dreams in which the dream self-model has become so strong and
rich that it allows us to understand what is happening. Can one consciously
enjoy one’s own internal virtual reality? Is it possible to dream
without the metacognitive deficit? The answer is yes. You can have
dreams in which you are not only aware of the fact that you are dreaming
but also possess a complete memory both of your dream life and
your waking life, as well as the phenomenal property of agency on the
levels of attention, thought, and behavior. Such dreams are called lucid
dreams. They are highly interesting—not so much for the sheer fun of
the drama but because they open new ways of investigating the phenomenon
of conscious experience. In particular, they help us understand
how the various layers of the self-model are constructed and
woven into the dream tunnel.
Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, who coined the phrase “lucid
dreaming,” reported the following experience to the Society for Psychical
Research in 1913:
In January, 1898 . . . I was able to repeat the observation. . . . I
dreamt that I was lying in the garden before the windows of my
study, and saw the eyes of my dog through the glass pane. I was
lying on my chest and observing the dog very keenly. At the
same time, however, I knew with perfect certainty that I was
dreaming and lying on my back in my bed. And then I resolved
to wake up slowly and carefully and observe how my sensation
of lying on my chest would change to the sensation of lying on
my back. And so I did, slowly and deliberately, and the transition—
which I have since undergone many times—is most wonderful.
It is like the feeling of slipping from one body into another, and there is distinctly a double recollection of the two
bodies. I remembered what I felt in my dream, lying on my
chest; but returning into the day-life, I remembered also that my
physical body had been quietly lying on its back all the while.
This observation of a double memory I have had many times
since. It is so indubitable that it leads almost unavoidably to the
conception of a dream-body.7
Van Eeden’s “dream-body” is the self-model in the dream state. Lucid
dreams are fascinating because our naive realism—our unawareness of
living our lives in an Ego Tunnel—is temporarily suspended. They are
therefore a promising route of research for solving what I termed the
Reality Problem in our tour of the tunnel in chapter 2. A lucid dream is a
global simulation of a world in which we suddenly become aware that it
is indeed just a simulation. It is a tunnel whose inhabitant begins to realize
that he or she actually operates in a tunnel all the time.
Hugh G. Callaway, a British experimenter in out-of-body experiences
who published under the pseudonym Oliver Fox, recorded the following
classic episode, occurring in 1902, when he was a young science student
at the Harley Institute at Southampton:
I dreamed that I was standing on the pavement outside my
home. . . . I was about to enter the house when, on glancing casually
at [the pavement] stones, my attention became riveted by
a passing strange phenomenon, so extraordinary that I could
not believe my eyes—they had seemingly all changed their position
in the night, and the long sides were parallel to the curb!
Then the solution flashed upon me: though this glorious summer
morning seemed as real as real could be, I was dreaming!
With the realization of this fact, the quality of the dream
changed in a manner very difficult to convey to one who has not
had the experience. Instantly, the vividness of life increased a
hundredfold. Never had the sea and sky and trees shone with
such glamorous beauty; even the commonplace houses seemed
alive and mystically beautiful. Never had I felt so absolutely well, so clear-brained, so inexpressibly free! The sensation was exquisite
beyond words; but it lasted only a few minutes and I awoke.8
Maybe you’ve had a lucid dream yourself; the phenomenon is not rare. If
not, you can try a number of different induction techniques. For instance,
you can adopt the habit of performing “reality checks” several
times a day. Each reality check should last at least a minute. It consists in
carefully inspecting your current inner and outer environment for any
indications that this might not be ordinary waking reality. Here is a
checklist that readers interested in exploring the dream tunnel can use
as a guideline.
• Is all the furniture arranged the way it normally is?
• Are the paving stones, the tiles, or the design of the carpet on the
floor arranged in the same pattern as usual?
• Do objects or persons suddenly appear and disappear, or do they
change their identity?
• Do you know who you are and where you are?
• Do you remember what day of the week it is and when you last
woke up?
• Are there any gaps in your short-term memory of recent events?
• Does your visual attention shift the way it usually does?
