What is it about?
Spontaneous lucid dreaming is occurring when people realizes that the reality they are currently experiencing is in fact a dream. Some people have lucid dreams about once a month others never experience them. What might explain this variability ? Frequent, occasional and non-lucid dreamers were compared on an established task designed to measure 'insight'. Results show that frequent lucid dreamers solve significantly more insight problems overall than non-lucid dreamers. This suggests that the insight experienced during the dream state may relate to the same underlying cognition needed for insight in the waking state
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Why is it important?
To realise that ones current experience, everything you are seeing, hearing, feeling is not real takes a remarkable moment of insight. Dreams are hallucinations. While waking insight is poorly understood, the current results indicate that whatever the cognition is, it is likely also to operate when people are dreaming. An explanation is given for why some people are frequent lucid dreamers and some are not
Perspectives
The main limit of this study is that it is correlational. It is suggestive of something very interesting but we do not know if one factor (waking insight) causes the other (lucid dreaming) or vice versa or neither of these.
Patrick Bourke
University of Lincoln
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Spontaneous lucid dreaming frequency and waking insight., Dreaming, January 2014, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/a0036908.
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