LUCID DREAMING

Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dreaming

Dreaming is a common experience of all human beings. However, the mystery of the cause of dreaming is yet concluded. After Freud, this enigmatically undiscovered field of science and psychology has always been a topic that people are interested in. During the summer of 2010, a movie called “Inception” aroused a new craze to “dreaming”. The movie won four Oscars and grossed $823 million dollars worldwide (IMDb, n.d.). Its multi-layer plot explored the possibility of controlling dreams and created a novel world in dreams where everything is possible. The original idea of “Inception” is defacto from “lucid dreaming”. The term “lucid dreaming” refers to a dream that one is aware of while dreaming. From research done in the past, the prevalence, which means the number of the occurrences, shows that lucid dreaming is “a common phenomenon” (Schredl & Erlacher, 2004, p.1470). However, the samples of those researches were usually students who enrolled in psychology courses (Schredl & Erlacher, 2004) or adults who has “unusually high interest in dreaming and/or lucid dreaming” (Gackenbach, 1984, para.1). It is possible that it was more convenient for those psychologists making their own students or people who are interest in this rare topic to take part in their projects. What will the result be if more non-psychologically-related participants are added into the calculation? Is lucid dreaming prevalence still high among non-psychology students? In order to answer this question, I divided my research into three parts:

1. The history of lucid dreaming

2. The process of lucid dreaming

3. A survey to non-psychology university students

The History of Lucid Dreaming

The discovery of lucid dreaming is not as resent as we think. Far from 415 AD, St. Augustine of Hippo, who was a bishop, a philosopher, and a theologian, described a lucid dreaming experience in his letter. A friend of him, Gennadius, who was a physician, had dreams in which a saintly youth appeared and talked with him in a philosophical manner (Knight, 2009). Also, a 17th century English writer Sir Thomas Browne mentioned his own lucid dreaming experience in his book “Religio Medici” (The Religion of a Doctor): "...yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof" (Browne, n.d., para.12). Besides Western records, in China, there is also a famous story called “The Butterfly Dream”, which is related to the concept of lucid dreaming. A philosopher in 4 BC named Zhuangzi had a dream about himself as a butterfly flying in the sky. He wrote in his book, that “he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. (Burton, 1964)” Although this is a more philosophical argument, it has become a common Chinese idiom. From these examples, it is clear that lucid dreaming is not a new finding, but an international dreaming experience that has been noticed for thousands of years.

The process of lucid dreaming

In order to find out how ...