The Science and Potential of Lucid Dreaming | Robert Waggoner

foreign hi everyone I'm Robert Wagoner and I'm here today to talk about this special topic the science and potential of lucid dreaming lucid dreaming is something that I've been involved with for more than 40 years and I think it has an incredible potential for the human race as we continue to move forward so my first question is this how many years have you spent in the dream state so think about that for a second science says that during our sleep State we spend about 23 percent of the time on average in dreaming so when you think about your age though how many years have you spent in dreaming now if you do the math you'll see that by age 24 you've already spent two entire years in dreaming and by age 36 it'd be three years by age 48 four entire years of dreaming but no matter how old you are how much do you really know about dreaming if you spent two years in a foreign country you would know about the culture the food the language the society but what about two entire years in dreaming what do you know about dreaming so what we're going to get in today is the idea of lucid dreaming and lucid dreaming gives us a new way to explore the unconscious mind as well as understand the importance of dreaming so lucid dreaming is defined by the American Psychological Association dictionary as a dream in which the sleeper is aware that he or she is dreaming and may be able to influence the progress of the dream narrative so that's the official definition but for many of us lucid dreamers we would just say lucid dreaming is realizing within a dream that you are dreaming you know this is a dream so think about that for a moment what what does that mean you find yourself in a dream but at the time you just accept it as as a sort of reality and then suddenly you have this insight and understand wait a second this is a dream so you have a sudden Insight that leads you to a realization and like the Zen Garden in this image it's it's in many ways like a Moment of Zen you understand the actual nature of your existence you understand oh I'm in a dream now instead of being fooled by the appearances of things so lucid dreaming it always involves a sudden insight you can probably understand this better if you consider a normal dream so so think of a normal dream you're you're walking in the downtown area of a large city and suddenly uh Tyrannosaurus Rex appears what happens Well normally uh you react you accept this as valid as true you create a story to justify it oh this this dinosaur must have appeared from a museum someplace and uh was genetically revived somehow you create a story which which in the sense uh justifies what's happening but all together when you think about it you lack critical awareness you just accept whatever happened and go along with it you might run and get your family you might tell others get out of here there's a dinosaur but that's what a normal dream is like so so now let's think about a lucid dream but in a lucid dream suddenly you see that dinosaur and you think wait a second dinosaurs are extinct how can this be and at that moment you realize oh this this must be a dream I'm dreaming that and when you have that realization then technically you're lucidly aware so once you're lucidly aware you can begin to make choices do you want to fry up and get away from the dinosaur or do you want to go up to the dinosaur and say what do you represent and oftentimes you'll hear it respond to you and tell you exactly what it represents you can do whatever you want at this moment you can begin to explore explore the dream state while consciously aware while knowing this is a dream you can conduct experiments not only your own personal experiment but also scientific experiments as well and finally you can learn you can learn about the nature of the unconscious about the nature of dreaming about the nature of this other state of reality one beautiful thing about lucid dreaming when you truly become Lucid is you let go of fear you know it's a dream dinosaur there's nothing here that can hurt you and once you have that Freedom From Fear then you can go even deeper now people often ask does scientific proof exist for lucid dreaming and the Beautiful Thing is the answer is yes the evidence begins back in the spring of 1975. Keith earn was a researcher at the University of Hall who met a lucid dreamer named Alvin Worsley who said he could become consciously aware within his dreams and Keith Hern wondered well how could you scientifically validate lucid dreaming how could you validate this and then he had an idea he brought Alan Worsley into the sleep lab and he told him when you become consciously aware within a dream will have these rapid eye movement polygraph pads on your eyes that shows you're in regular dreaming but when you become consciously aware I want you to move your eyes left to right eight times and that'll show up on the rapid eye movement polygraph pad readout and that'll provide evidence for lucid dreaming they also had some other uh pieces on Alan warsley to show that he remained in the Sleep state so it was April 12th of 1975 Alan Worsley was in the sleep lab suddenly in the dream state he became consciously aware that he was dreaming he remembered the signal by moving his eyes left to right eight times and that was the very first evidence for lucid dreaming two years later at Stanford University Stephen Laberge did basically uh the same experiment not knowing about Keith hearn's work he brought himself into the sleep lab moved his eyes when