An Important Exception

An Important Exception
Thus far, we have been careful to use qualifiers such as “generally” and “a majority of the time”, when referring to the situated nature of dream cognition because it is possible to have waking-like cognition operate while dreaming (Laberge et al., 1981). This phenomenon is known as lucid dreaming and occurs when the dreamer realizes, within the dream, that they are dreaming and that their actual body is asleep in bed. With this knowledge in mind, the dream continues and the dreamer is able to manipulate and interact within the dream world from a waking frame of consciousness. Research has shown that people are able to reach this state in a sleep laboratory and are able to indicate their lucidity to the waking world by giving distinct eye signals that are recorded by EOG (LaBerge et al., 1986). Upon waking, a dream report is given in which the subject describes how many eye movements they made and the duration between these eye movements. These reports are shown to match up with observed physiological data (Laberge et al., 1981).
This is a capacity that we contend has to be unique to humans, and represents a level of awareness that is often not attained in the waking state (although see Hegel for talk of a similar type of waking “self-consciousness”; Hegel, 1979). While lucid dreaming occurs rarely for people in the general population, it is a skill that can be learned through various techniques (Laberge, 1980). These techniques generally have the person become more aware of their state of consciousness and question their reality throughout the day. By forcing the person to step outside the flow of their current perceptions and motivations during waking life, there is an increased chance that this will occur during dreaming and facilitate a lucid dream. This allows a kind of feedback between the dreaming and waking state to be reached where a more unsituated approach to waking life affects the level of situatedness in the dream and vice versa. Thus, a by-product of the dreaming virtual-rehearsal mechanism may be the ability to obtain a higher level of awareness of one’s place in regards to one’s surroundings.
Since higher mental operations can occur during dreams, this is surely bound to interact and feed into waking cognitive abilities, and while it might not confer an obvious benefit to fitness, dreams are a venue that have been used in a number of cultures to attain higher states of consciousness (e.g., Tibetan dream yoga, and the practices of the Senoi) and increase one’s sense of well-being (Wangyal, Rinpoche, and Dahlby, 1998). Since no neuroimaging work has been done with lucid dreaming one can only speculate, but it is possible that people who are frequent lucid dreamers would show a different functional pattern of activation while in REM sleep, with greater activation of frontal regions. This potential difference in activation for lucid dreamers demonstrates the importance of taking into account subjective dream reports when interpreting data on the physiology of sleep in general, and REM sleep in particular.