Lucid Dreamers - Asleep and Awake

J. Allan Hobson, a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, has suggested that during a lucid dream, the dreamer is experiencing both the waking state and the dreaming state at the same time in different areas of the brain.

Hobson, who is known for developing the Activation Synthesis Theory of Dreams along with Robert W. McCarley, published his findings in a 2009 article in the International Journal of Dream Research.

Recently, Hobson developed a theory that dreaming is an alternate state of consciousness.

Hobson says that state dissociations - in which one person experiences two different brain states at the same time - are quite common.

Examples of state dissociations may include sleepwalking, night terrors, sleep paralysis and REM sleep behavior disorder.

When someone sleepwalks, for example, their cerebral cortex - the part of the brain that is involved with consciousness - is in Stage 4 of NREM sleep, while the parts of their brainstem that regulate walking and navigation behave as they would when the sleepwalker was completely awake.

In his work, Hobson provides examples of studies that show that during a lucid dream, some parts of the dreamer's brain are awake while other parts are asleep.

One such study was performed by Ursula Voss at the University of Frankfurt, Germany.

Voss took EEG readings of lucid dreamers.

She found that when people have lucid dreams, they have more 40 Hertz (Hz) brainwaves in the frontal regions of the brain than when they have "normal" REM dreams, but less than when they are awake.

In addition, Michael Czisch of Munich, Germany's Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry has been studying MRI scans of lucid dreamers.

These scans show that during a lucid dream, the frontal areas of the brain, as well as the temporal lobes and the occipital lobes, are more active than they are during a typical REM dream.

The areas of the brain that become active when the dreamer becomes lucid are the areas of the brain that distinguish human beings from macaque monkeys.

EEG studies have shown that activity in these parts of the human brain -as well as 40 Hz brainwaves - are associated with waking consciousness.

Hobson says that because during a lucid dream, the dreamer is neither fully asleep nor fully awake, it is very hard for the dreamer to remain in the lucid dream.

The brain wants to move completely to one state or the other.

Consequently, the lucid dreamer either awakens completely or switches to "normal" dreaming within a very short time.