Balancing Act—Waking Up to the Power of Dreams

By Jenny Des Jarlais

Mysteriously, a switch flipped in my brain and I realized the sunny Hawaiian shore on which I stood was an illusion. Even so, its authenticity dazzled me—I saw in sharp detail the brightly colored threads of a sunbather’s towel, heard the squeals and splashes of a child nearby, and felt the warm breeze lift the tiny hairs on my arms. I still knew that my real body was dozing peacefully in bed under a fuzzy orange blanket, but at the same time, I was fully aware that I was dreaming.

On the dream beach, I surveyed my manufactured kingdom and decided to experiment. Wishing gravity away, I pushed off from the sand and floated into the air. It was working! Some part of my conscious mind had actually changed the course of events my dreaming mind had conjured up. But as my pulse quickened, the scene slipped away and I awoke to the familiar walls of my apartment.

I lay there, awestruck. I’d never before been aware with crystal clarity, during a dream, that I was dreaming—nor had I been able to consciously control my dream’s content. What was this? Could I do it again? I was determined to track down answers.

What I found put me on the edge of my seat. It turns out this phenomenon—called “lucid dreaming” by scientists—is not something reserved for a lucky few whose neurons happen to fire in the right place at the right time. It’s something anyone can learn to do on a regular basis, and it’s more than just a trip to a virtual playground. Lucid dreaming offers an impressive array of real benefits: It can help people hoping to improve performance on tasks like giving speeches or playing music, as well as those struggling with serious problems like phobias or the aftermath of sexual abuse. It even has the potential, supporters say, to spur physical healing.

Lucid dreaming is similar to guided imagery, which also taps into the power of imagined experiences and has been shown to soothe victims of traumatic events (see “Spotlight on Post-Traumatic Stress,” page 35). But it can be even more powerful. “There’s good reason to believe we get a lot more mileage out of lucid dreaming,” says psychophysiologist and leading lucid dream researcher Stephen LaBerge. His work at Stanford University has shown that the technique provides imagery far more vivid than our waking brains can conjure, making it an especially useful tool.

For the last few decades, LaBerge has poured himself into researching what’s going on in our brains and bodies when we lucid dream, how we can make it happen more easily, and how it can help us. He’s found that the breathing, movement, and sexual activity that take place in a dream, for example, trigger nearly the same mental and physical responses as they do when we’re awake. In his lab, he’s developed a sleep mask that detects the hallmark eye movements of dreaming and responds with a flashing light or sound cue that tips the dreamer off to the fact that she’s dreaming. And he’s amassed numerous accounts of people who’ve reaped the benefits of inducing this semiconscious dream state.

While he’s made headway, his pace has been hindered by a scarcity of research money. “Many funders view dreaming as a frivolous subject,” he says. But there’s little that’s frivolous about the story of Patricia Keelin. One evening a number of years ago, the 54-year-old graphic designer got word that her dear friend Jack had died of a heart attack. In shock and missing him keenly, Keelin suspected that her dreams might bring her some comfort.

For her, this wasn’t a far-fetched notion. After her father’s death when she was 11, Keelin had had many dreams in which she told him how much he meant to her, caught him up on family news, or gave him a hug. The experience turned her into something of a dream junkie, and she read everything she could about dreams, including one of LaBerge’s books on lucid dreaming. “I was astonished to find out you can train yourself to have these kinds of dreams at will,” Keelin says.

To quell the grief she was feeling over Jack, she put to work one of the strategies she’d learned, telling herself that the next time she “saw” him, she should remind herself that she was dreaming.

A few weeks later, it happened. Keelin dreamed Jack was standing at the foot of her bed, glowing and radiant. She remembered what she’d told herself and in her dream, she sat up, reached out to Jack and said, “Take me with you.” He put his arms around her and they zoomed upward together.

“For a few moments we were in a place that I cannot find words for,” says Keelin. “I felt complete love and acceptance and a deep sense of home. Since that dream, I’ve been healed of much of my grief.”

The kind of emotional benefits that Keelin experienced can be an immeasurable boon, but another promising new frontier in lucid dreaming is its application to physical healing. LaBerge says the premise makes perfect sense. “From the brain’s point of view, the neurons that fire when you’re dreaming about running, say, are the same as those that fire when you’re actually running,” he says. “This is why dreams seem so lifelike; to the brain, as well as to the dreamer, they are the real thing.”

Picture, for example, a paralysis patient who goes on weekly dream hikes, keeping his neural pathways in tip-top shape for the day a medical breakthrough can regenerate the connection to his unused limbs. Or a cancer patient who dreams her way through a microscopic tour of her body, hunting down malignant cells and eventually revving up her immune system.

“Lucid dreaming is a powerful technique for those who can do it,” says Deirdre Barrett, a clinical assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Dreaming. “But it can be tough to do, at least often and reliably.” That’s why LaBerge and other proponents have been hard at work to develop tricks and techniques to make it more accessible (see “Dream Weaving,” page 63, for details).

LaBerge will soon begin testing to see whether taking supplements that increase acetylcholine—the main neurotransmitter involved in consciousness, memory, and dreaming—can boost the chances of having a lucid dream. He’s seen some promising results already, but won’t recommend supplements to anyone outside of his studies. “If you intensify your dreaming sleep without serious lucidity training, you may end up with nothing more than strange dreams, even nightmares,” he says.

That’s enough to convince me to go the hard work route. I’m jazzed by the glittering potential of what lucid dreaming can offer and ready to devote some energy to learning the ropes. If I hit a wall, though, I wonder whether I might be able to convince my health plan to sponsor me at one of LaBerge’s retreats. Yeah, I know, in my dreams. For now, anyway.

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