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.
Next: A rip-off by any other name…
I’m worried that patients are leaping onto the XMRV bandwagon before the science is anywhere close to verifying not only the presence of the retrovirus in CFS patients, but even whether it can be treated at all. It seems to me that since we’ve been relegated to trying alternative and even fringe treatments if we want to find relief, the idea of a science-based answer is so attractive that the actual scientific process is being ignored.