A strange thing happened to me last night. At some point, during a normal night of REM sleep and vivid dreams, I began to realize I was dreaming. That in itself isn’t so strange. Called lucid dreaming, it happens when a part of your brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex wakes up while you’re still asleep allowing you to control your dream. What was strange is that, at one point, I decided to really take in the quality of the dream–similar to how you’d take in the quality of an HD television. Though it seems a little hazy now, I remember it being exactly like reality. If it wasn’t for the fact that I seemed to be in Sherlock Holmes-era London, it could easily have been reality.

I’ve had lucid dreams before. I’ve even spent a week trying to have one after I heard a great two-part special on sleep on CBC radio’s Ideas called While You Were Out where I learned there are tricks to lucid dreaming. Some people get so good at it that they can do it at will even going so far as to use their dreams to practice things they want to do while awake (from the brain’s point of view, actions while you’re awake are the same as actions while your dreaming). To check if you’re dreaming, you can check digital watches, text, or test light switches because all of these things are known to be unstable in dreams. I find that I tend to have lucid dreams when I go to bed early before I’m really tired. Apparently, it even helps to go around while you’re awake asking yourself if you’re dreaming though that might be a step too far for me.

If you’re intrigued about lucid dreaming, you have to check out While You Were Out. It covers the science and history of sleep–the first part dedicated to what happens the first half of the night when you’re in slow-wave sleep and the second part covers that latter half of the night when we dream. The journalist, Jeff Warren, lives his journalism first-hand by subjecting himself to sleeping in a research lab where he’s woken up periodically and asked to talk about his dreams. He even sequesters himself in his family’s cottage during the shorts nights of November with no artificial night to see if he can experience sleep as we may be naturally supposed to experience it–in two four-hour chunks with two hours of conscious euphoria in between.

When this show came out as a podcast, it was so wildly popular that the CBC only left if up as a free download for a week before realizing they could make some money off it. That’s why now it’s only available on CD although you can stream it online from Jeff Warren’s website here. I highly recommend giving this a listen.

And now, Annie Lennox with some topical advice: