Laberge, Stephen

(dreams)

Stephen LaBerge (1947–), a Stanford-trained psychologist working in the Stanford University Sleep Clinic, was the first person to scientifically demonstrate the existence of lucid dreaming. People are experiencing a lucid dream when they are aware that they are in the midst of a dream. The most unusual aspect of this state is that lucid dreamers can consciously alter the content of their dreams.

LaBerge, who had experienced lucid dreams since childhood, resolved to study the phenomenon scientifically during his psychology graduate program at Stanford. He initially experimented on himself, using sweeping motions of the eyes—controlled by muscles that are not immobilized during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep—to signal non-sleeping observers that he was in a lucid dream state (he later used clenched fists to send messages in Morse code). LaBerge trained others to dream lucidly, and then experimented with dream control—undertaking a task such as flying or changing the dream landscape at will.

The results of these experiments were reported in LaBerge’s popular 1985 book on the subject, Lucid Dreaming. The success of this work stimulated the nationwide formation of dream groups. The mass media also became interested in the idea, and the implications of lucid dreaming were discussed in innumerable articles and on talk shows.

References in periodicals archive

Stephen LaBerge next gives a review of lucid dreaming, the awareness during dreaming that we are actually dreaming, combining the psychological qualities of waking life (ability to reason and remember aspects of waking life) with those of dream life (creating a vivid and realistic immersive world).

VARIETIES OF ANOMALOUS EXPERIENCE: EXAMINING THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE

In their book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold provide an example of a software programmer who used lucid dreaming to visit Einstein.

Lucid dream healing: a primer

It examines several paths to working with and understanding dreams: analytical psychology (Carl Jung and James Hillman); neuroscience (Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili); lucid dreaming (Stephen LaBerge and Jayne Gackenbach); anthropology (Barbara Tedlock); and cognitive psychology (Harry Hunt), as well as indigenous technologies: Tibetan Dream Yoga, Senoi dream psychology, Mayan dream traditions and Kabbalistic dream practices.

Editor's note

Broughton, Daryl Bem, Charles Tart, Montague Ullman and Stephen LaBerge among many others whose names you will see referenced in connection with these researchers.

Parasomnias or paranormal--things that go clunk in the night

After years of involvement, I am most amazed and excited about the work done by Stanford University affiliate Stephen LaBerge, through his Lucidity Institute.

Letters

For those of us less in control, US researcher Dr Stephen LaBerge has developed software he claims can teach anyone to manipulate their dreams.

BYTE SIZE: COMPUTER BITS

Several experiments, including those by Dr Stephen LaBerge at Stanford University's sleep research laboratory in America, have demonstrated that lucid dreamers can recall instructions taken while awake and use their eyes to signal that they are lucidly dreaming.

Dreams expert Dr Stephen LaBerge says that spinning on the spot in the dream will change the setting you're in.

IN YOUR DREAMS

This, she observes, would align with suggestions made by lucid dream expert Stephen LaBerge.

The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena

It gave me the opportunity to see some of the data that had been collected by the government and to conduct two remote-staring experiments with Stephen LaBerge (Schlitz & LaBerge, 1994, 1997).

Boundless mind: Coming of age in Parapsychology

Stephen LaBerge and Jayne Gackenbach's chapter on lucid dreaming highlights an astonishing success in linking the seemingly impenetrable "subjective" world with the objective world of science--the discovery that lucid dreamers can control the sleeping body's eye movements and send "signals" from the dreaming state to outside observers by wiggling the eyes in predetermined ways.

VARIETIES OF ANOMALOUS EXPERIENCE: EXAMINING THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE

Based on the recent work of Keith Hearne, Jayne Gackenbach, Stephen LaBerge and other notables in this field of specialized study, we learn that lucid dreams occur worldwide, are more common in childhood, with women, more often reported by emotionally, physically, and cognitively "balanced" individuals, and that they can be elicited and developed in both the lab and home settings.

Our Dreaming Mind