Sleep and Consciousness
Lucid Dreaming Proof
This work on lucid dreaming really took off among dream researchers. The initial verification of the possibility of knowing you are dreaming while you are dreaming is primarily due to my colleague Steven LaBerge. By now his work has been replicated in several sleep laboratories. I think we can say with reasonable certainty that you can be "awake" in some sense while you're asleep.
This is how it has been proven. When you're in REM sleep remember you're paralyzed from the neck down. The task was to come up with a way to signal to the polysongrapher, "Hey, I know I'm dreaming". You can not hit a micro switch or kick your leg because of this paralysis. But it turns out that you do have control of your eye movements. That is, while in a dream if you think, "I'm going to move my eyes way to the right and then way to the left" and then your dream self does it with his/her dream eyes, that's what really happens to the dreamers physical eyes. Faberge devised a technique at exactly the same time as Keith Hearne in England, totally unbeknownst to each other, where people could signal when they realized they were dreaming. The signal to the sleep lab technician through electrodes attached to the corners of the eyes was a prearranged set of eye movements. Then the technician would wake them up and ask "what was going on before I awoke you?" If dreamer knew they were dreaming and had signaled they would want to know if the technician got the signal?
For instance in Figure 4, there are five signals from LaBerge's laboratory. He writes about this figure: "This is from the last eight minutes of a thirty minute REM period. Upon awakening the subject reported having made five eye movement signals. The first signal at one -- left-right, marked the onset of lucidity. . . . During the following ninety seconds, the subject flew about exploring his dream world until he believed he had awakened, at which point he made the signal for awakening, at number two, which is four movements of left-right, left-right. After another ninety seconds the subject realized he was still dreaming and signaled at three with three pairs of eye movements. Realizing this was too many, he correctly signaled with two pairs at number four. Finally, upon awakening a hundred seconds later, he signaled appropriately with again four movements of left-right, left-right." You can see that you don't need to be a trained polysonographer to recognize the signals. They jump out at you. They're not ambiguous. And they exactly fit the dream transcript describing the felt experience of the dream.