By Stephen LaBerge and Brenda Giguere
THIS IS A DREAM! With these words, a unique new aid to lucid dreaming announces its arrival. The DreamSpeaker®, as it is called, works with both the DreamLight and NovaDreamer devices to play a digitally-recorded message during REM sleep to help us recognize that we are dreaming.
The DreamSpeaker operates on the same general principle as the DreamLight, NovaDreamer, and other devices that induce lucid dreams by presenting during REM sleep external stimuli as lucidity cues to the dreaming person. The basis for all these devices is the fact that environmental stimuli are at times incorporated into dreams. Almost everyone has had the experience of hearing an annoying sound, such as a neighbor's buzz saw in a dream, only to awaken a moment later to find what he had really been hearing was the equally annoying sound of an alarm clock. If we have a kinder alarm, music or the news may find its way into our dreams. Stimuli in all the other sensory modes (smell, touch, sight, temperature, and possibly other senses as well) are also occasionally incorporated in dreams and, in theory, any of these sensory pathways could carry a reminder to the dreamer that he or she is dreaming while still asleep.
Some may consider the idea of influencing dreams by external stimulation the invention of the devil, and we must admit that there is a tradition supporting this claim. According to Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan, in amphibian form, first planted the idea in Eve's head to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge by whispering in her ear while she slept and thereby causing her to dream as he wished:
...him there they found, Squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve; Assaying by his Devilish art to reach The Organs of her Fancy, and with them forge Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams...
Having given the devil his due, we skip ahead to the 19th Century when the French scientist Alfred Maury carried out perhaps the first recorded series of experiments on the effect of external stimuli on dreams. For example, in one experiment, his lips and nose were tickled with a feather whereupon he dreamed of being tortured by a mask that tore off the flesh of his face. In another case, when a pair of scissors was sharpened nearby he dreamed that he heard bells pealing (1).
At about the same time, another Parisian, the Marquis de Saint-Denys, made similar observations noting that, "It is generally agreed that in dreaming, the sleeper is influenced by innumerable external sensations which he perceives and incorporates into his dream, interpreting them in his own way." (2) Saint-Denys gave a number of examples of dream incorporation: in one, a knocking sound made him dream someone was knocking on his door; in another instance, a friend reported that one night in a dream he lost his temper completely because he was asking someone some questions and they replied "Ho! Ho! Ho!" to every one. Upon waking up he discovered that the "Ho! Ho! Ho!" was nothing but the echo of his own snoring.
Not content with collecting anecdotes, Saint-Denys, like Maury, undertook a variety of clever experiments on influencing dreams by environmental stimulation. In one case, he whispered a few military commands ("Present arms! Shoulder arms! etc.") to a sleeping person, who upon being awakening a few minutes later, reported dreaming that he was watching a parade. In another case, gently rung bells induced a dream of traveling in a mail-coach. But by far the most elaborate and ingenious series of his experiments was based on the idea of deliberately setting up associations between particular sensory stimuli and specific people and settings. For example, he repeatedly wore a particular perfume when and only when he visited a particular place. After a time, the particular perfume applied to his pillow during the night induced a dream of the associated place.
Saint-Denys carried out a similar series of experiments with sounds. During a busy social season the Marquis arranged, with the help of the orchestra leader, that every time he danced with two "particularly agreeable" ladies, two different waltzes "notable for their originality" would always be played. Thus, he always danced the same waltz with the same partner, and never danced that waltz with any other partner. Then he specially ordered a music box that would play the two waltzes, and modified the mechanism of an alarm clock so that instead of ringing its bell, it would start the music box. Finally, he selected one of the two tunes on the box, set the alarm for an early morning hour and went to sleep. As expected, the next morning he remembered dreaming about the selected lady. The second tune was just as successful, as were further experiments with additional tunes until he had eight tunes associated with eight partners, at which point the Marquis fell into a state of confusion and had to stop "recognizing once more that the human constitution has limitations." (Many of us might find such a multitude of partners similarly confusing, with or without pursuing dream induction!)
Although Saint-Denys had a keen interest in lucid dreaming, he never appears to have used external stimuli as an method to induce lucid dreams, an idea that had to wait until a later century. This idea and the accounts above might all seem paradoxical to the reader accustomed to thinking of sleeping as being "dead to the world." But the fact is that the sleeping brain maintains a degree of contact with the environment, analyzing for meaning the information about external events that is received through the senses. After all, we are able to awaken when our own name is called, but remain asleep when someone else's name is called or an airplane flies overhead. And consider the mother who sleeps through her husband's loud snoring, but awakens to her baby's faint cries coming from another room. If we are monitoring the environment for the occurrence of significant events such as these while sleeping, why couldn't we sleep with the intention of noting some prearranged external sensory cue as a reminder that we are dreaming?
