Lynne Levitan is a doctor of medicine, anesthesiologist, lucid dreamer, and wife of Stephen LaBerge (one of the most prominent researchers on the subject of lucid dreams), his colleague at the Lucidity Institute, and co-author of many papers.
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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