Investigating consciousness in the sleep laboratory – an interdisciplinary perspective on lucid dreaming

Abstract

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Real-Time Dialogue between Experimenters and Dreamers During rem Sleep

“…I just remember the last one was '8 minus 6.''' (For further details on sleep monitoring and terminology, see Nir and Tononi, 1 Appel et al, 6 and Baird et al 7 ) nap, near the beginning of a period of REM sleep. He indicated that he was in a lucid dream with a series of three left-right eye movements (termed LRLRLR).…”

“…On the other hand, a ''lucid dream'' differs in that the dreamer gains the elusive insight of being in a dream. 6,7 Lucid dreams occur predominantly during REM sleep and can be accompanied by eye-movement signals used to indicate that dreamers recognize that they are dreaming 8,9 or to transmit other information such as time-stamping dream events. 10,11 However, lucid dreaming is a notoriously rare phenomenon and lucid dreams can seldom be summoned at will, which has made it difficult for researchers to capture them in the lab in a reliable manner.…”

Portable Devices to Induce Lucid Dreams—Are They Reliable?

“…The authors observed that the methodological quality of the works analyzed was relatively low, and none of the induction techniques reported in these studies induced LD reliably and consistently. More research is needed to increase our understanding of external sensory stimulus processing during sleep and the conditions and the stimulus properties required for reliable dream content incubation, while preventing awakenings (Appel et al, 2018).…”

Exploring the range of reported dream lucidity

“…Entangled with the issue of measuring lucidity is the question of how to measure lucid dream induction success . The immense promise of lucid dreaming is limited by the capacity to experimentally induce lucidity (Appel et al, 2018), and thus a leading goal of the field is to develop reliable lucid dream induction methods. The method of quantifying induction success rate is often inconsistent across experiments, and might be one of the contributing factors to literature discrepancies (Stumbrys, Erlacher, Schädlich, et al, 2012).…”