Expert Says Lucid Dream Can Aid Life

``A few years back I was trying to lose weight. I would dream that I was in a grocery store, bakery or restaurant, and food was everywhere. I was conscious that I was dreaming and therefore could eat whatever I wanted. I proceeded to pig out on the feast before me, even tasting the food. These dreams would satisfy my craving to gorge myself. I would wake feeling satisfied - not full, but satisfied - and if during the day I got the urge to eat something I shouldn't I just thought, `I'll eat it tonight in my dream,' and I did!''

- C.C., Cotati, Calif.

The experience is one of dozens that lucid-dream researcher Stephen LaBerge and co-author Howard Rheingold quote in their new book, ``Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming'' (Ballantine Books, $18.95).

A lucid dream is one in which you are fully aware that you are dreaming while you are in the dream.

Why should you bother? Perhaps to overcome nightmares. Or to chat with Albert Einstein, or have an intimate evening with Marilyn Monroe.

LaBerge and Rheingold point out that master golfer Jack Nicklaus claimed to have made a discovery in a dream that improved his game by 10 strokes, overnight. And Friedrich Kekule discovered the structure of the benzene molecule in a dream.

No less a spiritual master than the Dalai Lama writes in his autobiography that the most important spiritual work he does is in lucid dreams. Other folks become lucid to be the flying heroes of great dream adventures. The potential seems limitless.

``Lucid dreaming is a capacity we all ought to have at our disposal,'' said LaBerge, who was in Seattle recently to promote his new book. He has been studying lucid dreaming since 1977 in the psychiatry department at Stanford University.

``I look forward to the day children will be taught the skill of lucid dreaming in grammar school, so they can use it to live better,'' he said. A child who has nightmares can use lucid dreaming skills to change the scenario, he explained. Confronting a dream monster, and watching it lose its power, can be an important lesson that carries over into waking life, in the form of increased self-confidence and a sense of control.

``I fully expect that lucid dreaming will be the way people are treated clinically for nightmares 10 years from now,'' LaBerge said.

Some people have lucid dreams naturally, but for most of us it is a learned skill. ``Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming'' describes a variety of techniques for learning how to do it, and explores what you can do with the skill once you have it.

``The worlds of lucid dreaming are fascinating, and constantly changing, with many vistas of breathtaking and unearthly beauty in which the impossible and unexpected regularly happen,'' LaBerge explains. ``They are at least as interesting and unexpected to explore as any place a waking world traveler might want to visit.

``In fact, the lucid dream world offers several advantages: It doesn't cost anything but a little effort to get there, and unlike Paris, China or Tahiti, you will never see all the sights. Moreover, you won't get seasick, stuck in airports, or have your bags stolen.''

Not to mention that dream sex may be the only completely safe sex.

LaBerge has received more than 10,000 letters over the past 10 years from people interested in learning lucid dreaming skills. To respond, he has organized the Lucidity Institute, P.O. Box 2364, Dept. B2, Stanford, CA 94309.

He developed the DreamLight, a sleep mask attached to a computer that responds to the rapid eye movements that characterize the dreaming state by flashing tiny lights inside the mask. The dreamer is conditioned to recognize it as a signal of being in the dream state, and become fully conscious in the dream.

There's a catch. The Dream

Light costs a whopping $880, because each must be handmade. LaBerge is looking for investment capital to produce them less expensively, for home use. Seattle investor Thomas Bolander, who heads The Bankland Group, is helping to find investors.

LaBerge leads workshops to teach lucid-dreaming skills twice a year at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., and is planning lucidity workshops next year in several major cities, including Seattle. No dates for the Seattle workshop have been set. For information call Bolander at 946-5186.

LaBerge writes, ``In dreams, Cinderella can be with her prince and prisoners can conjure sweet freedom; the crippled can walk and the aged can be as young as they like - everyone can be fulfilled, no matter how impossible their wishes may seem in waking life. The experience of wish fulfillment is not the same as actually living out the same scenarios in waking life, yet the sensations are no less intense and pleasurable when you know it is `only a dream.'

``As the psychologist Havelock Ellis said, `Dreams are real while they last, can we say more of life?' ''