• Are you engaging in any unusual physical activities, like flying?
• Are you constantly trying to remember something you know is of
great importance but can’t remember what it is?
• Does your current situation have a metaphoric or symbolic
character, or do you have the feeling of being close to an
important discovery?
If you perform reality checks of this type several times a day, you have a
good chance of eventually becoming a lucid dreamer. By pure habit, you
will one day perform a reality check in a dream—and if you are lucky,
you will correctly realize that you are dreaming. Other methods of inducing lucid dreams are even more efficient. Try
setting an alarm clock early in the morning and carefully writing down the events of your last dream. Get up, move around for a short period of
time, and then go back to bed. While you are falling asleep, try to rehearse
the last sequence of dream events in as much detail as you can.
You may find that you can consciously reenter the dream and stay lucid
throughout it. As an intrepid philosophical psychonaut, I have of course tried to
build devices to do this kind of exploring, involving headphones and tape
loops whispering, “Watch out—this is a dream!” at thirty-minute intervals
all night long. I also bought an expensive lucid-dreaming device
called a Nova Dreamer, which looks a bit like the eye masks you sometimes
see people wearing on long-distance plane flights. The Nova
Dreamer is activated when your rapid eye movements signal the start of a
dream. After a couple of minutes, it begins submitting mild subliminal
visual stimuli, and you can perceive these soft, red, ring-shaped flashes of
light through your closed eyelids. They are meant to alert you to the fact
that you are dreaming; however, they are more likely to be integrated into
your dream story. Here’s one of my own dreams thus invaded:
I am an astronaut. I have been waiting for this moment for
years. My friend and I are lying on our backs in the Space Shuttle,
awaiting takeoff with a mixture of anxiety and great excitement.
Deep below our backs, we can feel the rumbling and
rattling of the ignition give way to a thundering roar. Then red
lights start flashing everywhere on the control panel. Suddenly,
every possible alarm system is activated. Someone says, “Something
must have gone terribly wrong!” We feel the spaceship
slowly tilting to the side and losing its vertical position while the
roar at our backs gets louder and louder.
Unfortunately, all I ever got out of my expensive lucid-dreaming device
was terrible nightmares—with an interesting twist. In Germany, the
flashing lights of police cars are blue. So what I got from this device was
American nightmares, with American police cars hunting me down and
cornering me, flashing red lights and all. Every two years or so, I give my
Nova Dreamer another try; lately, it has had a different effect on me. I wake up in the morning and the device is gone. If I go looking for it, I find
that it has been hurled across the bedroom by some stranger. Apparently
there is someone inside me who does not want to be a philosophical psychonaut
or a serious practitioner of first-person phenomenological research
at all—someone who just wants to sleep.
So what, exactly, is a lucid dream? In a lucid dream, the dreamer
knows that she is currently experiencing a dream and is able to ascribe
this property to herself. If we opt for a strong definition, another condition
is that she also has access to memories of her previous dream and
waking life. Autobiographical memory is fully intact. The dreamer has
full access not only to past conscious experiences in waking life and in
ordinary dreams but also to previously experienced lucid dreams. The
overall level of mental clarity and cognitive insight is at least as high as it
is during normal waking states. A further defining characteristic is that,
according to subjective experience, all five senses function just as well as
they do during the waking state. Finally, and perhaps most important,
the property of agency is fully realized in the lucid dream. Phenomenologically,
the lucid dreamer knows about her freedom of will. Not only
can she direct the focus of attention wherever she likes, but she can also
actually do whatever she wants—fly, walk through walls, or engage in
conversations with dream figures. The subject of a lucid dream is not a
passive victim lost in a sequence of bizarre episodes but rather is a fullblown
agent, capable of selecting from a variety of possible actions.
Full control of one’s attention is an important feature distinguishing
lucid dreams from ordinary dreams. Insight into one’s freedom to act is
also an important criterion of lucid dreams (but is it an insight?). During
what are sometimes called pre-lucid dreams, we frequently become
aware that none of this is real, that this must be a dream, but we remain
passive observers. With the onset of full lucidity, the dreamer often
turns from a passive observer into an agent—someone who takes
charge, moves around, explores and experiments, who deliberately
starts to interact with the dream world and shape it.
