What exactly is lucid dreaming?

Dreams and the subconscious have become a serious research topic for neuroscientists.

Dr Benjamin Baird, a research professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Texas, is an expert on ways to induce and control lucid dreaming and how lucid dreaming can benefit our health and well-being once we wake up.

He joined RNZ's Nine to Noon to answer questions about lucid dreams why we have them, why some of us don't have them and what use they might be to us therapeutically.

Related stories:

How is lucid dreaming different to regular dreaming?

“It's simply that you're dreaming while it's happening. So, in the middle of the dream, you realise you're dreaming. It's as simple as that.”

How common is it to remember dreams?

“Many people claim they don't remember their dreams at all. And when we bring them into the sleep lab and wake them up in specific parts of sleep, they're often shocked to wake up and realise they remember all these different dreams.

“The stage of sleep that's most correlated with the vivid narrative type of dreams is known as REM sleep for rapid eye movement sleep.

“We go through this stage about every 90 minutes or so as we go through an overnight sleep epoch. And we think though that dreams of various sorts can happen in other stages as well. It's just that these very vivid, long kind of structured dreams are most common in REM sleep.”

Sometimes you want to remember your dream and within a flash it's gone. What's happening?

“There's likely a very strong evolutionary reason for why we tend not to remember our dreams.

“We humans are special, but for other animals it would actually be very bad to be confused about a memory, whether that memory came from a dream or from reality. Where did I hide that nut? You know, if you're a squirrel, you don't want to misremember where you hid it in the dream.

“We humans have language, so it's a bit different.”

What is the purpose of dreams if not for remembering?

“One theory is that dreaming is tied to memory consolidation, and we do know that memory consolidation is happening during sleep and in REM sleep as well, but the link between specific mnemonic consolidation processes and the conscious experience of dreams is still rather weak.

“There are also theories within the psychological literature that dreams may have to do with simulating threats, and therefore we have an opportunity to practice our response to certain kinds of threatening simulated situations, and you can imagine that would give kind of an evolutionary imperative to dreams.”

Can lucid dreaming be used therapeutically?

“By working with a qualified clinician one can actually engage in certain practices within the dream, confronting the psychological content of the dream in a way that's impossible unless you're aware and lucid, and actually working with that in real time, turning around, for example, and confronting that person who's been chasing you for the last six months in your dreams and saying, who are you?

“We've heard many, many anecdotes from people, we need more empirical work on this, but anecdotally, the evidence is overwhelming from all kinds of reports we've gotten from people engaging in those kinds of practices, again, best in the context of working with a qualified clinician, where they can actually have that kind of transformative experience, and they end up never having the nightmare again.”

Is lucid dreaming different from being aware you are dreaming?

“We do think that they are the same. You'll find some debates still in the academy about whether control is necessary for lucidity.

“There are a few scholars that would make that claim. But I think on the whole, the consensus is lucid dreams simply mean you're aware that you're dreaming while it's happening, full stop.”

What work are you doing on understanding lucid dreaming and its potential to be beneficial?

“In academia, we often tend to focus on clinical conditions, on bringing people who have some deficit back up to normal.

“But we don't think a lot about how can we take normal people and take them to new heights to really excel and reach their full potential and explore their minds and so forth.

“And I think that's really where the potential and promise of lucid dreaming is at large, is it gives people a new opportunity to explore their mind. If you like to get into a kind of different state space of their own mind brain, and for all of us to find out what might we use this for, what might be possible in this other state.”

What are dream diaries? And what are the benefits?

“If you wake up in the morning and just try to remember anything from the dream, describing any kind of thread, even a small detail. If you do that every morning, what most people find is that they start to remember more and more day after day, as time goes on.

“And this is certainly true for myself, I started with nothing. And by the end of a couple of months, I was spending an hour in the morning writing out five very vivid dreams.

“And so, it can be very interesting, I think, for people just to start to get in touch with their own mind in this way, to recognise what's going through their mind every night, because all this stuff is happening, all this content is being presented to us, it's just that normally, we're completely oblivious to it.”

What is reality testing?

“One of the simpler forms is simply throughout the day, periodically, you ask yourself, is this a dream or not? And you can do some sort of test, looking at your hands and counting your fingers.

“So that's one kind of reality test is we'll be looking at your hands, counting your fingers, asking yourself if this is a dream or not.

“Part of the idea is if you do this enough, then by habit, you'll also start to do it in your dreams. And then you will, of course, notice after doing the test that you're in fact dreaming. So it's one method to cultivate lucidity.”

What is mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD)?

“What MILD in the context of dreaming is you set a strong intention to, when you're in the dream, to recognise it as a dream and become lucid. And there are some specific practices surrounding that.

“Some visualisation practices, you imagine yourself in the dream, ideally one you just woke up from, engaging with the specific content, but this time noticing that it's a dream. And you repeat that to yourself and setting this prospective memory intention over and over as you're falling asleep.”

Dr Benjamin Baird's answers have been lightly edited.