The November/December 2011 issue of the Scientific American Mind has an interesting cover story about sleep and dreaming. I was especially intrigued by its article about lucid dreaming.
‘Lucid dreaming‘ is a term coined by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik Willem van Eeden in 1913. It happens when the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming. Most people (8 out of 10) can recall having at least one lucid dream in their life, but sleepers who frequently experience lucid dreaming (once or twice a week) are rare. There are different degrees of lucidity in a lucid dream: from the realization that one is dreaming to having volitional control over the course of the dream.
Benzene molecule
In 2009, Dr. Ursula Voss and her team investigated sleepers’ brain activity using electroencephalography (EGG). The researchers found that the frontal lobes seem to perform very similarly in a lucid dream and in the waking state. On the other hand, the patterns of activity in the parietal and temporal lobes have more resemblance to those of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. These results allowed them to conclude that lucid dreaming is a hybrid state of consciousness in between waking and REM sleep.
It has been shown experimentally that sleeping can lead to insights. Many scientific discoveries were made based on an insight that happened during a dream, such as Loewi’s theory of chemical neurotransmission, Mendeleyev’s periodic table of chemical elements, and Kekule’s discovery of the structure of benzene. Recent studies have shown that lucid dreams can have practical uses as well. People can learn to increase their chance of having a lucid dream to decrease their frequency of nightmares. Athletes have been found to learn complex motor sequences more quickly after targeted lucid-dream training. Finally, lucid dreams can also boost creativity, such as finding metaphors.
Below is a video with tips on how to increase your likelihood of having a lucid dream.
A lot more needs to be found about lucid dreaming still, but we can already imagine many other potential applications. Who knows, maybe one day university students will be able to get more sleep while still learning everything they need. But for now, I am just dreaming.
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