As I looked across the coziness of my grandmother’s house, something struck me as shockingly familiar.
My grandmother was hard at work in the kitchen while my grandfather sat in his old recliner watching the news. They had been actors in this scene for the better part of my life, but there was something unreal.
Sensing an unnatural familiarity, I walked down the steps leading to the living room, where I sat down beside granddaddy and we talked like countless times before.
It was a conversation between old friends. My grandfather has been dead for seven years.
He exists now only in memories, his conversation is the projection of a dream hijacked by fleeting logic as I sleep through a lucid dream.
As our neurological understanding of sleep increases, scientists learn more about our innate ability to influence our dreamscapes for recreational and potentially therapeutic purposes.
Lucid dreaming is the in-dream realization that you are dreaming, according to Lourdes Del Rosso, a sleep scientist at LSU’s Sleep Science Center in Shreveport.
Scientists theorize this realization comes primarily through practice but can also be triggered by focusing on something otherworldly in a dream — like seeing a grandfather in his usual routine years after he died.
At its zaniest, this realization allows dreamers to influence their dream, dictating actions and sometimes surroundings like a subconscious video game. Your actions are limited only by imagination and skill.
“You can go anywhere and do anything. It just takes a lot of imagination,” said mass communication senior Helen Headlee, describing one of her favorite lucid dreams where she summoned fireworks over LSU’s West Campus Apartments.
Scientists began studying lucid dreaming at the turn of the 20th century, but evidence of this phenomenon was mostly restricted to anecdotal testimony. Scientifically measuring the content of dreams is difficult, Del Rosso said.
That was until the ‘70s, when Stephen LeBerge and other sleep scientists at Stanford University were cleverly able to communicate with the waking world using eye movements, according to the Lucidity Institute, a for-profit organization which LeBerge founded to spread awareness and support research into the phenomenon.
Survey data of college students suggest about 10 to 20 percent of students lucidly dream once a month, said Robert Waggoner, author of “Lucid Dreaming, Gateway to the Inner Self” and co-editor of the online Lucid Dream Exchange.
Waggoner said most people have likely experienced some sort of lucid dream whether or not they remember it.
Possibly because of differing sleep habits, dreamers have mixed capabilities of remembering dreams, but bolstering the dreamers capacity to remember could be a simple as chronicling your dreams in a journal immediately after waking, Del Rosso suggested.
The Lucidity Institute has developed — and sells — advanced techniques for inducing, participating in and controlling the dream. They also sell equipment like the Novadreamer, a mask which uses a small laser beam that helps the sleeper realize they are dreaming without waking them.
But there are more simple ways to induce lucidity. These typically involve using some waking time for training the mind to realize when it is dreaming.
Waggoner, who estimates to have had more than 1,000 lucid dreams since he first began exploring lucid dreaming techniques in the ‘70s, said the dreamer needs to train his mind to realize when they are in a dream.
This can be as simple as the dreamer looking at his hands before sleep and repeating to himself that in his dreams, he will see his hands and then know he is dreaming, Waggoner said.
Waggoner said the goal of such exercises is to create an associational or Pavlovian link that will spark realization through the trance of the dream.
