Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
After focusing my mind in that way over the course of this weekend, I noticed on my way back to San Francisco, that I felt high. I associated it with the exercise and the expansion of awareness that came from thinking of my waking experiences as a dream and trying to maintain a continuity. A few nights after I came back from the workshop at Esalen, I had the first lucid dream I could remember since my childhood. I was climbing K2 dressed in short sleeves, going up the mountain through the snow drifts.
I had the thought, look how I’m dressed, how could I be doing this? It’s because this is a dream. And at that point in my youthful folly, I decided to fly off the mountain and dream big. Personally, sitting here now, I would like to see what it’s like to climb to the top of the second highest mountain in the world. So that piqued my interest in the topic of lucid dreaming and it gradually developed over the next five years and along the way I had an experience that convinced me that developing lucid dream- ing could be something of great value to me.
I had a dream in which I was going up a mountain path, and had been hiking for miles and miles. I came to a very narrow bridge across an immensely deep chasm, and looking down I was afraid to go across the bridge. My companion said, "Oh you don’t have to go that way, you can go back the way you came," and he points back an immense distance to the long way around. And somehow that just seemed the hard way of doing this, and I had the thought, if I were to become lucid, I would have no fear in crossing that bridge. Then I sort of noticed the thought, became lucid and crossed the bridge to the other side.
When I woke up I thought about the meaning of that and saw that it had an application to life in general. Life is, in a sense, a kind of bridge, and what causes us to lose our balance is fear of the unknown, death, the meaninglessness around us, whatever it might be. Yet if we maintain the right awareness and context, it is possible to cross the bridge. About that same time I decided that I’d finished my seven years in search of the Holy Grail in hippydom and that I should get back to being a scientist. It occurred to me that lucid dreaming could be a dissertation project and that it could be scientifically researched. The experts at the time said it was impossible but I had thought of a way which it could be proven that it was possible.
RMN: Tell us about the experiment you did with Lynn Nagel, which first empirically proved that lucid dreaming existed.
Stephen: Lynn Nagel was a research associate at Stanford in the sleep center when I had the idea of doing something with lucid dreaming. Without Lynn, it might never have happened. He helped me set it up, and taught me how to do sleep recordings. In our first studies Lynn stayed up all night while I slept as the subject. The basic idea of proving lucid dreaming was a simple one. It was based on earlier studies that showed that, if a person in their dream happened to be watching a ping-pong game and they’re looking from left to right, the eyes of their sleeping body would show a corresponding pattern of eye-movement activity. So I had thought that, since in a lucid dream I can volitionally do whatever I want, why not make a signal that we could agree upon in advance; a pattern of eye-movement signals that could then be used to prove that I had a lucid dream and that I knew I was dreaming while I was in the dream? We could also use that to establish what stage of sleep lucid dreaming occurred. I thought it would be REM sleep just because that was when most dreaming occurs.
DJB: Are the eyes the only part of the body that will correspond to physical movements in a dream?
Stephen: No. What happens is that for any muscle group that you move, there will be small twitching activity. Some parts of the body are much more paralyzed than others and the main muscles that are strongly paralyzed are the muscles of vocalization and locomotion. The large muscles of locomotion could cause you to fall out of a tree while you’re in the midst of a dream. Also you obviously want to suppress vocalization in the middle of the forest at night, so that you don’t cry out, "Hungry tiger, come and get me!" things like that. Or, "I’m glad there are no tigers around here!" (
suppressed laughter
) So those muscles are very strongly paralyzed, but the eye muscles can do us no harm. You can’t wake up by moving your eyes and evolution hasn’t developed any connections to inhibit them. There are a few other muscles that are not very inhibited and some that are not at all, for example, respiration. You don’t want voluntary respiration muscles inhibited during REM or you don’t wake up!
So, anyway, Lynn and I did experiments in the beginning where we were trying to press a micro-switch. So in my dream I would be pressing my dream-thumb down "here," (
disembodied laughter
) but there wasn’t any micro-switch in my dream-hand so it was a little funny and I could never do that. We did find muscle twitches in the arm that corresponded to that effort, but the problem is that most of the muscle fibers are not firing when my brain commands them to and only a few impulses get through in the same pattern. So we made up some eye movement signals; the one that we use now, most typically, is two pairs of left-right eye movements which are very easy to see in the context of other eye movements and it’s also easy to do. After a few false starts where we did things like waking me up at the beginning of the REM period to remind me that I wanted to be lucid, (
foolish laughter
) we finally let me alone. Then I had the first lucid dream in the laboratory in which I made eye movement signals, and sure enough, there they were on the polygraph.
RMN: You say you had a hard time getting your results published, let alone accepted. Why do you think there is so much skepticism in this field?
Stephen: Basically, people were thinking of the dream as a product of the unconscious mind, and of Freud’s idea that the dream is the royal road to the unconscious. From that they seemed to develop the mistaken idea that dreams are themselves unconscious somehow, but they’re not, they’re conscious experiences, otherwise you couldn’t report them. It’s true that the source of dreams is largely unconscious and we don’t know why things happen in the typical dream. In that sense much of the dream content is unconsciously determined but that doesn’t mean that the experience is unconscious.
One is given to speaking very loosely about saying somebody’s conscious or unconscious and we would sometimes hear people describing sleep as being unconscious. If you tighten up the language a little, you’d say what you mean is, a sleeping person is unconscious of the environment. It’s not the same thing as being absolutely unconscious. When we say, a person is "conscious", that is a shorthand for is "conscious of x." What’s the "x"? What is consciousness? That’s a very difficult question. A much better way of putting it is, what is the difference bet-ween a conscious and an unconscious mental process? So it’s kind of a philosophical problem that people were having.
