He shares his birthday with Marie-Jean-Léon Lecoq, a French aristocrat and a well-known intellectual in the nineteenth century, who became a pioneer in the study of lucid dreams (LD). However, he did not believe that this state was fundamentally different from ordinary dreaming and waking life, and did not give the phenomenon a name. For him, lucid dreams were simply dreams involving will, attention, and awareness.

In 1867, he published the book Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them; however, because of the book’s small distribution, it remained practically unknown even in scientific circles for almost a hundred years. Lecoq himself first experienced LD at the age of thirteen. His main method was to keep a dream diary. As the researcher writes in his book, on the 207th night after the start of the diary, he became lucid in a dream, and after fifteen months he began to experience LD almost every night.

Lecoq also conducted experiments on programming dream scenarios, believing that anyone can summon up a dream on any given topic. He used various sensory stimuli to create a conditioned reflex. For example, during a trip he used a particular perfume, and on his return he sprayed his pillow with the same perfume. As a result, he had a dream about the area he visited.

Have you ever programmed an ordinary (unconscious) dream on a given topic for yourself?

Lecoq’s book is available on Amazon.

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As The New York Times wrote in an article published upon the scientist’s death in 1999, in an experiment conducted in 1953, Kleitman along with his student Dr. Eugene Aserinsky at the University of Chicago recorded regular periods of sudden eye movements during sleep. Thus the discovery of REM was made. People who were awakened during REM sleep recalled dreams, unlike those who woke up during non-REM sleep.

In 1956, with another student, Dr. William Dement, Kleitman reported that certain types of eye movements were associated with certain types of motion in dreams, and that the average person dreams for a total of about two hours every night.

The scientist dispelled a number of myths about sleep. For example, that newborn babies need 20 to 22 hours of sleep a day (he found that 15 hours was the norm); that an hour of sleep before midnight is worth two or three hours later; that dreams last only a few seconds (they last 10 to 30 minutes), and that people should wake up refreshed after a good night’s sleep (drowsiness is normal).

According to Dr. Allan Rechtschaffen, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, Kleitman was “the first to take a deep, complete, absorbing interest in sleep, the first to compile the knowledge of sleep into a unified text, and with his students, the first to map out the multiple discreet stages of sleep.” “For the first time, we’d found the dream,” added Dr. Wilse Webb, a Professor Emeritus in Psychology from the University of Florida.

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In 1987, he collected his experiences and diaries into his first book: Out of Body Experiences: How to Have Them and What to Expect. His second book, Lessons Out of the Body: A Journal of Spiritual Growth and Out-of-Body Travel, was published in 2001.

Peterson has also studied lucid dreaming (LD) and has called Michael Raduga’s book The Phase the best in the history of the subject. However, he considers OBEs and LDs (which we combine under the concept of “phase states”) to be different phenomena. For example, he pointed out that LDs occurs when a person is asleep, and OBEs—while awake. A person can control a LD, while in an OBE, he/she is a passive observer. The surrounding world in a LD is vivid, filled with mystical possibilities, while during an OBE everything is rather ordinary (except for the separation from one’s body). LDs are a product of the dreamer’s mind, while OBE is an objective reality.

At the same time, Peterson lists lucid dreams among the recommended ways of inducing an OBE, as a tool of transition from one state to another. A normal dream is a hallucination without consciousness; LDs require consciousness, but remain a hallucination. An OBE is awareness without hallucination. Since the hallucination in a dream is created by our own subconscious, we can stop it—and enter an OBE.

As Peterson added in one of his articles: “Shifting from a lucid dream to an OBE is easy for me, but I can only describe it as an act of will. I ‘will’ the dream hallucination to disengage, and it feels like I’m waking up, but my body doesn’t make up. There’s just a sudden, complete shift of attention to a different kind of experience.”

Do you consider out-of-body experiences and lucid dreams to be two different phenomena or one and the same?

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On the morning of April 5, 1975, the first such experiment was successfully conducted: the dreamer performed a given sequence of eye movements, proving that he was in the LD phase. Unfortunately, the equipment happened to be switched off at that moment, and only a week later, on April 12, the same person demonstrated awareness in a dream, with the this time with recording devices at the ready.

Hearne published the results of his research in a PhD thesis completed in 1978 at Liverpool University. The text of the dissertation is available for free download on the scientist’s official website, and the original recordings of the experiments are in the Science Museum in London, as part of the permanent exhibition.

The idea to recognize April 12 as Lucid Dreaming Day belongs to Daniel Love, an LD researcher and educator, the author of the book Are you Dreaming? published in 2013. His proposal received widespread support from practitioners around the world.

Today’s date refers specifically to the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, rather than phase states in general. By “phase states” we refer to such phenomena as LD, but also out-of-body experiences – which is celebrated on December 21.

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Hearne’s first experiment of confirming awareness in a dream was successfully realized on the morning of April 5, 1975. The dreamer performed a given sequence of eye movements, proving that he was in the LD state. Unfortunately, the equipment happened to be switched off at that moment, and only a week later the same person again demonstrated awareness in a dream, this time with recording devices at the ready. This day, April 12, is celebrated by practitioners around the world as Lucid Dreaming Day.

