Lucid Dreaming: Its Experimental Proof and Psychological Conditions

The occurrence of lucid dreaming (dreaming while being conscious that one is dreaming) has been verified for 4 selected subjects who signaled that they knew they were dreaming. The signals consisted of particular dream actions having observable concomitants and were performed in accordance with a presleep agreement. Two of the subjects signaled successfully during REM sleep, and the others during stage 1. To know what the psychological conditions for the occurrence of lucid dreaming are, a questionnaire on lucid dreams was made and given to college students at the same time Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and Sugawara’s Self-consciousness Scale. There was no significant relationship between the lucid dream experience frequency and the personality characteristics, whereas lucid dreamers had significantly higher scores than non-lucid dreamers on the “private self-consciousness subscale”, but not on the “public self-consciousness subscale”. This result suggests that most people may have a capacity to have a lucid dream, despite their differences of personality, through some appropriate way of training to reinforce their private self-consciousness in their daily life.