Consciousness and Cognition
April 13, 2026
Xinlin Wang, Emma Peters, Johannes Strelen et al.
Abstract During lucid dreaming, the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. In past years, numerous studies have explored the characteristics of lucid dreams, which link lucid dreams to vivid visual perception, positive emotions, and wake-like metacognition and executive functions. To determine brain network activity associated with the conscious experience during lucid dreaming, we analyzed...
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
May 14, 2025
Çağatay Demirel, Jarrod Gott, Kristoffer Appel et al.
8 citations
Lucid dreaming (LD) is a state of conscious awareness of the ongoing oneiric state, predominantly linked to REM sleep. Progress in understanding its neurobiological basis has been hindered by small sample sizes, diverse EEG setups, and artifacts like saccadic eye movements. To address these challenges in characterizing the electrophysiological correlates of LD, we introduced an adaptive...
Sleep
April 11, 2022
Benjamin Baird, Giulio Tononi, Stephen LaBerge
41 citations
(1) To critically test whether a previously reported increase in frontolateral 40 Hz power in lucid REM sleep, used to justify the claim that lucid dreaming is a "hybrid state" mixing sleep and wakefulness, is attributable to the saccadic spike potential (SP) artifact as a corollary of heightened REM density. (2) To replicate the finding that lucid dreams are associated with physiological...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 1, 2021
Benjamin Baird, Stephen LaBerge, Giulio Tononi
13 citations
Dreamers were long thought absolutely isolated from the outside world. Yet psychophysiological studies over the past 40 years have firmly established that lucid dreamers can use eye movements to report on their dream content in real time while in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. We now also know that sensory input is not completely suppresssed during sleep. A recent study by Konkoly et al....
Nature Communications
August 17, 2018
Stephen LaBerge, Benjamin Baird, Philip G Zimbardo
Humans are typically unable to engage in sustained smooth pursuit for imagined objects. However, it is unknown to what extent smooth tracking occurs for visual imagery during REM sleep dreaming. Here we examine smooth pursuit eye movements during tracking of a slow-moving visual target during lucid dreams in REM sleep. Highly similar smooth pursuit tracking was observed during both waking...
PLoS One
August 8, 2018
Stephen LaBerge, Kristen Lamarca, Benjamin Baird
59 citations
Lucid dreaming is a remarkable state of consciousness in which one is aware of the fact that one is dreaming while continuing to dream. Based on the strong relationship between physiological activation during rapid eye-movement sleep and lucid dreaming, our pilot research investigated whether enhancing cortical activation via acetylcholinesterease inhibition (AChEI) would increase the frequency...
Dreaming
June 1, 2006
Brigitte Holzinger, Stephen LaBerge, Lynne Levitan
69 citations
The main goal of the present study was to explore electrophysiologicaldifferences between lucid and nonlucid dreams in REM sleep. Seven men andfour women experienced in lucid dreaming underwent polysomnographicrecordings in the sleep laboratory on two consecutive nights. EEG signalswere subjected to spectral analysis to obtain Þve different frequency bandsbetween 1 and 20 Hz. Lucidity was...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
December 1, 2000
Stephen LaBerge
54 citations
Lucid dreaming provides a test case for theories of dreaming. For example, whether or not “loss of self-reflective awareness” is characteristic of dreaming, it is not necessary to dreaming. The fact that lucid dreamers can remember to perform predetermined actions and signal to the laboratory allows them to mark the exact time of particular dream events, allowing experiments to establish...
Advances in Consciousness Research
February 15, 2000
Stephen LaBerge, Donald J. Degracia
77 citations
What can we conclude from the above quotations? Certainly nothing regarding the nature of eroticism in the lucid dream state. Rather, they illustrate that the experience of lucid dreaming is subject to individual variation. This should not be surprising, since lucid dreaming, like all forms of conscious experience, is comprised of a flow of subjective events created by brain processes using...
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 1994
Stephen LaBerge
A model of dreaming is developed along the following lines: A primary function of the brain is to predict and control environmental events. In order to do so, it constructs a model of the world. The waking brain bases its model primarily on current sensory information, and secondarily on contextual and historical information. In contrast, because the sleeping brain acquires little information...
Sleep
August 1, 1989
A Brylowski, Lynne Levitan, Stephen LaBerge
A single subject, a proficient lucid dreamer experienced with signaling the onset of lucidity (reflective consciousness of dreaming) by means of voluntary eye movements, spent 4 nonconsecutive nights in the sleep laboratory. The subject reported becoming lucid and signaling in 8 of the 18 rapid-eye movement (REM) periods recorded. Ten lucid dream reports were verified by polygraphic examination...