Where Buddhism Meets Neuroscience by The Dalai Lama

Author:The Dalai Lama
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

LUCID DREAMING

Dr. Hobson introduced the concept of lucid dreaming with an illustration of a man on a flying carpet. Flying is a favorite dream activity, and its obvious unreality provides a way of identifying the dream state.

ALLAN HOBSON: This man on a magic carpet, flying through the air, has taught himself to do this by taking advantage of some of the facts about dreaming. He knows that dreams are strange, that they have curious characteristics. So he tells himself before he goes to sleep that if he has a conscious experience that is strange, he will know that he is dreaming. He needs to do this for about three weeks, every night, for just a few seconds before going to sleep, and then he starts to gain consciousness of his dreams. He has created a new state in which part of his brain is acting as if it were awake while the other parts are dreaming. Western practitioners of this skill call themselves lucid dreamers. They can watch their dreams while their dreams are occurring.

DALAI LAMA: Is there special training that leads to that ability?

ALLAN HOBSON: It is simple. For three weeks you tell yourself before sleep that you ordinarily dream for about two hours, and that if you have a strange experience, you are going to recognize consciously that it is a dream. It helps to have a notebook at your bedside and to write down your dream experiences. You can induce lucid dreams by this automatic procedure, a split consciousness. In other words, the power of the mind is quite appreciable, capable of changing the state of the brain.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: Have lucid dreamers been studied over a long period of time?

ALLAN HOBSON: Lucid dreamers have not been studied over a long period of time in sleep labs. I suppose your question would be: What is the functional gain?

ANTONIO DAMASIO: What is the functional loss?

ALLAN HOBSON: Who knows? It could be that you are interrupting sleep in a deleterious way. All I can tell you is that their period of lucidity is fleeting. Even when they become highly skilled, the dream plot tends to slip away from them.

Until two years ago, there was no physiological evidence for lucid dreaming, and now there is. Subjects can be trained to make a prearranged sequence of eye movements so as to indicate that they are presently lucid, and these eye movements can of course be recorded electr­ophysiolog­ically.

During lucid dreaming, general body muscle tone is still inhibited. But of course they have eye motor control which is presumably under the control of the frontal eye fields in cortex of the frontal lobes. As a means of testing and documenting lucid dream states, the subjects are told to make three full-excursion movements to the left followed by three full-excursion movements to the right. The probability of this occurring spontaneously is essentially zero

DALAI LAMA: In the Buddhist practice of dream yoga, there is a particular practice in which the lucid dreamer, while in the dream state, is told to be conscious of the dream state and told to meditate on something specific.

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