A Comparative Psychology of Lucid Dreams

Abstract

A problem with much of the literature on lucid dreaming has been its theoretical and empirical insularity-a lucid dream, apparently, is a lucid dream, is a lucid dream. Certainly there are important correlations with incidence of out-of-body experience, hypnagogic reports, and waking visual-spatial abilities (Gackenbach et al., 1983), but there seems to have been little effort so far to place lucid dreaming with its “kin and kindred” and thence to draw conclusions concerning the basic cognitive processes involved-to place lucidity in relation to a general cognitive psychology (and vice versa).