WHAT IS LUCID DREAMING?

Lucid dreaming is simply being conscious that you are dreaming. Many people, especially in childhood, have had lucid dreams and have described them. Often in lucid dreaming there is a sense of exhilaration on discovering you are dreaming right now-an excitement so intense that it may cause you to awaken. If you are able to maintain both the dream and your awareness of it, there comes a great sense of freedom. Knowing that the dream images are insubstantial, you can walk through dreamed walls or escape the law of gravity, flying over vivid, imagined landscapes. With training you can shape the dream environment according to your wishes. Small things can be made large, large objects shrunk at will. The only limit is your imagination. Once greater control has been developed you can use the dream space as a laboratory to achieve psychological insights, overcome fears, do creative work, entertain yourself, or meditate in the virtual environment of your choosing. The science of lucid dreaming is a recently developed system of theory and practice within the field of psychology. Although he had important predecessors, Stephen LaBerge, who received his PhD in psychology from Stanford University, is the foremost exponent of lucid dreaming. In the late 1980s, LaBerge, while doing graduate research at Stanford, became the first to prove to the scientific community that one can be consciously aware while dreaming. Although many people had reported lucid dreams through the ages, psychologists assumed these were false memoriesthat people had actually awakened at night and in the morning mistakenly believed they had been conscious of dreaming. LaBerge is extremely gifted as a lucid dreamer and is able to have lucid

dreams at will, an ability he had naturally as a child but which was lost during adolescence, then deliberately regained as a graduate student. As part of his research he devised a method of making specific eye movements while he dreamed so that his fellow researchers would know he was awake within his dreams. This method proved the existence of lucid dreaming.