Conversations on Consciousness by Susan J. Blackmore

Author:Susan J. Blackmore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Consciousness, Science & Technology, Philosophy, Thought and Thinking, Mind & Body, Philosophers, Scientists, Biography & Autobiography, Neuroscientists
ISBN: 9780192806222
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

Stephen LaBerge: Lucid dreaming is a metaphor for enlightenment

Stephen (b. 1947) originally studied mathematics and chemical physics, before taking a break and then returning to work for a PhD in psychophysiology at Stanford. This included his pioneering work showing that lucid dreams really do take place during REM sleep. Since then he has continued research on lucid dreaming and the psychophysiological correlates of states of consciousness at Stanford. In 1988 he founded the Lucidity Institute. His books include Lucid Dreaming(1985) and Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming(1990).

Sue: What is it about consciousness that makes it so interesting?

Stephen: Consciousness makes consciousness interesting. It’s exactly that self-similar quality, the fractal nature of it, which makes it so endlessly fascinating.

Sue: Tell me how you got interested in it in the first place.

Stephen: I started out as a hard scientist, studying chemical physics at Stanford. I had a very limited view of the world and then in California in the late ’60s, I had experiences with psychedelics that suddenly opened me up to the possibility that there was another universe that I hadn’t realized was there: the inner world, so to speak.

I learned one important lesson from LSD: under its influence I saw living breathing, hieroglyphics superimposed on a blank wall, and thought, ‘Ah, so this is what the world is really like, overflowing with meaning, beauty, and complexity. How could I not have seen it before!’ But then the next day, ‘Ah, wait a minute, this is what it’s like, that was just an illusion.’ And finally to realize, no, it’s neither like this nor like that, those are just my mind’s understanding of what the world is, and the world remains a mystery. But I soon found out that drugs were not useful for more than giving one a glimpse of what the possibilities are.

Then after a long and strange path I found myself returning to Stanford to do research in psychophysiology, and that’s where I did work proving lucid dreaming actually happened. It’s actually rather surprising to realize that 25 years later I’m still working on this one area. I had no idea how vast a topic it was, how much there was to learn, and how far we have to go.

Sue: Lucid dreams are dreams in which you know, at the time, that it’s a dream.

Stephen: Exactly. In most dreams we are conscious on an experiential level: for example, a strange thing happens to me, I wake up in bed and I tell a story about being at the circus. The fact that I can remember those experiences means that they were conscious in the sense of the reportability criterion, but what’s usually absent from dreaming is the reflective consciousness that everything that’s happening there is happening in a dream; that it’s all in your mind; that you’re in fact asleep in bed. When you remember this you now have a new set of possible actions that make sense in this wider context, and which before were literally unthinkable. It’s like saying there’s another dimension that I’m in contact with.

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