Dream Psychology: Operating in the Dark

Abstract

The questions I want to address today concern the scientific significance of lucid dreaming, especially for our understanding of the function of dreaming. There is an emerging consensus that scientific dream psychology has not lived up to the potential which motivated much of the research following the discovery of REM sleep in 1953 (see Antrobus, 1978). For example, Foulkes (1976; 1982; 1983a; 1983b) has claimed that the three foundation disciplines of dream psychology, specifically psychoanalysis, psychophysiology and evolutionary biology, in fact have contributed very little to our scientific understanding of dreaming. Similarly, Fiss (1983) has argued that we desperately need a clinically relevant theory of dreaming. One important reason for this apparent lack of fruitfulness is the exclusion of lucid dreaming from the central concerns of dream psychology. Ogilvie (1982) has aptly observed that until recently lucid dreaming has been consigned to the “wasteland of parapsychology”. This exclusion of lucid dreaming from scientific dream psychology finally has been rendered untenable by the dramatic demonstration by a number of researchers that lucid dreaming is a scientifically real phenomenon (Covello, 1984; Dane, 1984; Fenwick, Schatzman, Worsley & Adam, 1984: Hearne, 1981, 1983; LaBerge, 1980a, 1980b, 1981; LaBerge, Nagel, Dement & Zarcone, 1980; Ogilvie, Hunt, Tyson, Lucescu & Jeakins, 1982; Tholey, 1983; Tyson, Ogilvie & Hunt, 1984). ‘Scientifically real’ in this context means that researchers such as LaBerge were able to show, among other things, that prearranged signaling was possible from lucid dreaming during stage REM sleep without the intervention of an electrographic transition to the waking state. In effect, the dreamer was simultaneously awake and asleep. The significance of this finding has yet to be fully appreciated within dream psychology in particular or cognitive psychology more generally.