Investigating consciousness in the sleep laboratory – an interdisciplinary perspective on lucid dreaming

Abstract

During dreaming, we experience a wake-like hallucinatory reality, however with restricted reflective abilities: in the face of a bizarre dream environment, we do not realize that we are actually dreaming. In contrast, during the rare phenomenon of lucid dreaming, the dreamer gains insight into the current state of mind while staying asleep. This metacognitive insight often enables the dreamer to control own dream actions and the course of the dream narrative. Lucid dreaming allows for radically new methodological and theoretical approaches and has led to new insights in diverse scientific disciplines beyond classical sleep and dream research, including neuroscience, psychotherapy, philosophy, art, and sports sciences. Here, we review past research and the current knowledge on lucid dreaming. We present insights into the scientific work in a sleep laboratory and describe how lucid dreams can be induced through methodologies from diverse academic backgrounds including psychology, electrical engineering and pharmacology.