Lucid Dreams or Resolution Dreams for Healing?

Abstract

I would like to start my summary of the issues with a fundamental question: do you have to be lucid to have a lucid dream? Do you in fact have to wake up in the dream and know you are dreaming in order to have a dream which has been characterized by lucid dream researchers as a lucid dream? Some other characterizations of dream lucidity include greater vividness of imagery (Garfield, 1974), auditory phenomena, fewer dreams characters and more cognition (Gackenbach, 1986), and potential facilitation of health (LaBerge, 1986).In dealing with the question of the relation of dreams to healing we first have to clarify the issues around lucid dreaming per se. The Jungian-Senoi methodology (Williams, 1980) is a clinical approach rather than a research approach. As such we are limited in our ability to report scientific findings as in those coming from a sleep laboratory, but we do have thousands of hours of dreamwork using an organized approach to working with dreams and dreaming via our methodology. From this base we can address certain issues, if not results.