Hi there and welcome back to the podcast it's Matt here of course and no

podcast series on dreaming could go unfinished without discussion of lucid

dreaming which is going to be the topic of the final two episodes in this series on Dreaming. Technically we define lucid

dreaming as the moment when an individual becomes aware that she or he is dreaming. However, most people think of lucid

dreaming as much more than this, and specifically as gaining full volitional control over your dreams.

In other words, you get to decide what it is that you do during your dreams.

Now historically the concept of lucid dreaming was once considered a

scientific sham. Scientists debated its very existence. I mean, come on, you can kind of understand their original skepticism.

First, to claim that people can all of a sudden consciously gained control over a normally non-consciously

controllable process injects a heavy dose of ludicrous into the already preposterous experience that we call dreaming.

Second, how can any scientist objectively prove a subjective claim that an individual can

lucid dream, especially when the individual in question is fast asleep during the time when they claim to be doing the

thing that we're trying to prove. It seems scientifically unprovable and so this is part of the reason why there was this original

skepticism and so you can kind of understand it however several years ago an

ingenious experiment removed all such doubt.

What the scientist did was place lucid dreamers inside an MRI scanner.

Now the first part of the experiment was conducted while they were awake,

and the scientists instructed the participants

to first clench their left hand and then clench their right hand and to do that

over and over again. Left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand. And the researchers were taking snapshots of brain activity as they were doing this.

And it allowed them to define the precise brain areas controlling the left hand and the right hand of each one of those individuals.

Then came the second part of the experiment. The participants did another MRI scanning

...