The Tibetan yogis were already familiar with the phenomenon of the phase states, by which we mean lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences. But this practice existed not only in the East. A group of Brazilian scientists – doctors and psychologists Ferreira, Prata, Fontenele-Araujo, de Carvalho, and Mota-Rolim – analyzed the topic of LD as it is presented in Western philosophy.
The first mention of lucid dreaming in the Western world belongs to Aristotle. As the ancient Greek thinker pointed out, something in the mind of the sleeper tells him that he is dreaming. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas noticed that people can realize that they are in a dream. During the enlightenment era, Thomas Reid claimed to have experienced a waking-like cognition during dreams. In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche mentioned that sometimes in the middle of a nightmare, he becomes aware that he is dreaming.
In the twentieth century, there were arguments denying the possibility of awareness in a dream. For example, this was Norman Malcolm’s position, based on a person’s inability to communicate with the external world during sleep. In the 1970s, there was a discussion between Kathleen Emmett and Daniel Dennett, in which Dennett remarked that the LDs are simply “illusions of a dream within a dream.”
In 1981, the psychophysiologist LaBerge and his colleagues scientifically proved the reality of lucid dreams in the laboratory (we should add that this had been achieved even earlier, in 1975, by the English psychologist Keith Hearne). Currently, many philosophers consider LD an important part of the problem of the relationship between body and mind and a key phenomenon in the study of consciousness.
The article was published in April 2021 in the scientific journal “Dreaming.”