he became consciously aware within the dream and had the rapid eye movement polygraph pad information to show that so he was one of the first people to widely distribute his research in well-known journals and became connected with this scientific evidence for lucid dreaming now since that time there's been a lot of scientific research on lucid dreaming and just to give you a rough example of some of the areas of research there's neurological research so they'll bring lucid dreamers into the sleep lab they'll put a 19 Channel EEG electroencephalogram cap on their head to measure their brain activity and then they'll signal with their eyes when they're consciously aware within the dream and then that way researchers can see what does brain activity look like in a lucid dream so there's been some wonderful neurological research on that done by Martin Dressler in the Netherlands Ursula Vos J Allen Hobson at Harvard and others who have researched lucid dreaming also lucid dreaming has been used for psychotherapeutic activity basically with people who have recurring nightmares because of post-traumatic stress disorder that's one of the most common symptoms of PTSD is recurring nightmares and the very first work occurred back in 1982 where a psychotherapist Gordon holiday asked them ask the people who are having recurring nightmares to become aware within their Nightmare and then just change one thing in the lucid dream what he discovered is that by changing one thing suddenly their nightmare ceased they quit having nightmares every night and they could return to regular sleep habits so it's gone on and also improved just the whole field of recurring nightmares this work on lucid dreaming also there's been scientific research on how lucid dreaming affects the body so Stephen Laberge would do experiments where he would ask people to become lucidly aware in the sleep lab and then he had put measurements on their arms to measure muscle movement so they would signal with their eyes they were lucid dreaming and then they would clinch their fist in an alternating pattern in the lucid dream and what he discovered is that actually there was physical muscle movement at a low level in their arms in an alternating pattern so there's been a fair amount of research to show that lucid dreaming actually affects the body in Germany there's been research to look at how lucid dreaming could help a person enhance their waking skills for example there was a psychotherapist Paul Foley who was quite a lucid dreamer and wrote a book on the subject and he used lucid dreaming to perfect his skills in downhill skiing and doing a number of certain things and he showed other people that they could practice their waking skills in a lucid dream and for example do Maneuvers in their downhill skiing in the lucid dream that normally they wouldn't do in the waking world and in that way they began to develop a certain kind of muscle memory so it's interesting to think that a survey showed that in Germany of the professional athletes something like eight or nine percent of them were using lucid dreaming to enhance their skills to enhance their level of attainment in their area of skills and felt like they were having Success With It now there's also been research on interacting with dream figures when you're lucidly aware and and much more so I'm not going to go into all the details but I just want to get across the idea that lucid dreaming has been researched and of course there's always more research that can be conducted now oftentimes people ask me well is lucid dreaming natural and there's a wonderful study by Ursula Voss in Germany she went to a school that had school children ages 6 to 19 and of this 694 school children she asked them have you ever become aware within a dream that you were dreaming basically she asked him have you ever had a lucid dream and then she interviewed everyone who felt like they had had a lucid dream just to be sure that it met the criteria after all of this they discovered that 51 of the students had already had a lucid dream in fact as I read the research I realized that many more than 20 percent of the eight-year-olds had already naturally and spontaneously had a lucid dream so again no one taught them how to do this no one explained it to them it was just something that happened naturally on occasion in the dream state and so this gets across the notion that lucid dreaming is natural and it just happens occasionally and spontaneously amongst the population now people also wonder well is lucid dreaming very prevalent around the world and so there's been surveys on this as well there is a survey by Daniel erlocker and others who surveyed college students and and asked them have you ever become aware within a dream that you were dreaming in the USA one class reported that 71 percent of the people in that class could report at least one lucid dream in Germany they would get numbers like 82 percent had reported a lucid dream in Netherlands 73 percent could remember a lucid dream in Japan 47 could recall at least one lucid dream but was what was interesting about this survey is not only did it show this kind of numbers of people having lucid dreams it also showed that of this group about 25 reported at least having one lucid dream a month on average and so scientists consider that a frequent Lucid dreamer they're having at least one lucid dream a month so it's a wonderful thing to have this kind of survey data that just shows lucid dreaming is natural it's spontaneous and actually it's fairly prevalent around the world one