aleczb
Lucid Dreaming
What is Lucid Dreaming Like? A Subjective Standpoint
You’re experiencing a dream, a typical dream with everything out of the ordinary. Eventually, you come to notice that something is out of place or doesn’t make sense; the experience you're having is somehow incongruent with what you know to be possible in the real world. All of a sudden you may think “oh, this is a dream”.
You’re in you high school gym and realize that somebody is there who you never knew until after high school. You’re hovering high above the clouds and realize that what you are doing is physically impossible. You find yourself able to breathe underwater knowing that if this were real, you would drown. Or perhaps you inexplicably come to the realization for no explicitly identifiable reason. This is the moment you being to experiencing a lucid dream.
These realizations happen more often than we would think or remember. And there are many possible courses the dream could follow after you have the realization. One possibility is that the realization immediately causes you to wake up. Another is that you do nothing with the realization, you are lucid for a brief moment before falling back into the typical dream state and continue on with the dream, forgetting that you ever became lucid at all.
Perhaps you become lucid during a dream that is set in a cabin in the woods with some people that you don’t know. This realization is striking to you, you’re completely aware you’re in a dream and you continue to be lucid for a prolonged period of time. You walk into the vividly constructed cabin at your own free will and encounter the characters of your dream
“This is a dream” you say.
One of them looks back at you, a man with a red beard. He smiles.
"Go outside it's beautiful" he says.
You turn and run outside, elated by the sense of freedom and awe. As you run among the beauty of the trees, you notice the striking vividness of the sunlight coming through the trees, the feeling of the wind on your face and the squashing of your feet in the mud. Every step you take is intentional who you follow and where you go is intentional. You realize you can do anything.
You decide to have fun with it for a moment, you know you can do anything imaginable with absolutely no consequences. You imagine a hoard of stormtroopers coming your way and suddenly you’re holding a lightsaber and you want to fight them all off. You imagine a giant cake as tall as you that’s decorated with gems of every color that glisten in the sunlight, then it appears. You imagine meeting that celebrity you’ve always dreamed about, then they appear at your side and you take their hand. You know it’s just a dream, but the swing of your lightsaber hums and collides as realistically as any movie, the cake tastes richer than anything you’ve ever tasted, the detail and beauty of your celebrity crush is as vivid as the beauty of any person you’ve ever seen and the feeling of them against you is just as palpable as any waking intimacy you’ve ever experienced.
This is an example of a lucid dream with prolonged lucidity and complete autonomy of yourself and your dream world. Not all lucid dreams are like this and not all are positive. Sometimes you may realize you are in a dream because something terrifying is happening, someone is trying to kidnap you or you’re locked in a prison cell with the walls slowly closing in. Full autonomy may be harder to achieve in such a scenario has panic sets in. Maybe you do manage to garner enough autonomy over your dream to black your attacker into the sky or to break through the walls of the prison. In negative dreams like this you may even lose control of the dreamworld, and find yourself in an even scarier situation. This is all the more terrifying because despite the fact that you know you’re in a dream, you feel like it is control you rather than you controlling it. Whether lucidity is brief or prolonged, whether autonomy is partial or complete, rather the content is awe inspiring or more consistent with a nightmare, all such examples are all instances of lucid dreaming. (Read my experience title “The Superman”) for a prolonged fully autonomous lucid dream narration).
My subjective interpretation of a lucid dream: A dream in which you realize you are in a dream, depending on the scene or level of awareness you may potentially be able to gain full omnipotent control over your actions and the dream world.
What is Lucid Dreaming? An Objective Standpoint
To analyze the phenomenon of lucid dreaming from an objective standpoint we need to consider the ways in which the phenomenon is perceived by society, the prevalence of lucid dream experiences in the general population, and of course, the neuroscience behind it.
Lucid dreaming is a topic that has been sensationalized by our collective consciousness, a boundless world of magic and wonder. Extensive “how to” guides have been published giving tips and tricks to those who hope to one day master the art of lucid dreaming. Websites like Reddit have lucid dreaming forums where practiced and aspiring lucid dreamers come together to form an online lucid dreaming community. These forums allow people to share their own stories as well as read the experiences of others. There are a number of reported stories in which people have been able to achieve lucidity every night which enough practice.
One of the most common techniques to practice achieving lucidity in a dream is the reality check. It involves getting into the habit of checking, every so often, to confirm that you are awake and not in a dream. If one practices reality checks enough during waking reality, eventually they should conduct a reality check during a dream, find that something is out of the ordinary, and become lucid.
Lucid dreaming is far from an everyday experience, though it may not be as rare as one may initially believe. A team of German psychologists surveyed 1,380 people about their knowledge and personal experience of lucid dreaming. Assuming their results are reflective of the larger population, around half of all people (45%) have never experienced a lucid dream. Of those who have experienced lucid dreaming, 32% report to have no more than a couple of lucid dreams per year. Roughly 21% of the population or about one fifth experience lucid dreaming at least once a month.
Frequency/Relative Frequency of Participants who Experience Lucid Dreaming
Any change in subjective awareness is founded in some type of physical change in neural activity. Lucid dreaming is no exception, in theory there should be some common overarching shift in the dreaming brain that can be linked to moments of lucidity. We can hypothesize about what this shift looks like; however, the proximate cause of the shift may be more difficult to determine.
