Part 2: On-Demand Lucid Dreaming—The Current State
This is Part 2 of a three part series:
* Part 1: Waking Up to Lucid Dreams
* Part 2: On-Demand Lucid Dreaming — The Current State
* Part 3: On-Demand Lucid Dreaming — The Roadmap to Mainstream
Lucid dreaming is a unique state of consciousness. It may enable discoveries that alter our understanding of the nature of reality. Within lucid dreams, people have reported encounters with highly intelligent entities, precognition, time travel, and shared dream experience with people across the world. In Part 1 of this series, I shared personal experiences that shifted my perspective from sleepy skeptic to lucid dreaming enthusiast. Below, we’ll review the current methods to induce lucid dreams, their shortcomings, and future improvements necessary to bring lucid dream access to the masses.
Humans have practiced lucid dreaming for thousands of years, including ancient traditions like dream yoga and the Tibetan shamanic Bön tradition. The modern, scientific map of the lucid dreaming world is largely uncharted. Many didn’t even believe lucid dreaming was real until it was scientifically proven by Keith Hearne in 1975 and later confirmed by Stephen LaBerge in 1981. The scientific exploration into lucid dreaming is just beginning!
With vast potential to further our understanding of the nature of reality: Why isn’t lucid dreaming more popular?
It’s hard. Lucid dreaming is possible for most people, but It’s not easy for many to routinely access.
This presents an opportunity. If we develop techniques and technology to enable on-demand lucid dreaming, then the power of lucid dreaming will go mainstream overnight.
What’s on-demand lucid dreaming? There’s no official definition, so let’s make one up, as a lucid dreamer would do in the dreamscape. On-demand lucid dreaming is using a simple solution to achieve a lucid dream in more than 50% of nights without any prior training.
I’m convinced we’ll achieve on-demand lucid dreaming within the next two decades, if not sooner. Solutions may arise from a combination of these three categories:
1.) Cognitive techniques
2.) External substances
3.) External stimuli
And even if current solutions fall short of on-demand lucid dreaming, they still help us achieve lucid dreams today.
Cognitive Techniques
While some have an innate talent for lucid dreaming, others can build skills to increase their lucid dreaming frequency and quality by using cognitive techniques. Even for the few with natural lucid dreaming talents, these techniques are usually necessary to consistently induce lucid dreams. Many techniques exist, with options to fit many personality and lifestyle types. Some common examples include recording your dreams in a dream journal, daytime reality checks (i.e. ask yourself, “Am I dreaming?” during the day), learning to recognize dream signs during dreams, purposely disrupting your sleep prior to later REM sleep stages, and practicing mindfulness. Many excellent books exist to learn these cognitive techniques, such as: Learn to Lucid Dream, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, and Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. I won’t try to teach them here.
While cognitive techniques are easy to learn, it’s more difficult to build consistent habits around them. According to the book Atomic Habits, the four-step backbone of every habit is having a cue, craving, response, and reward. In other words, we get triggered to initiate a behavior, are motivated to execute the behavior, do it, and then get rewarded. In lucid dreaming practice, we often don’t get the reward. Even people closely following all the cognitive techniques outlined in the lucid dreaming literature will not have a lucid dream on many nights, especially in the early days of practice. This is discouraging for many, and leads people to prematurely end their lucid dreaming pursuits before they start experiencing lucid dreams.
Eventually, these cognitive techniques will lead to frequent lucid dreams for a subset of people that successfully build these habits. These techniques reshape our inner state to create more fertile grounds for lucid dreaming. That was my experience.
Cognitive techniques alone won’t lead to on-demand lucid dreaming and mainstream access. For this, we look to external influences to impact our inner states. New solutions using external supplements and external stimuli show promise, using science and technology. In other words, we’re going to have to science the shit out of this.
External Supplements
By altering the biochemistry within our brains, we can alter the nature of our dreams. Several supplements have shown promise for inducing lucid dreams by altering the amounts of certain molecules in our brains while we dream.
One such supplement is galantamine, which increases the amount of acetylcholine in the brain by slowing into natural degradation. A 2018 double-blind, placebo-controlled study with 121 participants showed statistically significant increases in lucid dreaming frequency at 4-mg and 8-mg doses of galantamine. Lucid dreams were reported 27% of the time at the 4-mg dose, 42% of the time at the 8-mg dose, and 14% when using cognitive techniques alone (i.e. 0-mg dose). All participants were people with high dream recall and an interest in lucid dreaming. Both the experimental and control group woke approximately 4.5 hours into sleep, recalled a dream, ingested a capsule (i.e. 0-mg, 4-mg, or 8-mg galantamine dose), and stayed out of bed for at least 30 minutes. While the 42% and 27% lucid dreaming frequency at the respective 8-mg and 4-mg doses are impressive — even in a population of self-selected lucid dreaming enthusiasts — it also demonstrates this type of supplement does not yet offer on-demand lucid dreaming. To open access to the lucid dreaming world, there should be a solution that achieves a greater than 50% chance of lucid dreams each night in the general population without having to disrupt their sleep in the middle of the night.
Huperzine A is another supplement with similar characteristics to galantamine, and should be studied in more detail for its potential to induce lucid dreams.
Stacking complementary supplements on top of a galantamine dose could potentially further increase the frequency at which people experience lucid dreams. Such supplements include, but are not limited to: choline supplements (e.g. Citicoline, Alpha GPC, choline bitartrate), vitamin B6 for enhanced dream recall, and mugwort for greater dream vividness, among others. None of these supplements are well proven, given the lack of controlled studies in this domain. Different supplements may work better for different people given differences in brain chemistry.
