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It was a typical night for research scientist Benjamin Baird, then a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was late, around 1 a.m., and he was reading everything he could find online about his dissertation topic, which was human consciousness. That’s when he came across some information about lucid dreaming.  

“I’d never considered that something like that was possible,” Baird says. “I could be conscious and aware while I was asleep and in a dream? It blew my mind.” 

The story suggested that people get in the habit of counting their fingers. If you don’t have five of them, you’re probably dreaming, the article said. Baird fell asleep thinking about what he’d read. Soon he was in a dream world. He looked at his hand. One. Two. Three. Wait? Three? “Oh,” he thought, “I’m asleep. I’m dreaming!” “Then I took off flying and woke up,” he says.

The experience left Baird hungry for more. Now, several years later, he’s a researcher at the University of Texas focusing on cognitive neuroscience. His work, along with that of others, has helped scientists to figure out ways to harness lucid dreaming for improved mental health and physical performance. 

Lucid Dreaming Goes Mainstream 

Way back in the 1970s, when Stanford psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge began developing techniques that allowed himself and others to control their dreams, the greater scientific world was skeptical, at least at first.  

That’s because it was difficult to prove that LaBerge and others were truly having lucid dreams. For many researchers at the time, lucid dreaming seemed about as scientifically plausible as levitation. That is, until LaBerge and other researchers found a few lucid dreamers who were willing to sleep in a lab with all sorts of sensors attached to their bodies, including their eyelids. 

.(Credit: agsandrew/Shutterstock)

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