What Is Lucid Dreaming?

In the simplest terms, a lucid dream is a dream in which you become aware that you are dreaming — you “wake up” inside the dream while the dream carries on around you. That definition is not casual: Dutch psychologist and writer Frederik van Eeden coined the term “lucid dream” in 1913, and awareness is precisely what he used to define it.

My own first lucid dream didn’t just change my life, it grew into a passion that reshaped my sense of what we’re capable of as human beings. Almost twenty years later I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I can experience a reality every bit as real as this waking one.

Awareness, Not Control

People new to the subject often assume you must be able to control a dream for it to count as lucid. Not true. Plenty of accomplished lucid dreamers simply let the narrative unfold and watch it as a fully conscious observer. Your level of awareness that you are dreaming is what makes a dream lucid — not your authority over it.

That distinction matters in practice, because lucidity comes in degrees. From my own experience:

• There have been times I realized I was dreaming but could do nothing at all to steer it.
• There have been times I realized I was dreaming and the realization itself ended the dream moments later.
• And there have been times I didn’t recognize a dream as lucid until the next morning, when I recalled that I had in fact been awake inside it.

It is also possible to reach low-level lucidity, where you briefly wonder whether this is a dream and then let the thought go. Because awareness rather than control is the defining criterion, most guides concentrate on techniques — reality checks above all — that jog you into noticing.

What It Actually Feels Like

These ideas are genuinely hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t experienced full-consciousness lucidity. While I’m in that state I literally cannot tell the difference between the dream world and the waking one. That fact is what has held my interest for so many years: if my waking world and my dream world are identical in almost every respect, that says something remarkable about what our minds can do.

There are even times a lucid dream has felt more real than waking life, and more natural besides — partly because, as John Perkins puts it, my world is as I dream it. Inside a lucid dream, my world can be exactly what I imagine it to be, vivid enough that I need to run a check to work out which world I’m actually in.

My own check is whether I can fly. I’ve dreamt of flying like Superman as far back as I can remember, so flight became both a habit and a dream sign: if I can fly, I must be dreaming. That realization is often exactly what hands me the dream. Flying with outstretched arms, with the sensation utterly convincing, is something I could never properly put into words.

Here is the part I still can’t explain. The first time I flew over my childhood home — before Google Earth existed to check against — what I saw from above was almost identical to the satellite image I looked up years later. Every detail of the neighborhood matched: tree for tree, street for street, house for house. I’m not claiming to know what that means. But people who’ve had near-death experiences have described their hospital rooms in accurate detail, and I know someone who read the numbers off the roof of the ambulance she was in while in anaphylactic shock. That such experiences are recorded at all — some of them my own — makes this one of the most extraordinary things available to us in these fragile frames.

How Lucid Dreams Differ From Related States

The awareness requirement is also what separates lucid dreaming from neighboring altered states: out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, even alien abduction experiences. Many of these share phenomena you might meet at the onset of a lucid dream — tingling vibrations, a sense of paralysis often carrying intense emotion, the feeling of leaving your body.

The difference is belief. People undergoing out-of-body, near-death or abduction experiences typically believe at the time that what is happening is literally real. In a lucid dream, the dreamer recognizes at some point that the surrounding world is a construct of the mind.

A Long History

Becoming conscious within a dream has been recognized across cultures throughout recorded history, pursued for spiritual seeking, philosophical exploration, self-improvement, and plain recreation. Tibetan monks hold that increased lucidity and dream control are an important step on the path to enlightenment, and have practiced meditation-based techniques for centuries.

Rather later, the French philosopher René Descartes found that his own lucid dreams led him to question whether anything made waking reality more “real” — a line of doubt that helped produce his famous maxim, “I think, therefore I am.”

Despite all that, no serious scientific research addressed the question until the early twentieth century, beginning with van Eeden’s 1913 coinage.

What Happens in the Brain

In the first experiments with lucid dreaming, neuroscientists such as Stephen LaBerge set out simply to prove the phenomenon was real. The natural next question was which parts of the brain switch on during one.

Neuroscientist Allan J. Hobson has speculated that during REM sleep, activation of the part of the prefrontal cortex governing working memory may be what allows a dreamer to become lucid. That region controls access to memory and self-awareness, and is normally dormant during REM. Meanwhile the subconscious act of dreaming is driven by deep brain structures that stay active and creative even after you become lucid — which is precisely why you don’t have to consciously hold the dream together once you arrive. You can sit back and watch it play out, or use certain techniques to prolong it if you prefer.

Why Lucid Dreams Feel Real Afterward

Perhaps the most revealing clue is what waking up from a lucid dream feels like. Unlike an ordinary dream or a false awakening, it still feels real and continuous with the waking state afterward.

In her 1991 article on the subject, Susan Blackmore suggested this seamlessness arises because your model of yourself during a lucid dream sits much closer to the model you maintain while awake. When you’re awake, sensory input helps your brain build one consistent model of reality with you at its center. In dreams that input is gone, leaving the brain free to generate competing models — and whichever is most stable at that moment feels real.

Recall an ordinary dream in enough detail and you may notice there is no distinct “you” witnessing it. There are thoughts, feelings and actions performed by various dream versions of you, but because the regions responsible for self-awareness and memory are dormant, no consistent self is being maintained. Lucid dreaming changes that. The higher prefrontal activity may be just enough to build a model of you inside the dream that closely resembles your waking self — congruent enough to let you notice inconsistencies in the dream, and to recognize that you’re dreaming. It’s also why you remember lucid dreams so much better than ordinary ones.

Where to Go From Here

If this is the experience you’re after, the practical work is covered in depth in my complete guide to how to lucid dream — dream journaling, dream signs, reality checks, the named techniques, and timing your sleep around REM. The single most powerful starting tool, for me, remains a dream journal.

You’ll also find entries from my own dream journal throughout this blog, along with a comprehensive list of herbs for dreaming. Many plants have been used for thousands of years to aid dream recall, induce vivid dreams, and encourage lucidity.

Happy Dreaming,
— Keith Cleversley