Mark Blagrove is a professor of psychology and director of the Swansea University Sleep Laboratory in the UK. He is a consulting editor for the journal Dreaming and a former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.
As an educator, Blagrove teaches a course dedicated to dreams, which examines the relationship between dreams and stages of sleep, as well as events and problems in reality. Among other things, students are introduced to the study of lucid dreams (LD) and nightmares.
Most of the scientist’s works are devoted to dreams in general, nightmares, and the psychology of dreams. In terms of lucid dreams, he studied the possibility of stimulating LD with brief awakenings at night and in the morning. As his experiment showed, waking up probably activates the brain or promotes the onset of the REM phase after returning to sleep, which increases the chances of LD.
Blagrove also participated in a study on the induction of LD in one session of laboratory sleep. Cognitive training and REM-sleep stimulation were used for this purpose. The participants came to the laboratory in the morning, received instructions on LD, and then for 20 minutes the experimenter reproduced alternating audio and visual cues with an interval of 1 minute. Participants were instructed to practice a state of critical self-awareness by observing their thoughts and feelings every time they noticed a signal. Then they were allowed to take a nap, during which the stimulation by signals continued. As a result, half of the volunteers experienced LD, including those who had never encountered the phenomenon before.
The researcher’s works can be found on his ResearchGate page.
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