Lucid Dreaming & Dream Consciousness

Lucid dreams are uniquely different. One realizes that one is dreaming while the dream is still happening. The scene often suddenly expands in richness and color as the dreamer becomes aware that the world being experienced, although appearing very believable, is actually a dream and that his or her physical body is elsewhere safe asleep in bed. With this new understanding, the lucid dreamer is free to explore remarkable worlds limited only by imagination, and now not just as an actor, but also to some degree as a producer and director.

Lucid dreaming was brought into the academic and public spotlights around the world once it's scientific validity was separately proven by researchers at Stanford University, California (where it has also been proven to be a learnable skill), and at Liverpool University, England. Proof was achieved by performing, during REM sleep, a series of extreme left-right eye signals which were agreed upon prior to sleep. Though most of the body's muscles are de-activated during REM sleep, the eye muscles are not, and repeated experiments at Stanford, the Sacré-Coeur Hospital Dream and Nightmare Laboratory and elsewhere have proven that the eyes (and to some extent other physiological responses) can be brought under conscious control by a dreamer who realizes that she or he is dreaming.