thing that people always ask me when I go around the world giving workshops and lectures is does lucid dreaming mean control that you control the dream and I don't think it does in fact I created a metaphor to kind of explain my feelings after a thousand lucid dreams about how I feel about this issue of control I wrote the Sailor does not control the sea neither does the Lucid dreamer controls a dream so when you think of ceiling on the sea you have to deal with the wind the waves the current the condition of the boat your skills as a saver you have to deal with all of that so the Sailor really doesn't control the sea the Sailor responds to the Sea the saver relates to the sea that the Sailor doesn't control the sea and that's how it is in lucid dreaming as well you can influence things you can manipulate some things but you don't control the entirety of the dream so some of you out there have probably had a number of lucid dreams and and might feel a little bit conflicted about that but but I want to bring up an idea let's say you became Lucid tonight and you decided to fall fly through the wall of wherever you were and then when you fly through the wall on the other side of the wall you see a castle and a white horse who created the castle and the white horse you as a lucid dreamer just flew through the wall how do you explain the castle in the white horse if you control the dream so I bring that up just to say that in the lucid dream state we're still relating to the unconscious mind to that larger awareness and if we're thoughtful we'll realize that we're in this relationship we can learn from it as well but it helps to understand that lucid dreaming really doesn't mean control so much as more aware relating you know you're in a dream and now you can begin to relate to the contents of the dream also also many times people will ask me does lucid dreaming mean the same as an out of body experience or astral travel and and so I I want to get to how I feel about this so remember the definition of a lucid dream is you realize within a dream that you're dreaming you see something or notice something or experience something within a dream and realize oh this is a dream I'm dreaming this but think about out-of-body experiences for example a number of people report having these when they have a medical emergency like a heart attack or a car crash suddenly they find themselves floating above their body maybe looking at the doctors and nurses who are trying to revive them and so where in that do you realize within a dream that you're dreaming so that kind of condition is obviously not a lucid dream it's something else or sometimes people will report as they're preparing for Sleep something strange happens for example they might be getting to hear an intense humming or a buzzing around their body or they feel this strange energy and then often they'll report that oh then they spontaneously find themselves looking at the bedroom from from above the bed so again where in that do you realize within a dream that you're dreaming obviously this is a different kind of experience and the intense humming and buzzing is oftentimes a characteristic of of some out-of-body experiences and this feeling of a strange energy is characteristic of some out-of-body experiences so again while they might share some similarities I don't really think of out-of-bodies Astro travels as the same as lucid dreams it's kind of like comparing um a house cat to a mountain lion they both have a tail they're they're both covered in fur they both look like felines but they're not exactly the same and so again within a lucid dream you realize that you're dreaming within a dream and Out of Body Of course can be something uh entirely different that doesn't meet that definition now all of this brings me to the point of what makes the scientific evidence of lucid dreaming a breakthrough and I want to tell you why this scientific evidence is a breakthrough you have to realize that the history of lucid dreaming goes back for many thousands of years so for example in Buddhist dream yoga they go to a three-year dream yoga monastery to learn about lucid dreaming and how to connect that to Buddhist philosophy now the 11th century Indian Buddhist Yogi naropa he said that Buddhist dream yoga was one of the six paths to enlightenment so they saw lucid dreaming as a very important technique in order to achieve enlightenment here I have an image of the sufis the whirling dervishes in Sufism for more than a thousand years there's been Sufi writers who have written about using lucid dreaming to connect to the divine and then when you look at shamanic and Native Traditions you'll find that for many thousands of years they've been using using lucid dreaming as a way of gaining information as a way of communicating as a way of accessing inner reality so lucid dreaming has this long for many millennial expression and teaching in all of these groups because they saw the value of lucid dreaming to connect with something beyond the physical world now I also brought the image here of a Christian crucifix because in the letters of Saint Augustine there is actually a lucid dream that Saint Augustine reported was from a gentleman a Christian in Carthage so his name was janardius and one night uh gennardius sees this radiant youth and he notices this radiant Youth and then he wakes up the next night he falls asleep again and once again he sees this radiant youth but now the radiant youth comes up to him and asks him where have we met before and gennardius realizes that oh it was in last