Control Your Dreams with Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dreaming could allow some to write their own unconscious adventures

ByABC News via logo
February 3, 2007, 3:24 PM

Feb. 3, 2007 — -- For many of us, dreams are a strange other world -- puzzling, terrifying and beyond our control. But some psychologists now say, under the right conditions, we can control our dreams to have fun or to learn from them.

One way to do that is through lucid dreaming, in which you choose what happens in your dream. You can fly through the air, swim with dolphins, tame the monster in your nightmares, speak to a dead relative -- anything you want to do, all the while aware that it's a dream.

"Lucid dreaming is simply a dream in which you know you're dreaming while it's happening," said Dr. Stephen Laberge, founder of the Lucidity Institute at Stanford University. "So you know, 'This is a dream I'm having,' and therefore, you can control, you can decide. You know it's all in your mind, so nothing can hurt you. You're free and you can experiment."

Recently, people come to the big island of Hawaii for a two-week session with Laberge, who is widely considered to be the country's pre-eminent authority on lucid dreaming.

Stephanie Smedes, an animal eye doctor, is here to learn how to have lucid dreams. One of her goals is to control her nightmares of being chased by an unknown figure, running from room to room.

Smedes hopes that lucid dreaming will "help me to be part of them and then switch them around so I'm not so frightened of them."

At its most basic level, lucid dreaming involves recognizing that you're dreaming while you're dreaming.

"The key to lucid dreaming is [to] remember to do something in your dreams, to notice that it's a dream," Laberge said. "So before bed, you set your mind. Say, 'Tonight, I'm going to be dreaming -- and when I do, I want to remember to notice that I'm dreaming.'"

To train the mind to realize it's in a dream, Laberge sometimes uses a device called "the nova dreamer."

"It's your sleep mask you wear while you're asleep," Laberge explained. "There are sensors on it that pick up the rapid eye movements, where your eyes move when you're dreaming."