Recall the role of the prefrontal cortex in cognition; self reflection and logical thinking. The inactivity in the prefrontal cortex during REM sleep accounts for the lack of reflective awareness and critical thinking that characterizes typical dreams. One might expect that the sudden activation of the prefrontal cortex during REM sleep would cause the dreamer to critically examine their situation just as they do in waking situations, perhaps this activation of self reflection or logical thinking corresponds to the reported ‘realization’ of being in a dream and a subsequent instance of lucidity.
Studies to test the involvement of the prefrontal cortex have indeed been conducted using subjects who had been trained to become lucid. One EEG study in 2009 found that the shift from non lucid REM sleep to lucid REM sleep is indeed marked by an increase in activity in frontal areas of the brain. Could this be a neat and tidy explanation for the lucid dream state? As is often the case in science, things become more complicated as they gain more attention and are more closely studied and scrutinized.
Another study in 2012 confirmed that the prefrontal cortex is indeed involved in the switch from non lucid REM sleep to lucid REM sleep. However, this study also found that activation in multiple other regions that correlates with lucid REM sleep versus non-REM sleep. The results of this study found that the primary region that correlates with lucid dreaming was a region called the precuneus, which has been implicated in self awareness, short term memory, self related memories, motor coordination and spatial navigation. Other cortical regions related to language and the processing of more detailed visual experiences we found to be active. Even within the prefrontal cortex, the study identified a subset of the region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to be particularly active during lucid REM sleep. This section of the prefrontal cortex is known to play a role in the “meta evaluation’ of one's inner thoughts and feelings.
Source: https://academic-oup-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/sleep/article/35/7/1017/2558845
It’s important to be aware of the limitations of any scientific study, especially if it gives the results that might be the most desirable. And these studies into lucid dreaming are not exceptions. For one, training to become lucid can be difficult; there’s no guarantee that any given trial will end up measuring the brain of what we define as a “lucid dream”. Because of this limitation, neither study collected an extensive amount of data. Between the two studies, only six subjects were able to obtain lucidity that could be verified by the researchers. Statistically, this significantly limits the degree to which their results can be generalized to the population.
Lucid dreams are essentially the invasion of our internal world by a part of our mind that does not belong there. It seems relatively safe to assume that that ‘part’ of our mind is generated by cortical regions, regions that help us to be self aware and engage in self reflection. REM sleep began in an organism that lacked these cortical structures, thus prohibiting it from experiencing a lucid dream, or even have a concept of self and know the difference between a dream and reality. The fact that our sense of self can be isolated and placed into a world with no physical basis may be nothing more than a fluke or byproduct of the evolution of a cerebral cortex that produces a sense of self; the function of a much younger set of structures being imposed on a neural process that evolved long before there was any need for them.
My objective interpretation of lucid dreaming: Occurrences during REM sleep that causes cortical areas that are typically inactive during REM sleep to spontaneously become active. These cortical regions administer self reflection, logical reasoning, and bodily autonomy into a standard REM state allowing for more conscious control over the internal REM generated world.
Lucid Dreaming: Mind and Matter
In order to draw implications of lucid dreaming to the mind-body problem, I think it’s necessary to reinterpret sleep paralysis as: The conscious mind becoming active within an internally generated world, in some cases allowing conscious autonomy to influence the the lifelike internally generated world as it's being simulated.
In the case of a lucid dreaming experience, we are dealing with a world which is generated entirely by the mind. We’ve established that humans may be the only species with the mental capacity to have a sense of self, and to be able to self reflect and make determine whether or not things are logical or illogical. We know we are not the only species who have dreams, but we may be the only species with the capacity to lucid dream (being the only ones with developed cortical regions and a sense of self).
This takes the question of mind vs matter someplace new entirely. The structures that give us our sense of self are matter, as are the structures that take in sensory information and recreate internally generated worlds with that information. But how does one classify a sense of self, mind or matter? Our sense of self is nothing more than a feeling that we have, it can be perceived but it cannot be measured the way physical perceptions can. We can use others to confirm a perceptual stimuli we are looking at, but we can’t ask anyone to see or measure our sense of self awareness, yet we still experience it all the time. Not as internally or externally generated perception. How can this be so if the same neural material that gives rise to the perceptions also gives rise to the sense of self? Might any feeling or perception exist only as a specific pattern of neural firing? Essentially making it nothing but matter.
I don’t know how to answer this, I am amazed by the mind’s ability to create these expansive and vivid perceptual worlds. And even more amazed that out higher cortical areas can have such a radical effect on our internal world. Both a sense of self as well as an IGPW require neural activity, however they are not the same. IGPW can be generated by many species, though we have no access to the subjective world of other species, many of the same structures are there that would allow them to have their own sensory world, which we could probably understand if described to use. What it much harder to understand is how the cortical regions of the mind word to produce a subjective sense of self, something we can never share with another human being. Conscious awareness is a feeling mediated by the same mechanisms that allow us to see and hear and smell and touch (neural activity).
The sense of self that has such interesting effects when imposed on an internally generated world brings to light just how abstract a sense of self is. The mind takes in sensory information (matter) and stores it in neural networks. As far as we know, mind uses no external stimuli to represent a sense of self, meaning it is an aspect of mind that exists in only one physical form (neural pathways) as opposed to perceptions which have two physical forms (the stimuli and the neural pathways that encodes them).
No matter how abstract something like a sense of self is, it necessarily must be built out of physical stimuli interacting and shaping the physical structure of the mind until it emerges.
So how does this help us better understand the mind-body problem?