night's dream and then they begin to have a conversation where the radiant youth makes it clear that janardius is dreaming right then and there that he's aware within a dream and he asked gennardius are your eyes what were you right now and he he thought well he's he's obviously sleeping in bed and and the youth asked with what eyes do you see me now and that was an interesting question for gennardius because he wondered in the after death state or once a Christian Resurrection occurred how would you see because he had seen bodies deteriorate in the desert of Tunisia and he realized that the physical body just completely and utterly falls apart so how do we see when we're Resurrected and when he realized that he was looking at this radiant youth he he couldn't really respond to that question but the radiant youth assured him that he would have a faculty of perception after he passed away or was resurrected so in any case lucid dreaming has touched all these religions all these spiritual Traditions all these wisdom traditions in various ways and the Beautiful Thing is now has been scientifically accepted as a way of perceiving and exploring the nature of things I think what we'll learn as we go deeper into lucid dreaming is this that lucid dreaming will be able to assist science in exploring the nature of the Mind the nature of the unconscious and also the idea of the self and we'll get into that as we go further into this lecture so people often ask me what's the value in lucid dreaming why would a person want to lose a dream so first I have to say that lucid dreaming in and of itself is Simply Fun you become lucidly aware and then you can fly through the dream space you can walk through walls you can walk into water you can talk to dream figures you can ask them what they represent you can explore the dream space while consciously aware but I'd say probably the first value and potential of lucid dreaming is accessing inner creativity and so here's some examples of how lucid dreamers use that oftentimes lucid dreamers who are in the art will use lucid dreaming to Be Inspired or access creativity so a lucid dreamer Who's involved in painting might announce once they become consciously aware within a dream now let me see the most incredible art I can create and suddenly on the nearby walls art will begin to appear and these artists will examine uh the lucid dream art that's appeared in their lucid dream and they'll remember it and upon waking they'll make some sketches and then later produce this oftentimes these lucid dream artists have found that their lucid dream art sells the best it seems to be the most desired by others I've had a novelist who writes novels for a living tell me that when he gets stuck writing a novel he'll try to have a lucid dream and when he becomes aware within a dream that he's dreaming then he'll call out for the novel characters to appear and suddenly the novel characters will appear and he'll ask them how do we make this book work better or what what should we do next in the book and oftentimes the novel characters will tell him how to make the book better how to make it more interesting or more surprising or more joyful I've had musicians tell me that they've become aware within lucid dreams and announced when I go into that next building I'm going to hear the most amazing music I could ever create and they walk into that building and begin to hear This truly profound phenomenal music they're accessing their own inner creativity and in one of the books by Stephen Laberge he shares the story of a computer programmer who said that whenever he got stuck doing a program he would try to have a lucid dream and in the lucid dream he would call on Albert Einstein to appear and often Albert Einstein would appear and they would sit at a table and try to figure out the problem in the software program and he said once they figured it out he'd tell Albert Einstein to go away so he could memorize the solution this gentleman said that when he took it to the office 99 of the time it was correct so again lucid dreaming allows us to access that inner creativity directly but you have to know how to go about it in order to really understand and utilize that also another potential of lucid dreaming I feel is promoting emotional health so in this magazine called the lucid dreaming experience which I co-edit um I interviewed a woman named Hope and hope had been involved in an industrial accident and lost her leg she spent six months in the hospital recovering from this accident and she said the worst thing that happened was that she began to have nightmares every night she said it actually got so bad that she hated to fall asleep then one day she was out at a bookstore and and discovered a book on lucid dreaming and then she began to read it she realized that lucid dreaming might help her with this recurring nightmare so it was later that week she was being chased in her nightmare once again but all of a sudden it occurred to her wait a second I'm running but I only have one leg and at that moment she realized it was a dream and so for the first time ever she turned and faced the monster who was chasing her and she just looked at it knowing that it was a dream creation and said bye and took off flying away she said after that her nightmares basically ceased so again that's just one example how of how people have used lucid dreaming to resolve recurring nightmares but I've also heard of how other lucid dreamers have used it to resolve phobias fear of public speaking fear of insects fear of heights those kind