My favorite experiment in lucid-dream research was conducted by
Stanford University psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge and his colleagues
more than a quarter of a century ago. It exploited the interesting fact that our conscious self-model is firmly anchored in the brain in a
fascinating way: There is a direct and reliable relationship between the
gaze shifts reported by lucid dreamers and the eye movements observed
in their sleeping bodies. In the sleep lab, these eye movements can be
recorded using a polygraph. The fact that the movements of the dreameyeballs
in the dream-body are directly correlated with the movements
of the physical eyeballs in one’s physical body was used by LaBerge in a
particularly ingenious experiment. Veteran subjects deliberately indicated
the initiation of a lucid dream with specific ocular signals determined
before the experiments—that is, by rapidly moving their eyes up
and down. Two such eye shifts would inform the experimenters of the
onset of a lucid dream; four signaled awakening. The polygraphic analysis
revealed that the onset of lucidity is typically correlated with the first
two minutes of an REM phase, or with short intervals of waking consciousness
during an REM phase, or with heightened phasic REM activity
(characterized by bursts of eye movements and sometimes by motor
twitches and widespread synchronized activity in specific thalamocortical
networks). Put simply, lucidity seems to occur when there is a brief
and sudden increase of the general cortical level of arousal: All nerve
cells become more active, the result being the sudden availability of
more “computational power,” or capacity for information processing.
With regard to the dream itself, lucidity seems to lead to increased
vividness, heightened fear or stress, the discovery of contradictions
within the dream world, and, of course, the subjective experience of becoming
aware of a “dreamlike” or “unreal” quality of reality.
I like these experiments because they are a rare example of transtunnel
communication. When the lucid dreamer in the sleep lab emits
eye signals by deliberately moving his or her dream-eyes up and down
and scientists in the waking world read these signals off their instruments,
a multiuser link between the dream tunnel and the waking tunnel
is established. Because the gaze shifts performed by the dream-body
are functionally linked to those of the physical body, and because the lucid
dreamer is aware of this fact, a bridge connecting the two tunnels is
built. In this experimental setup, information from one type of conscious reality tunnel can be transmitted to another type, one created by
the brains of other human beings.
We need more good empirical research on lucid dreams. It is plausible
to assume that lucidity depends on the degree to which the prefrontal
cortex, where the organizing of cognitive and social behaviors
takes place and the so-called executive functions are located, can form a
stable functional link with other brain regions that generate the conscious
dream self. The prefrontal cortex is thought to arrange thoughts
and actions in accordance with internal goals. It also has to do with differentiation
among conflicting thoughts, planning, assessing future
consequences of current activities, predicting outcomes, generating expectations,
and the like.
Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and dream researcher at the Massachusetts
Mental Health Center and author of The Dreaming Brain, has
speculated that for lucidity to occur, “the normally deactivated dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) must be reactivated, but not so strongly
as to suppress the pontolimbic signals to it.” This part of the brain may
allow us to refer to ourselves by engaging in reflective thought. In the lucid-
dream tunnel, this leads to the reestablishment of executive control
and the reemergence of a full-blown agent. If Hobson is right, the moment
we consciously think, “My God, I’m dreaming!” may be the moment
the self-model of the dream state becomes hooked up to the
prefrontal cortex, making proper reflexive self-consciousness possible
again and reestablishing cognitive agency.
Here are some questions for future research: What precisely happens
to the conscious self during the transition from an ordinary dream to a
lucid dream? What are the fine-grained functional differences between
the dream self-model and the lucid self-model? Could there also be
something like “lucid waking”? And what, exactly, happens during a
false awakening?
