Lambert Peng
Exploring the Lucid Dream Exploration Book
Is it a handy tool?
Lucid dreaming is something that cannot just be self-taught. You need to use proven
techniques practiced by people who already have experience. And where can you find such
people? You can certainly search for online resources and whole communities of practiced lucid
dreamers and learn from there, but the problem is that it is very difficult to get yourself
motivated to learn the proper techniques. You need to be highly motivated to learn lucid
dreaming properly, and when online resources are just passively lying around waiting for you to
read them, you’re going to find it very difficult go actively go out, search for them, and use them
for yourself. For most people, lucid dreaming, as you might imagine, is not easy to learn, and
when you go for several nights without much progress you’ll find it’s very discouraging unless
you have something to keep motivating you. You need something solid, something tangible,
lying around on your desk or bed or someplace where you can easily access it so you can easily
have something external to remind you that you want to practice lucid dreaming.
This is where Exploring the World of Lucid Dreams comes in. For all its worth, this
cheap, compact little book does a good enough job keeping me motivated to try lucid dreaming
every night, so that I can be consistent. It encourages me to pick it and up skim through it, and it
blocks me from thinking stressful thoughts about my day that might get me worked up and forget
to relax. But how good is the actual content of the book? Will this book have something to teach
lucid dream beginners and veterans alike? I think it is the merely the presence of the book that
keeps me going, and it wasn’t until recently that I tried to seriously read through the book to see
just how valuable the lucid dream information presented could be.
The book opens with various stories by different people describing their lucid dreams to
prime you for what is to come ahead, to get you in the “mood” for lucid dream practice. There is
a short overview on the history of dreaming and how ancient peoples had known about lucid
dreaming for hundreds of years; lucid dreaming is not a new discovery. There is information and
a series of anecdotes to reassure you that lucid dreaming is not “dangerous” or harmful to your
body in any way as popular culture might suggest (Inception comes to mind).
You learn that this book, published in 1991, was the first time that detailed knowledge of
lucid dreaming was made widely available to the general public. If this book is so old, you might
wonder, wouldn’t some of the knowledge presented here be “obsolete?” While there certainly
has been some new discoveries and insights about sleeping and dreaming over the 20-year gap,
the basic techniques outlined in this book are still applicable today. The non-material,
psychological processes suggested by the book, as well as the ideas behind them, will still
work—the human body certainly hasn’t changed, after all! The only information I could find in
this book that is clearly outdated is the passage about the DreamLight: a device invented by Dr.
LaBerge, the author of the book. DreamLight was in its experimental stage at the time, and it
works by signaling lights through your eyelid while you sleep so that you would be reminded in
your dream world to test the state of your reality. This device has since been replaced by the
NovaDreamer, also invented by LaBerge, which in turn has been withdrawn from the market to
make way for something even newer.
Keep in mind that Dr. LaBerge is a professional sleep researcher, so there is bound to be
some information on the scientific and quantitative side of sleep and dreaming. There is a
passage on the stages of sleep and instruments used in sleep laboratories to study patients, but he
keeps it painlessly simple and straightforward, presenting only enough information you need to
understand how it fits into the whole dream research picture. You can see a slight element of his
own bias in his deciding to insert the story of how he “proved” the existence of lucid dreams
using eye movements. It is an interesting story about a clever idea, and it might be enlightening
for those interested in the research component of psychology. This experiment earned him his
Ph.D. at Stanford.
At times, Dr. LaBerge does stray a bit too much into the metapsychological or
metaphysical side of dreaming. He mentions moments where you feel your “two bodies”
separate, and gaining “true understanding” of the universe, and perhaps a bit of discussion from
the point of view of Tibetan monks. But although the metaphysics might be a bit strange to read
for the scientific-minded person, at least LaBerge acknowledges that these concepts might seem
a bit strange to the westerner.
The rest of the book is filled with useful knowledge. There are both practical, step-bystep tips and lengthy explanations for them, but LaBerge consistently keeps the language simple
and readable and inserts collected lucid dream stories and anecdotes to keep it interesting. When
presenting difficult techniques such as the WILD, he follows up with all of the things to watch
out for and continually encourages you to keep trying. When he tells you what to do to
accomplish something, he describes it actively to keep you immersed; i.e., in the passage about
dream signs, he doesn’t say, “other dream signs include broken light switches, being able to
breathe underwater, and distorted text.” He would say something like, “The light switch doesn’t
work. You are breathing underwater. The text is distorted.” This really does a fine job of making
you feel like you are experiencing the dream, which is all part of the process of fine-tuning you
into the lucid dream mentality.
For all its minor faults, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming is a fine little gem for a
lucid dreaming enthusiast. If you are a beginner, this will most certainly help you. If you are
already an expert, you can keep it as a good, tangible reminder to keep working on your skills—
not to mention the convenience of having a solid and reliable reference. Even though this book
was written in 1991, the knowledge here is certainly not obsolete, and the relevance is not
outdated.
Words: 1071
“When you are satisfied with your environment, enlist helpers – experts, teachers, assistants,
wizards, consultants, muses, galactic councils.”
“Motivation is an essential prerequisite; you have to really want to do it and make sufficient time
to practice.”
“By waking in your dreams, you can waken to life.”
Title: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming
Author: Dr. Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D.
Publisher: Ballantine Books (Nov 13, 1991)
Pages: 352
Price: $3.88