of things I've seen how lucid dreamers have also told me examples of how they've used it to resolve anxiety or resolve obsessive compulsive habits so lucid dreaming has a lot of potential here in this area of emotional healing I feel now beyond that there's also the idea of lucid dreaming to promote physical healing in my first book in my second book I have a chapter on how lucid dreamers have while they're consciously aware within the dream promoted their physical health so a gentleman sent a story to my magazine lucid dreaming experience his name is Ray and he had what people call gerd which stands for gastroesophageal reflex disorder so basically you have so much acid and and burning that that it's hard to sleep at night in fact Ray found that he couldn't sleep laying down he had to sleep propped up sitting upright he had been to doctors to try to have the gerd resolved he had taken all sorts of prescript prescribed medicines to try to get the gerd resolved but for years nothing really improved it So reading my book he realized that oh perhaps in a lucid dream he could try to promote his physical health and resolve the situation he became Lucid the first time and he really hadn't devised a plan and so he he tried to just uh suggest that he would feel better and he he said that he woke up and he did feel a little bit better but then he went back and re-read the chapter and realized that he had to really devise a plan in the waking state to enact in his Lucid his next lucid dream so later he became lucidly aware he stabilized the lucid dream he remembered that he wanted to try to heal his GERD and he went on that and had a profound incredible lucid dream experience he said when he woke up from that he realized that he was physically different and he realized that his gerd had disappeared I talked to him last year and that situation of his gerd disappearing had continued for seven or eight years he said he was truly stunned by that example but besides promoting physical health in that way lucid dreamers have also risk received prescriptive advice on things they could do that would improve their health and also they've received diagnostic advice sometimes received information about health issues that they needed to address while consciously aware in the lucid dream so here's another wide open area for Lucid dreaming's potential so besides all of that lucid dreaming also allows us to access an inner awareness I call my first book lucid dreaming gateway to the inner self because after 10 years of lucid dreaming I realized that in a lucid dream you could ignore the dream figures and simply ask a question of your unconscious mind like hey dream show me something important for me to see and oftentimes the entire lucid dream would change and you'd be looking at something important for you to see so I have explored this very deeply and as have many other people and you begin to realize that there is a responsive awareness that you can access within the lucid dream oftentimes you'll hear a non-visible voice give you the response sometimes the entire lucid dream will change but you can even have a conversation with this inner awareness lucid dreaming also has potential in exploring the nature of reality so we know oftentimes in dreams that space and time aren't exactly like they are in physical reality in a dream we can be in our childhood School room with our current friends again the nature of time is different or we can find ourselves in France and how did we get there the nature of space is different so in lucid dreams you can begin to explore the nature of space-time the nature of reality the nature of how the unconscious mind actually functions to create experience and that's truly a fantastic and deep area finally you can use lucid dreaming as others have for thousands of years as a means of spiritual growth and and personal transformation for example uh if you want to have a truly profound lucid dream stop in the lucid dream and begin to meditate I think you'll find that your meditation experience is Beyond any that you would normally have in the waking state or if you become lucidly aware asked to experience the quality of the Divine a dream let me experience unconditional love and see what happens sometimes the resulting experience can be one of the most profound experiences you'll ever have but there's ways of using lucid dreaming to grow spiritually to work through limiting beliefs and to really transform it doesn't happen the first time necessarily but it does happen as you go deeper on the journey into lucid dreaming so my journey into lucid dreaming began in 1975. I was a high school student reading a book by Carlos Castaneda called journey to excellent and in this book his shamanic teacher Don Juan suggests that he become a he finds his hands in the dream state and become aware of dreaming and and I thought what you can you can become aware within a dream that you're dreaming and there really wasn't a technique and so I invented my own technique and within three days by using this simple technique I had my very first consciously induced lucid dream now you have to remember that the scientific evidence for lucid dreaming did not appear until 1980. and so basically for the next five or six years I learned about lucid dreaming through trial and error I just did lucid dreaming in order to learn more about it and I kept going deeper and deeper but I was extremely happy when the scientific evidence for lucid dreaming did emerge because then I could talk to people about it without seeming uh totally uh Wild so