and inexpensive to attain (in the form of his book). But on the other hand, I didn’t like the idea that he then targeted people who were excited by his work, and tried to sell them slightly more scientific, but no less expensive, Sharper Image devices. It was hard for me to reconcile the interesting science with the sales pitch.

Recently, I listened to the episode of the Stuff You Should Know podcast that covered this topic. Chuck and Josh gave a fair treatment of it all, but LaBerge comes off as something of a nutter. When I look at the kind of seminars the Lucidity Institute is conducting now, I can see where they get that impression. It seems the focus has slipped away from the science and towards that gooey life-affirming aspect that never interested me in the first place.

Still, I give Stephen LaBerge a lot of credit. He is, I believe, responsible for establishing the legitimacy of lucid dream research from a psychophysiological perspective. He also helped to bolster my unpopular theory about life: that its fascinating mysteries are even more fascinating when you try to learn more about them scientifically. And while I do believe LaBerge’s motives are (or were, at least)  in the right place — unlike Peter Venkman — I learned that in real life too, science isn’t always above running a con game.

(Image: “Lucid Dream,” by Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison)