Illustration by Cate Andrews
Robert Waggoner likes to tell the story of a stressed-out woman who had a recurring nightmare of being chased by a train.
“Her psychiatrist learned that she had lucid dreams,” says Waggoner, the author of “Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self.” “He convinced her to allow the nightmare to occur [and to] become lucid and change one thing.”
In her next dream, as documented by the Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, she stopped running from the train and threw the track switch instead. “The train went elsewhere,” he says. “The psychiatrist said that she seemed a changed person after this.”
It might sound like a plot device from the 2010 film “Inception” or a trope from a Philip K. Dick story, but lucid dreamers do walk among us — you may even be one. The American Psychological Association defines a lucid dream as one “in which the sleeper is aware that he or she is dreaming and may be able to influence the progress of the dream narrative.”
It’s a very real concept, confirms Dr. Edward Peck, a Richmond-based neuropsychologist who treats conditions such as dementia, memory loss, ADHD, traumatic brain injury and various sleep disorders. Not only is lucid dreaming recognized by science, he says that its use as a therapeutic pathway is only one of many promising recent health discoveries in dream science.
“It’s a fascinating area, given today’s technology and what might be available in the future,” Peck says. “I think lucid dreaming therapy or guided imagery through dream therapy may be another one of the wonderful ways that the human body can learn to take better care of itself.”
Robert Waggoner, author of “Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self” (Photo courtesy Robert Waggoner)
Waggoner, a lucid dreamer himself, is an enthusiastic pied piper for dream consciousness. The Iowa resident, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, insists that lucid dreaming techniques can be taught, even if the process isn’t for everyone, especially those with very serious mental health issues. But for phobia sufferers and patients with sleep issues resulting from nightmares, lucid dream therapy can be beneficial.
Waggoner notes how he encouraged a woman who was a lucid dreamer and had a fear of flying to go to the airport in her dream and see how it felt. “If that went OK, I suggested over the next several nights that she enter the airport, buy a ticket and board a plane,” he says. “And if all of that felt OK, the next time she should take off. After five lucid dreams, she felt secure enough to buy a real plane ticket,” Waggoner says. Then he adds with a laugh, “She even wanted a window seat, so that she could see if the experience was like the one in her dream.”
Scientists are already tapping into the dreamscape. Northwestern University researchers, working with subjects in the U.S., France, Germany and the Netherlands, released a study in February 2021 on how they managed to establish communication with vivid sleepers as they entered REM state, even training them to solve simple math problems by using eye movements as signals. The researchers wrote in the journal Current Biology that their findings present “new opportunities for gaining real-time information about dreaming, and for modifying the course of a dream.”
Sleep, Dreaming and the Pandemic
Scientists are learning a lot about dreams these days — what they are, what they do and how we might be able to control them — and the timing couldn’t be better.
There’s been a sharp uptick in sleep-related maladies, including nightmares, during the COVID-19 pandemic, says David Pomm, clinical psychologist at the Central Virginia VA Health Care System. “The reasons are largely unknown, probably linked to the stress of the coronavirus.”
Pomm does not deal in dream therapy. He treats sleep-challenged patients with CBTI, or cognitive behavioral therapy. “If people are exhibiting bad dreams, we can coordinate care with a psychiatrist or neurologist, or medication could help,” he says, “but we prefer to get them back to better sleep habits and getting the sleep cycle reset to what it was designed to be.”
According to Dr. Tushar Thakre, associate professor of psychiatry at VCU Health and the director of its inpatient medical psychiatry program, the average sleep cycle consists of four stages that rotate and repeat throughout the night. “There’s rapid eye movement sleep, or REM, and three that form non-REM sleep.” These stages are determined based on brain activity, and they exhibit distinct characteristics during sleep.
Source: Dr. Tushar Thakre, VCU Health
The first stage, N1, lasts only a few moments and is called the “dozing off” stage. In the N2 stage, the sleeper enters a subdued mode, which includes a drop in temperature, relaxed muscles, and slowed breathing and heart rate. “About half of our sleep occurs in the N2 stage,” Thakre says. N3 sleep is known as deep sleep, Here, muscle tone, pulse and breathing rate decrease as the body relaxes even further. This stage is critical to restorative health, he says, allowing for bodily recovery and growth. It may also bolster the immune system and other key body functions.
During the fourth stage, REM, “there is a temporary paralysis of the muscles, with two exceptions — the eyes and the muscles that control breathing,” Thakre says, adding that REM sleep is believed to be essential to cognitive functions like memory, learning and creativity. “While we are able to dream in all of the sleep stages, the dreams in REM are more vivid and are more likely to be remembered.”
During the REM state, Peck adds, “there are psychological processes that occur, if we look at brain waves or bodily functions, they are actually near what they are when we’re awake, so sleep is a very active process. Our brain is constantly going,”
Lucid dreamers aren’t in total control of their dreams, Robert Waggoner says. “The sailor does not control the sea, neither does a lucid dreamer control the dream. It’s a hybrid state of consciousness where you lucidly engage the unconscious and learn from it.”
While we may not know what dreams signify, Pomm says that all signs point to REM sleep as imperative to well-being. “We know that this is the stage that often aids in memory consolidation and emotional regulation, so if you aren’t getting good sleep, and depriving yourself of that REM stage, it’s affecting your emotional regulation and memory and mental health in general.”
Insomnia and a lack of REM sleep have been on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic, but so has too much dreaming, concludes Diedre Barrett, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School.
In a recent survey, Barrett found that the lack of an alarm clock meant more time spent in the REM state of sleep. “It correlates with long, vivid dreams,” she told the Harvard News last May. Those bed visions include nightmares about the coronavirus itself. “[There’s] a fairly common dream where the person is short of breath or spiking a fever … [and] there’s a big sub-cluster of bug dreams. I’ve just seen dozens and dozens and dozens of every kind of bug imaginable attacking the dreamer.”
Health and Sleep
The new go-to book on the correlation between dreams and mental health is “When Brains Dream,” by Robert Stickgold, director of Harvard’s Center for Sleep and Cognition, and Antonio Zadra, professor of psychology at the University of Montreal. While the authors don’t definitively solve the big question — what are dreams? — they do offer up a new way of understanding the sleeping brain called NEXTUP (Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities). It postulates that since serotonin, which aids memory, is blocked off during the REM stage, our dreams are shaped by the brain reaching inside its neural connections to find mental associations — sometimes absurd — to reconstruct those memories.
“The takeaway of the last 10 years of various dream studies,” Peck says, “is a better understanding of the importance of persistent restorative sleep habits.” A 2017 Rutgers University report concluded that “the more REM sleep [a] subject had, the weaker the fear-related effect” they felt when awake. Last year, a joint project between the University of Geneva and the University of Washington found evidence that so-called scary dreams during REM can actually be beneficial coping tools — Tufts University researchers even gave this a name, The Overfitted Brain Hypothesis — assisting sleepers in responding well to emotional crises during waking life.
“The mind may be gaining practice for confronting potential dangers,” Thakre says. “Nightmares aren’t necessarily bad, but if they are interfering with social functioning, they can become a disorder that needs treatment.” To that end, he thinks lucid dreaming is a subject worthy of attention. “I don’t think it’s bogus science at all, I think there is some scientific basis to it. If we are able to change some people who have traumatic nightmares, there’s some clinical value in it.”
Lucid dream therapy has been shown to help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, Waggoner points out. “Recurring nightmares seem to be one of the persistent symptoms of PTSD,” he says. “Also, anecdotally, lucid dreaming has helped people overcome other phobias — fear of insects, fear of heights, anxiety and habitual problems such as drug abuse.”
At the end of the day, Peck says, “the body is the key to the mind.” What we chalk up as a psychological experience, he says, may just be the body telling us that we have a chemical deficiency, or that we had too much to drink before we went to bed — our blood sugar levels fluctuate wildly when we sleep, affecting the cycle — or that our sleepwear is tight and confining, hence that dream about being trapped.
“The safe answer is that we’re still figuring it out, what dreams really are,” he says. “If you talk to a psychoanalyst, they are going to tell you about the psychological meanings of dreams, and then you have the school who thinks that dreaming is a physiological manifestation. I mean, they are each correct. And I think it’s best when you have both sides of the debate shaking hands, because there’s knowledge to be shared.”
