Dreams are series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. When a person is dreaming they believe that is their reality. Lucid dreaming usually occurs during REM sleep. During lucid dreaming, a dreamer may be able to have some form of control over the dream characters, storyline, and environment. Therefore, the movie Inception is a very accurate portrayal of the idea of lucid dreaming. Philosophers and psychologists have debated on whether lucid dreaming is real or not. In 1959 Norman Malcolm said, “The only criterion of the truth of a statement that someone has had a certain dream is, essentially, his saying so.” (Brooks,2016). Which makes a good point because …show more content…
“The first published mention of lucid dreaming and its scientific potential was by Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys in 1867” (Busby,2013). The idea of lucid dreaming was not really thought of by many until Saint-Denys’s wrote about them and even then not many people believed him. In 1913. Frederick Van Eden, a Dutch psychologist, was the first to come up with the term lucid dreaming. According to Lambert (p.2), the Tibetan Buddhist had been practicing a similar version of lucid dreaming but it was called “dream yoga”. In which, the individual probes their consciousness and bring you to a constant state of awareness. Therefore, the lucid dreamer recognizes the dream as a dream and nothing more. They navigate through the dream and discover how they think and obstacles their minds put, which is similar to the idea of lucid dreaming, the most well-known scientist is Stephen Laberge who runs the Lucidity Institute. At the institute, he has workshops where he actually teaches people how to have lucid dreams. LaBerge truly sparked the more in depth research on lucid dreaming.
Another scientist studying the concept of lucid dreaming is Dr. Matthew Walker who proposed his own theory on lucid dreaming. According to Lambert (p.2), he believes that the