They just thought it was plain impossible. So when we brought forward scientific evidence, in 1980, their first conclusion was that we obviously must have made some mistake because it just doesn’t make sense. I think where people’s minds had a change was from presenting the material at conferences to the colleagues who had the opinions about these things. There they see it, and have their opportunity to say, "well what about that?" And you answer, or you don’t, to their satisfaction. So most people by 1983 who were going to believe it, believed it, and then there were some people who weren’t going to believe it no matter what. One skeptic, when he saw the data in 1983 said, "Well, it’s all very nice, but it’s not dreaming." So I said, "What kind of evidence which you haven’t seen so far could prove this to you?" and he said, "There isn’t any kind of evidence." (
stunned silence, followed by laughter
) Admittedly this was after a few beers that he said that.
DJB: What was his definition of dreaming then?
Stephen: Something that’s not lucid dreaming. In other words the problem was that people’s concept of what dreaming and what sleep was, was too limited. In fact when REM sleep was first discovered it was called paradoxical sleep in Europe because the characteristics of it were so unexpected, and it’s still called that. Basically it looks like wakefulness, and in my view we’re seeing the same story all over with lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming shows that under some circumstances the sleeping brain can sustain very high levels of reflective awareness and function very much like in the waking state. That’s not the typical dream to be sure, but it shows it is possible, and therefore one shouldn’t say dreams are necessarily single-minded, non-reflective and hallucinatory.
DJB: What do you think the function of a dream is and why did it evolve?
Stephen: I don’t know whether dreaming has a special or unique evolutionary function. I’d say the answer to why we dream is simple, it’s the same reason that we’ve got brains. Brains are primarily evolved to produce models of the world, to be able to simulate the environment and to predict what’s going to happen so that we can get what we want and avoid what we don’t want. That’s a strong pressure driving the evolution of nervous systems, in particular primates and humans, to a very high level at which we simulate the environment so well that we’re unaware that we’re simulating.
We look out and we see the world. That’s the common sense way of viewing reality; but what I see when I look out at the two of you and the tape-recorder on the table and the room that we’re sitting in here, is not the world, unless I’m referring to my world, my mental world. I’m seeing a simulation of my brain that is based on sensory input that I’m receiving, plus other patterns of expectation having to do with all kinds of other things I expect to see and am ready to see. Sensory input is great evidence but also memory and expectation is good evidence too.
RMN: So you’re saying that we dream as a habitual function of what we do during our waking state and dreams don’t have any particular purpose?
Stephen: Right. It’s the same constructive process that we’re using now under the special conditions of sleep. So if the brain is activated in REM sleep, if it’s turned on enough to be making a world model, it makes a world model, but it’s not making it out of sensory input anymore. Now it draws on the other sources that may have been secondary in the waking state, the expectation, motivational, those biases that bias perception. So it constructs a world that shows us what we expect, fear, wish for, need and all that.
RMN: So it’s not necessarily a way to assimilate our experience?
Stephen: No. It may serve a value, but we didn’t evolve a dream in order to do something, we evolved brains in order to do something. Surely, dreaming serves some function, but in a way, almost accidental to the evolution of the brain. There’s no doubt that REM sleep facilitates memory consolidation but we don’t know for sure whether that has anything to do with the dream content or not.
RMN: What do you think is the purpose of sleep?
Stephen: No one knows for sure, but there may be multiple purposes served by sleep. On this planet we have a strong 24-hour dark-light cycle, and almost all creatures are adapted to being active in one of those two phases. Humans are active in the light as we are strongly dependent on vision but suppose you didn’t sleep, instead you’re awake in the middle of the night in the jungle. Are you more likely to get what you want or what you don’t want, wandering around the jungle in the dark? You see?
So it makes more sense to have an enforced period of inactivity during the phase of the dark-light cycle at which you’re at a clear disadvantage. There are perhaps other energy conservation purposes and other specific functions that sleep serves, but that seems a sufficient argument to me of accounting for why it happens. So one idea about REM sleep is that it’s something that’s designed to maintain active enough brains so that if you need to get up for some reason, you can, and when it’s time to get up in the morning you can do that. That’s perhaps one of the reasons why REM sleep increases later in the night and becomes more frequent and more active. So given that we’ve got an active brain in the context of sleep and no sensory input, then you get dreams, not because it serves a function, but because - why not?
RMN: You’ve talked about using fear and anxiety in a dream as a catalyst to propel you into a lucid state. Tell us more about this.
Stephen: Anxiety certainly seems to stimulate reflectiveness and there may be a biological basis for that, that conscious processing in general seems to have evolved as a special problem-solving feature. It’s not just fear, by the way, fear is not enough for you to become conscious. Fear is, here you are in the jungle and there’s a tiger. What do you do? You run. That’s what fear motivates you to do - avoid and escape. So let’s say you climb a tree and the tiger starts to climb up after you.
Now you feel something new, which is anxiety, which is fear plus uncertainty and that causes an increased scanning of the environment for alternative actions. What else can I do? What new combination of things? Oh yeah, look, a coconut! Which you throw at the tiger, you see? So in the origins you can see the rudimentary consciousness being very strongly associated with anxiety and the re-framing, the re-formulation, the re-scanning of the environment for new ways of getting out of a problem you’re in. You see that same thing in less threatening ways in everyday life.