Hearne is also the founder and principal of the European College of Hypnotherapy and a renowned therapist. He actively lectured and introduced many new approaches in this area – in particular, the method of transforming nightmares into lucid dreams. And his special technique of hypno-oneirography (sequential tracing of dream images) has been featured in TV documentaries.

Over the years, he has frequently appeared in the media, especially on television, in the UK and abroad. He appeared on the BBC and was filmed for the Discovery Channel program about dreams. For over a year, he also wrote a regular column on the subject of dreams in The Express newspaper.

You can learn more about the work of Keith Hearne, read his doctoral dissertation and six other published books on the scientist’s official website.

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Together with his colleagues, he conducted an impressive amount of research and published a number of articles in scientific journals. Lucid dreams, their induction, and application in sports was the topic of his doctoral dissertation at Heidelberg University in Germany.

Stumbrys is a member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, as well as a board member of the Lithuanian Association for Mindfulness-Based Psychology. The scientist is interested not only in empirical research on the topic of LD but also in the practice of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. He conducts seminars and workshops on LD and mindfulness and is engaged in academic activities.

Stumbrys has studied lucid dreams as a method of treating psychological problems, including clinical depression. He also investigated the question of whether LD has potential dangers for health, coming to the conclusion that lucid dreams do not affect the quality of sleep and have an overall positive effect on the human psyche.

Last year, the scientist participated in a six-day experiment on mental healing in lucid dreaming. Later, researchers tried to assess success by analyzing saliva, believing that stress levels could be determined from it. A scheme for combating nightmares through lucidity was also developed. Stumbrys also became part of a scientific team that investigated the benefits of another phase state—out-of-body experiences—noting that it reduces the fear of death, provides inner peace, and enhances self-awareness.

Have you ever tried to solve psychological problems through lucid dreaming?

The researcher’s work can be found on his Google Scholar‬ page.

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Sharpless has devoted more than a dozen publications to this topic. Among other things, he wrote a guide for medical practitioners. Sleep paralysis is a recognized disorder of sleep and wakefulness, but it is not widely known to specialists who work in fields unrelated to sleep. Often patients are unwilling to disclose episodes of SP due to embarrassment: they see hallucinations and think they are going crazy.

Sharpless gives some practical advice for the prevention of sleep paralysis:

– avoiding alcohol and caffeine before going to bed
– going to bed and waking up every day at the same time
– sleeping on your side (sleeping on your back or stomach makes SP more likely)
– meditation
– awareness exercises

The researcher previously investigated the possibility of experiencing pleasant cases of sleep paralysis, noting that the ability to lucid dream makes it more likely. However, last year, he continued to search for a cure for sleep paralysis. The advice remains the same for now. But if a person is already paralyzed and sees a demon, they should focus on positive thoughts and their breath. Sharpless’s treatment scheme has been implemented in the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine.

What do you do if you find yourself in sleep paralysis?

The researcher’s works can be found on his Google Scholar page.

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Among other things, he was interested in the topics of astral projection, dreams, and the afterlife. He repeatedly combined them in his works, thus actually recognizing the similarity between the states that we call phase states. However, all his works are exclusively mystical in nature.

In the book The Astral Plane, Leadbeater notes that during sleep the astral body leaves the physical. In Dreams, he described how, when in a deep sleep, the physical body lies on the bed while the astral body floats directly above it. In the work The Other Side of Death, the author adds that the astral plane is not limited to the afterlife – in fact, we visit it every night in our dreams.

Most ordinary people, according to Leadbeater, don’t have sufficient control over their brains. They cannot regulate the flow of erratic images in their dreams, and when they wake up, they retain only vague memories of the dreams or none at all. And this is regrettable, because they could experience a lot of interesting things, for example:

– visit beautiful places
– meet friends, including the deceased
– get information from knowledgeable people
– get in touch with non-human beings of various kinds

However, Leadbeater’s teachings remain entirely mystical. Ideas close to the description of phase states are intertwined with stories about spiritualist séances, ghosts, paradise, and the divine spirit.

The author’s books are available on Amazon.

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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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Levitan first heard about lucid dreaming (LD) in April 1982, when she attended Stephen LaBerge’s course at Stanford University, even though she had already had her first lucid dream in adolescence. Nevertheless, she was interested in developing the ability to remember dreams. As a student, she didn’t sleep much, yet she still learned to have three-to-four lucid dreams a week.

Lynne Levitan tested the first LD stimulation devices created at the Lucidity Institute. During the first two years when the researchers developed DreamLight, she experienced LD every other night on average. With colleagues, she also studied the similarities and differences between dream and reality in terms of cognition, noting that the differences are quantitative rather than qualitative, and that the types of cognition experienced in dreaming and waking are much more similar than previously assumed.

Levitan was also a participant in research on sleep interruption technique (which requires getting up an hour earlier than usual and staying awake for 30–60 minutes, after which the subject can go back to sleep with the intention of becoming aware) and the benefits of daytime sleep. The results of this research showed that awareness during daytime sleep occurs ten times more often than at night. With colleagues, she also conducted the first experiments to confirm lucidity in a dream with the help of pre-agreed eye movements.

In her work with Stephen LaBerge, she also pointed out the similarities between lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, and out-of-body experiences (i.e. the phase states), noting that these conditions may be aspects of the same phenomenon.

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