It’s best to first build a strong foundation of lucid dreaming skills and habits using cognitive techniques before progressing to use external supplements. With any supplements, it’s important to consider any medical conditions you have, medications you take, and to avoid building a dependency by taking supplements too frequently.
And while it’s difficult to describe, sometimes the lucid dreams triggered by supplements manifest in lower fidelity. The dream figures and environment are more subdued. It’s like having your modern TV transform into a bulky, static-laced TV from the 1960s. This has been my personal experience and the reported experience of others.
Much is left to explore with supplements and more studies are warranted to generate evidence of efficacy and safety. If you want to learn more, several books describe the use of supplements for lucid dreaming in detail, including: Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements and Dreaming Wide Awake.
So if cognitive techniques combined with powerful supplements can’t yet get us to on-demand lucid dreaming, how else can we improve lucid dream induction? Let’s turn on to the power of external stimuli.
External Stimuli
The past is littered with devices that nobly attempted to democratize lucid dreaming. The first generation of lucid dreaming devices resemble sleep masks, and fittingly emerged from the lab of Stephen LaBerge — the modern-day godfather of lucid dreaming. Beyond blocking light from the wearer’s eyes, they also shine lights against the dreamer’s eyelids while they sleep. These flashing lights simultaneously appear in the waking world and the dream world. If the dreamer possesses enough awareness in the dream, they can recognize the flashes as a visual cue that they are dreaming. For some dreamers, this is enough to trigger the start of a lucid dream. The first of these devices, the NovaDreamer, is no longer in production, but it planted the seed for a new product category.
To induce a lucid dream, these lights should be triggered in rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, during which most dreams occur. Some devices timed their lightshow for when they anticipate REM sleep will occur based on expected patterns of sleep cycles. Other devices reduced the guesswork by providing real-time detection of REM sleep by tracking eye movement, and only emit the lights during REM sleep.
These first generation devices were not effective enough to inspire widespread adoption. The inexpensive Remee Lucid Dream Mask is still available for purchase, but it is not the solution that will bring on-demand lucid dreaming to the masses.
Over the years, various masks and headbands progressed their stimulation and real-time REM sleep detection abilities. In addition to light, some devices provided sound and tactile stimuli in an effort to raise dream awareness without waking the dreamer. Sounds ranged from tones to pre-recorded mantras (e.g. “I am now in a dream.”) to binaural beats designed to modulate brainwave activity. For more accurate detection of REM sleep, some devices started using more advanced sensors, including EEG, optical sensing for heart rate and blood oxygenation, accelerometers to track movement, and temperature sensors. Even with these stimuli and sensing improvements, these devices — which include ZMax, iBand Plus (may ship August 2020), and Neuroon Open (started shipping January 2020) — have not yet demonstrated sufficient efficacy at inducing lucid dreams to inspire widespread use.
How can we do better? We need more effective, targeted stimulation paired with accurate, real-time REM detection. Fortunately, REM sleep is generally easier to characterize than some of the other sleep stages, and sensors to adequately detect REM sleep are already widely available. On-device data processing, date storage, and battery life are also no longer barriers. The remaining barrier is applying effective stimulation to an effective location.
Electrical stimulation may currently hold the most promising means to induce lucid dreams. A 2014 study sparked hope when the application of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) to specific parts of the brain produced a minor increase in the ability to realize one is dreaming, and the ability to control the dream. The 27-person study stimulated participants’ brains at different frequencies across four nights. Lucidity was merely assumed when subjective survey ratings were more than two standard deviations more than the sham treatment (i.e. no stimulation). While 40 Hz was found to generate a statistically significant improvement relative to no stimulation, the results were far from compelling. Participants still scored low on their ability to realize they were dreaming and to control the dreams (i.e. both abilities scored less than 1 on a scale of 0 to 5) — it just wasn’t as low as the group that received no stimulation. Even these minor effects have not been replicated in the years that followed. More thorough dismantlings of the study can be read here and here.
It didn’t stop people from publishing articles with clickbait headlines and misguided conclusions, claiming tACS stimulation sparked lucid dreams for 77% of study participants.
Several devices — like the LucidCatcher and Aladdin — promised to harness the power of tACS to induce lucid dreams after the 2014 Voss et al. study. However, neither device has yet gained any meaningful market traction.
Well-designed studies with different stimulation approaches will move the field forward. An on-demand lucid dream induction device must use a stimulation modality (e.g. tACS, tDCS, TMS, etc.) that’s effective, targeted, safe, and able to be incorporated into a small, comfortable consumer device. With a poor understanding of how the brain functions, let alone how lucid dreaming arises in the brain, this is easier said than done.
On the bright side, many of the newest devices have received an enthusiastic response, raising much more money than they originally targeted on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The Aurora headband raised almost $240,000 after asking for $90,000. Neuroon Open raised almost $360,000 after asking for $100,000. Even if these products don’t pan out, this type of response demonstrates the demand and excitement for devices that induce lucid dreams.
This space is like dry wood waiting for the right spark. What will it take for lucid dreaming to catch fire?
In Part 3 of this series, we will outline a roadmap to make the dream of on-demand lucid dreaming a reality.
Continue to Part 3 of this series: On-Demand Lucid Dreaming — The Roadmap to Mainstream