As we have seen, false awakenings can happen to all of us. This
brings up another classical philosophical problem, the issue of solipsism
(from Latin: solus, alone, and ipse, self). How, exactly, can I refute the
skeptical hypothesis that my mind is the only thing that I know to exist? How can I exclude the possibility that the external world—and other
conscious minds in particular—cannot be known and might not exist at
all? Finally, here is a little thought experiment in applied tunnel epistemology,
introduced and illustrated by a lucid dream reported by the late
German dream researcher Paul Tholey:
I briefly looked back. The person following me did not look like
an ordinary human being; he was as tall as a giant and reminded
me of Rübezahl [a mountain spirit in German legend]. Now it
was fully clear to me that I was undergoing a dream, and with a
great sense of relief I continued running away. Then it suddenly
occurred to me that I did not have to escape but was capable of
doing something else. I remembered my plan of talking to other
persons during the dream. So I stopped running, turned
around, and allowed the pursuer to approach me. Then I asked
him what it actually was that he wanted. His answer was: “How
am I supposed to know?! After all, this is your dream and, moreover,
you studied psychology and not me.”14
Imagine that while in the dream tunnel, you suddenly become lucid and
find yourself at a major interdisciplinary conference, where dream scientists
and dream philosophers are discussing the nature of consciousness:
While they’re standing around during the coffee break, one of
them claims that you do not really exist, because you’re just a
dream figure in your own lucid-dream tunnel, a mere possibility.
Amused, you reply, “No, you are all figures in my dream—
just figments of my imagination.” This response is greeted with
laughter, and you notice, too, that colleagues at other tables are
grinning and turning their heads in your direction. “All of this is
happening in my brain!” you insist. “I own the hardware, and
you are all just simulated dream characters in a simulated environment,
processed and created by my central nervous system.
It would be easy for me. . .” Here, more laughter interrupts
you—roars of laughter. A young PhD student arrogantly starts explaining the basic assumptions about the nature of reality
shared by this particular scientific community: No such things
as brains or physical objects ever existed. The contents of consciousness
are all there is. So all phenomenal selves are equal.
There is no such thing as an individual “tunnel” in which one
self-model represents the true subject of experience and all
other person-models are just dream figures.
The strange philosophical concept this dream community of scientists
has developed as their background assumption is known as eliminative
phenomenalism. As the slightly overambitious PhD student explains:
“Eliminative phenomenalism is the thesis that physics and the neuroscientific
image of man constitute a radically false theory, a theory so
fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of
that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced,
by a completed science of pure consciousness.” All reality, accordingly,
is phenomenal reality. The only way you can drop out of this reality is
by making the grandiose (but fundamentally false) assumption that
there actually is an outside world and that you are the subject—that is,
the experiencer—of this phenomenal reality, that there actually is a consciousness
tunnel (a wormhole, as they ironically call it), and that it is
your own tunnel. By entertaining this belief, however, you would suddenly
become unreal and turn into something even less than a mere
dream figure yourself: a possible person—exactly what your opponent
claimed at the beginning of the discussion.
“Listen, guys,” you say, in a slightly irritated voice, “I can demonstrate
to you that this is my consciousness tunnel, because I can
end this state, and your very existence, at any point in time. A
well-known technique for terminating lucid dreams is to hold
one’s hands up in front of one’s eyes and fix one’s visual attention
on them. If I do this, it will interrupt the rapid eye movements
in my physical body and thus end the dream state in my
physical brain. I will wake up in the Waking Tunnel. You will
simply cease to exist. Do you want me to show you?” You note that your tone of voice sounds triumphant, but you also note
that the amusement in the eyes of the other scientists and
philosophers has changed to pity. The arrogant PhD student
blurts out again: “But don’t you see that simply falling back into
what you call ‘waking up’ doesn’t prove anything to anybody?
You must demonstrate the truth of your ontological assumptions
to this scientific community, on this level of reality. You
cannot decide the question by simply degrading yourself to a
virtual person and disappearing from our level. By waking up,
you will learn nothing new. And you cannot prove anything at
all—certainly not to us, but not to yourself, either. If you want to
humiliate yourself by vanishing into your waking wormhole,
then just go ahead! But the serious pursuit of consciousness research
and of philosophical theory of science is something entirely
different!”
How would you react? If I had not made the right decision at this point,
I might never have finished this book. But enough tunnel epistemology
for now.
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