The idea occurred to the senior author that the most direct approach would be to use as a cue a sentence plainly stating what the dreamer wishes to become aware of: "This is a dream." (3) I first tried this out in 1978 at the Stanford Sleep Laboratory, in collaboration with Dr. Lynn Nagel. When Lynn observed me in REM sleep, he turned on a tape recording I had made earlier that played at a moderate level from a speaker next to my bed. The recorded message in my own voice said, "Stephen, you're dreaming" and after a few seconds added a suggestion that I continue to sleep but realize that I was dreaming. I had not been sleeping too well, being still a newcomer to the sleep lab, and it seemed to me that I was lying in bed still awake. From the next room, I heard the voice of a doctor commenting in Germanic accents, "Amazing! Ze subject has had no REM sleep all night!" Hearing this, I was not surprised. As far as I knew, I had had no sleep of any kind. But the next moment I was astonished to hear my own voice coming over the P.A. system announcing, "You're dreaming!" I became lucid immediately. It had worked! I was very excited. In a dream world suddenly beautiful and more vivid than waking life, I was awake in my sleep! But a few seconds later, the recording continued with a voice now loud enough to wake the dead, to say nothing of sleeping, "continue to sleep..." and I awoke!
This first experiment showed us that lucid dreams could indeed be induced by a direct reminder given during REM sleep. The fact that in the dream I heard "you're dreaming" loud and clear, but did not hear my name at all is interesting. Perhaps unconsciously hearing my name attracted my attention, allowing me to hear the rest of the message consciously.
We used my own voice to record the message for two reasons. First, we hoped that being reminded by one's own voice would seem more like reminding oneself mentally and because an earlier study found that when subjects heard tape recordings of their own voices during REM, the result is dreams in which the subjects were more active, assertive, and independent than when they heard recordings of other people's voices. Since these qualities seemed likely to be associated with lucid dreaming, we hoped that hearing my own voice, by reinforcing these qualities, would facilitate the realization I was dreaming.
This was the beginning of a series of explorations that are still continuing. We had four people interested in lucid dreaming spend one or two nights in the Sleep Lab (4). They each made a recording repeating the phrase "This is a dream" every four to eight seconds. This was played at a gradually increasing volume five to ten minutes after the beginning of each REM period. The subjects were instructed to signal by means of a pair of left-right eye movements whenever they heard the tape or recognized they were dreaming. The sleep technician turned off the tape recorder immediately upon observing this eye-movement signal on the polygraph. If the subjects did not awaken by themselves within two minutes of the signal, the technician woke them and asked for dream reports.
The tape stimulus was applied a total of fifteen times, producing lucidity in a third of the cases and in general, one of four results:
l. Awakening. In eight of the cases (53%), the subjects reported hearing the tape only after they had been awakened by it.
2. Incorporation with lucidity. In three (20%) of the cases, the subjects reported hearing the tape in the dream and signaling while still dreaming (now lucidly).This is the same sort of result we obtained in our first experiments.
3. Incorporation without lucidity. The subjects twice (13% of cases) reported dream content obviously related to the taped stimulus, without, however, becoming lucid before awakening. The most curious example of this was when a subject awoke after the tape had been played and wrote a report of his dream. I asked him at that point whether he had heard the tape, and he replied that he was sure he had not. I was most surprised when I later read his written report. Near the end of his dream, he complained that someone was trying to tell him something but he wouldn't listen to them. What were they saying? "You're dreaming!" Remarkably, this subject had not even recognized the phrase while writing a report of it after awakening!
4. Lucidity without incorporation. On two occasions, our subjects attained lucidity and signaled (while the tape was being played) without consciously hearing the stimulus in their dreams at all. This is exactly the opposite of the preceding situation. In one of these cases, having been awakened from my first REM period by the tape, I was frustrated at having had my sleep disturbed for nothing and decided I would try to induce a lucid dream on my own during my next REM period before the tape had a chance to wake me up. So I per formed the MILD technique while returning to sleep. The next thing I knew I was in a violent struggle with my father. I recognized I was dreaming and thought "so this is the first ten minutes of REM" because I hadn't heard any tape. Thinking this seemed to lead to the dream fading and I soon woke up. Shortly after I wrote my dream report, the technician entered my room and asked if I had heard the tape. "What?" I was confused. "When? What tape?" It turned out the tape had been started about twenty seconds before I had signaled, which was, incidentally, after twenty, not ten minutes of REM. It seems likely that my unconscious perception of the message helped me realize I was dreaming.
