While You Were Sleeping

What LaBerge is talking about is not the instinct to dream but the mechanics of dreaming, the notion that it is a skill that can be sharpened. As for why we'd want to, the obvious answer is for the adventure of it, to enjoy our dreams as what LaBerge calls "personal virtual reality, allowing us to do things that might not be possible otherwise." Sex plays a big part in these "adventure/exploration" scenarios, as do physically impossible feats like flying, or any fantasy at all. But to see lucidity only in terms of wish fulfillment is to underestimate the power of such dreams to engage us at the core. One common use of lucid dreaming is as a "rehearsal for living," in which a shy person can work on his social skills, or a worker can dream her way through asking for a raise. Another involves "creative problem solving," as in the case of an artist who, while sleeping, visited a dream gallery and, in the paintings he saw there, found the solution to a stalled work of his own. Listening to LaBerge run through these examples, I'm reminded of a passage from Ernest Hartmann's book Dreams and Nightmares, in which he â marks the connection between dreaming and discovery. "Great things can happen in dreams -- great discoveries in science and art," he writes. "Elias Howe invented the sewing machine based on a dream. Robert Louis Stevenson reported that his novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to him directly from a dream. Mozart claimed that many of the themes for his music came to him in dreams, and Tartini wrote a well-known violin sonata that he says he transcribed simply from a dream in which he heard the devil playing it for him on a violin." The same might be said of René Descartes, who found his signature ideas in dreams, then used the experience to underscore a "position of universal doubt," arguing that, if dreaming could trick him into believing he was active "when in fact I am lying undressed in bed," there was no way ever to be certain of the point where dreams and waking begin and end.

If Descartes' "dream argument" has anything to tell us, it may be just how little definitive information we've gathered about dreaming in the last 350 years. I, however, prefer to see it as a precursor to LaBerge's query about whether we're dreaming now. It is, after all, only a small leap from the Cartesian landscape of doubt to one where, as LaBerge suggests, dreams are less illusions of consciousness than discrete experiences, as authentic as anything in waking life. "Although the events we appear to perceive in dreams are illusory," he writes in a 1990 research paper, "our feelings in response to dream content are real. Indeed, most of the events we experience in dreams are real; when we experience feelings, say, anxiety or ecstasy, in dreams, we really do feel anxious or ecstatic at the time." Of course, when it comes to dreams, almost every answer opens up another question, and LaBerge's findings are no exception. At the deepest level, he notes, dreaming may be "a spiritualizing experience, in which you understand that life has more to it than you ever knew. Dreams look real, but they're in your mind, so you realize that the physical world is also a construction, which shows that the mind can affect reality in more ways than you can imagine." This is, he acknowledges, treacherous territory for a scientist, but, then, the one irrefutable truth about science is that its terms are always changing. "Twenty years ago," LaBerge says, "lucid dreams were considered anomalous, but now because of research, they fit into current science. In my view, the only things that are truly anomalous are PSI effects -- telepathic dreams or dreams that predict the future -- because they don't fit in with current notions of space and time."

THE KEY WORD HERE IS "CURRENT," FOR BY USING it, LaBerge is saying that at some point he expects those notions to change. Such a sentiment is echoed by Stephen Aizenstat, founding president of Santa Barbara's Pacifica Graduate Institute and a clinician who has worked with dreams since the mid-1970s, although he frames it in far simpler terms: "The psyche is multidimensional," he says, as if this were the most obvious idea in the world. It was, in fact, a multidimensional experience that started Aizenstat on his own road to dream research: a series of dreams about his long-dead great-grandfather, culminating with one in which the old man led him to a wooden chest, then opened it to reveal a book. Once Aizenstat shared the dreams with members of his family, he discovered that his great-aunt not only knew the chest in question, but actually had it in her house. Sure enough, when he opened it, the book from his dream was waiting inside. "It was a book of my great-grandfather's life and writings," Aizenstat remembers. "He was a Kabbalist. So I read the book, and got in touch with that part of my lineage. And, as it happens, a lot of his ideas were similar to mine."