what I learned on my journey first was that the dream state really has principles and rules it's not chaos it's not random it's a principled state and that's what lucid dreamers around the world have learned that dreaming is actually a principled state and if you learn the rules you can have very long stable lucid dreams you can explore thoughtfully and there's there's incredible amounts of inner territory as long as you understand the principles then I learned how my own mind my own beliefs and expectations help to create my personal experience so for example if I believed that it would be easy to fly through that wall and get to the other side in a lucid dream if I believed it was easy I could fly through the wall easily but if I flew up to the wall and expected to have trouble then suddenly I might Bounce Off the Wall even though it was composed of dream stuff that little bit of doubt that little bit of negative expectation that I was going to have trouble would be reflected in my lucid dream experience so I began to see how important it was that I improve and clarify my own beliefs and expectations my own focus and intent and all of that I began to see how limiting beliefs would hinder my growth and in fact it was amazing that oftentimes this inner awareness would point out limiting beliefs or there would be a wise dream figure that would point out a limiting belief that was keeping me from growing and it was really interesting to resolve these issues because as I resolved these limiting beliefs then I began to expand and grow as a lucid Dreamer finally it got to the point where I realized that I needed to embrace trust and let go of fear in fact I had some lucid dreams where a banner would appear in the sky trust nothing to fear or sometimes I'd hear a voice say trust nothing to fear so it was on these occasions where I learned that fear and doubt and concern keep us from growing that when we begin to trust then we open up to experience at a deeper and deeper level and I learned there were very many openings of trust it's just not a simple okay now I trust you really learn to surrender and learn how to trust at a profoundly deep level and then finally after 20 years of lucid dreaming I began to realize that I was being shown how perceived experience was a co-creation of myself and my larger awareness and then I began to realize that there must be a real reality behind all of this and so that's how deep my lucid dream Journey took me so I don't know where you are when it comes to lucid dreaming you you might have had uh a few lucid dreams you might never have had a lucid dreams you might have had 100 or 500 or a thousand lucid dreams but what I've learned is lucid dreaming is profoundly deep now valzu said the Journey of a Thousand Miles begins with a single step and I'd say the journey into lucid dreaming begins with a single lucid dream by virtue of lucid dreaming we can continue to go deeper and deeper but it always helps to have a guide to have someone who's gone the depth to have someone who can help you understand what you're experiencing as you go along in fact I've met some people have read my books and within 30 or 40 lucid dreams they're having just extraordinary lucid dreams and I asked them how did you how did you manage to do this and frequently they'd tell me we read your book we followed the principles and that just allowed us to go deeper so much more quickly than we would have otherwise so that's the virtue of of having a good guide along your journey so so again um I'm Robert Wagoner I'm the author of these two books lucid dreaming gateway to the inner self it's been reprinted more than 15 times it's been translated into a number of languages also I'm the co-author of the book lucid dreaming plain and simple with Carolyn McCready and this book we go into the tips and techniques not only how to become Lucid but how to stabilize the lucid dreams so you have a long lucid dream experience and then how to most successfully explore that state so that you benefit from it also along with my friend Lucy Gillis I've been the co-editor of the online magazine lucid dreaming experience for more than 20 years and in that magazine not only do we interview experienced lucid dreamers and write articles and share articles on lucid dreaming but we also have reader submitted lucid dreams so people can benefit from the knowledge of everyone about what they're doing in the lucid dream state in fact this particular issue that you see there was a special issue on healing in lucid dreams where people shared their examples of emotional healing and physical healing within the lucid dream state so again lucid dreaming has a vast depth and that's my goal in life is to help people understand the actual potential of lucid dreaming and help them go as far as possible as they can in lucid dreaming I'll conclude with this quote by Carl Young who looks outside dreams who looks inside awakes in lucid dreaming work consciously aware as we look inside and I think it truly will encourage and speed you along the path when you consciously begin to dream lucidly so my thanks for listening again my name is Robert Wagoner and I look forward to hearing from you as you go deeper into lucid dreaming [Music] foreign

Channel: Theosophical Society

Views: 13,193

Keywords: theosophical society, lucid dreams, lucid dreaming, dreamwork, psychotherapy, how to lucid dream, dreams, analyzing dreams, Robert Waggoner, Theosophical Society in America

Id: kD4LvZyHuOo

Length: 44min 11sec (2651 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2023