The results of this study gave us a sense of the complexities and the multiplicity of variables involved. First, there is the question of when is the best time to apply the stimulus. Not every moment of REM sleep seems equally suited to lucid dreaming. As for the message itself, what would be its optimal form? First person, i.e., "I'm dreaming?" Second person, i.e., "You're dreaming?" Or objective, i.e., "This is a dream?" Another significant issue is whether a verbal cue is optimal. Perhaps a melody (say, Bach's Sleepers Awake!) might be more effective than speech. The research we are working on at Stanford is aimed at finding our way out of this tangle of questions, to gain in the future a reliable means of inducing lucid dreams in people who have had no prior experience with the phenomenon.
In contrast to the elaborate setup used in the early Stanford sleep lab experiments, the DreamSpeaker is simple and suitable for use in a bedroom at home with a NovaDreamer or DreamLight. Both of these induction aids have been designed to allow interfacing with other devices, such as the DreamSpeaker and the PEST® (Programmable Electronic State Tester).
The DreamSpeaker is comprised of three components: a battery-operated control unit, pillow speaker, and trigger cable. The control unit is a small black box containing a microphone and the electronics necessary for digital sound recording and interfacing with a REM detecting device. The pillow speaker has a volume control and is attached to the control box by means of a seven-foot cable. The control box is connected to the NovaDreamer or DreamLight by means of another cable, and the speaker is placed unobtrusively under one's pillow.
To use the DreamSpeaker, you first make a recording (up to 15 seconds in length) by pressing a recording button on the control unit and speaking into the microphone. Then you test the recording quality and volume by triggering a cue (by pressing the appropriate button or buttons on the NovaDreamer or DreamLight). Later that night... when you receive a light cue from the mask (triggered by the rapid eye movements associated with dreaming sleep) the DreamSpeaker will be activated as well. Thus, the mask's light cue is reinforced as a lucidity trigger by words heard during the dream. The most effective message volume will vary from person to person, and each oneironaut will want to do some experimenting.
Freud made an important point about the factors that affect how we perceive external stimuli during sleep in The Interpretation of Dreams:
A sense-impression is recognized by us and correctly interpreted that is, it is placed in the group of memories to which, in accordance with all our previous experiences, it belongs provided the impression is sufficiently strong, clear and lasting and provided we have sufficient time at our disposal for considering the matter. If these conditions are not fulfilled, we mistake the object which is the source of the impression: we form an illusion about it... the impressions received by the mind from external stimuli during sleep are of a similarly indeterminate nature....(1)
Thus, there is the danger that while dreaming we might misunderstand sensory information. Cues may not always be immediately recognized. However, we can increase the likelihood of correct perception by arranging that one of our memories is of intending to recognize we are dreaming. This can be reinforced by other memories, that of having made the recording of our voice, as well as having placed the speaker under the pillow. Additionally having thought about dreams before, and knowing what dreams are, we then have even more memories coming into play when the words "This is a dream" reach our ears. These multiple associations make it more likely that we will understand the information for what it is.
Sometimes you just have to hear the message more than once before you understand, as illustrated by the following experience of oneironaut Beverly Heart D'Urso while using a DreamSpeaker at home:
Toward the end of a long dream about wearing a backpack-sized hearing aid (I had gone to an ear doctor the previous day), someone gave me a stuffed animal doll (like my favorite toy as a child). The doll began to speak and said, "This is a dream...." continuing with a long explanation about how life is a dream, using statements like the ones I use in my Lucid Living workshops.After a while, I noticed that the doll turned into my three-and-a-half month-old son, Adrian. He had lots of teeth coming in, which he doesn't yet (but soon will). There were about twenty teeth growing in weird directions, some sticking out like fangs. I thought, "Oh, no this is a problem!" That was when Adrian, in the dream, said, "This is a dream", (the second cue, I presume). I finally got it and became lucid, laughing to myself at how funny it now seemed. I woke up shortly afterwards.
We look forward to hearing accounts of lucid dream adventures as oneironauts around the world put DreamSpeakers under their pillows. What will you hear when the DreamSpeaker whispers in your dreaming ear?
1. Freud, S.: The Interpretation of Dreams (originally published 1900; James Strachey translation, 1965) (Avon)
2. Saint-Denys, H.: Dreams and How to Guide Them (originally published 1867; edited by M. Schatzman, 1982) (Duckworth)
3. LaBerge, S.: Lucid Dreaming (1985) (Ballantine)
4. LaBerge, S., Owens, J., Nagel, L., and Dement, W. (1981). "This is a dream": Induction of lucid dreams by verbal suggestion during REM sleep. Sleep Research, 10, 150.