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Lucid Dreaming and Bimodality
Lucid Dreaming and Bimodality
Lucid Dreaming and Bimodality
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Until recently, waking was regarded as the state of consciousness, par excellence.
Dreaming was relegated to a subservient and disruptive role as the repressed un-
conscious of Sigmund Freud and his followers. But as previously argued (Hobson,
2009a), dreaming is mostly forgotten (and hence amnesic) but not really uncon-
scious. When we dream, we are, if anything, hyperperceptive and hyperemo-
tional. It is this augmentation of conscious state features that led Leonardo da
Vinci to wonder, “Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than it
does when awake?” At the same time, other, secondary, conscious state features
of waking consciousness, including memory, are in abeyance. We can spontane-
ously remember some dreams. And we can remember many more if awakened by
autosuggestion, by an accomplice, or by a technician in a sleep lab. Dreaming may
therefore be regarded as a second state of consciousness, quite different from, but
quite complimentary to, waking consciousness.
These facts and considerations indicate that consciousness is, at least, bimod-
al. It may, in fact, be multimodal but for the purposes of this essay, we choose to
focus on its indubitable bimodality.
The bimodality of consciousness converges closely with Gerald Edelman’s
(2003, 2005) useful distinction of primary and secondary consciousness. While
Edelman assumes that primary consciousness may be experienced by most birds
and mammals, he ascribes secondary consciousness to primates, especially hu-
mans. Primary consciousness is a state that allows for simple awareness, including
perception and emotion. Humans and primates have developed a superior form
of consciousness referred to as secondary consciousness. This involves awareness
of awareness which requires volition, rational thought, and self-reflection.
For strategic scientific reasons, we suggest that dreaming is like primary con-
sciousness. In dreaming, our consciousness is strongly perceptive and highly ani-
mated yet it lacks the characteristics of secondary consciousness.
The distinction between the two modes of conscious experience begs com-
parison with Freud’s primary process (which he ascribed, as we do, to dreaming)
and secondary process (which he ascribed, as we do, to waking). But whereas
Freud conceived of the two processes as fundamentally antagonistic, we view
them as fundamentally cooperative.
What is the evidence for bimodality? What is its mechanism? And what is its
function?
It is now quite clear that dreaming is caused by brain activation in sleep and that
activation, like the activation of waking, is mediated by the pontomesencephalic
brain stem.
The Activation function, A, of the AIM Model (Hobson et al., 2001; Hobson,
2009a) makes no distinction between waking and dreaming although quantita-
tive EEG studies to be discussed below, do show differences.
According to AIM, the bimodality of waking and dreaming is caused by two
other processes, also of brainstem origin.
One is the second AIM factor, I, which distinguishes between Input-output
gates: these gates are open in waking, but are closed in sleep.
The third AIM function, factor M, posits that the Mode of information pro-
cessing is altered such that waking is strongly and dreaming only very weakly,
aminergic. The two conscious states of waking and dreaming are thus chemically
distinct.
Function
What is the relationship between the conscious states of dreaming and waking
and what does that relationship tell us about consciousness? One answer to this
question is evolutionary: animals first developed a relatively simple system for
mediating their perceptions, emotions, and memories. This was, and still is, the
primary consciousness system which is all that birds and sub-primate mammals
have to work with. The primary consciousness system is activated in REM sleep
in all animals that possess its advantages. As the brain continued to evolve, and
greatly elaborated its thalamocortical circuitry, it became possible for animals to
add secondary aspects of consciousness to their waking repertoire.
The enormous advantages of these capabilities are obvious. But there is a
problem: how are primary and secondary mechanisms kept separate and how do
they conspire to interact positively?
If there really are two brain systems which conspire to engineer waking and
dreaming consciousness then it should be possible to tease them apart and iden-
tify the circuitry that makes the two states of consciousness so different. Such a
physiological dissection might also help us understand the mutual collaboration
of dreaming and waking and to model its occasional degeneration.
When most subjects dream, they assume, wrongly, that they are awake. This
delusional mistake has at least two sources: one is that waking and dreaming
consciousness are phenomenologically similar as well as stunningly different
from each other. The differences are unnoticed because dream perception, fictive
movement, and emotion are so strong as to be pre-emptive and because cognitive
discrimination suffers from the diminution in memory, orientation, reasoning
power and amnesia of dreaming.
We sometimes suspect that our dream consciousness is not waking but usu-
ally brush such criticism aside. When, through training or spontaneous change
we become convinced that we are not awake but, rather, dreaming we enter the
remarkable state called lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is difficult to attain and
to maintain, probably because state differentiation is adaptive and therefore the
brain is engineered to be in one state or the other but not both simultaneously. The
occurrence of lucid dreaming thus presents consciousness research with a unique
opportunity to understand the mechanism of primary and secondary conscious-
ness and begin to explore the functional significance of their interaction.
This challenge is met via the development of new tools for cognitive science
including quantitative EEG (qEEG), functional brain imaging (f MRI) and elec-
tromagnetic brain stimulation (EMS). Preliminary results using the first two of
these three methods are promising.
Laboratory studies
Physiologic correlates of lucid dreaming were first objectively studied in the labo-
ratory by K. M. Hearne (1978) and Steven LaBerge (1980, see also Holzinger et al.,
2006). However, methodological difficulties and concerns (Tart, 1979; Hobson,
2009b) discredited the scientific status of these studies and moved lucid dreaming
into esoteric realms. LaBerge convincingly demonstrated, however, that lucidity
consistently arose out of REM sleep and that it was possible for subjects to signal
out of REM that they were lucid by making a series of voluntary eye movements.
An unresolved question was whether the lucid subjects were still in REM sleep or
whether they had transcended into waking. Our own study revealed that the brain
in lucid dreaming is both awake and asleep at the same time (Voss et al., 2009).
This paradox not only sheds light on the brain mechanisms of bimodal conscious-
ness but shows that the REM sleep vs. waking controversy can be resolved by the
assumption of a both-and rather than an either-or position.
In fact, the brain may never be in one and only one state; instead dissociations
abound as Mark Mahowald has so cogently argued (2009).
When we studied lucid dreaming, the greatest experimental obstacle was that
lucidity is a very fragile state. It is, therefore, difficult to observe in a laboratory
setting. Our subjects were sensitive to noise and less able to perform plot control
when sleeping in the laboratory compared to sleeping at home. Although lucid
dreaming can be trained, it requires effort and determination. Accordingly, in
our first EEG study, we only recorded 3 episodes that were clearly objectifiable
as spontaneous lucid dreams. Despite the low number of observations, we found
that when subjects became lucid, they shifted their EEG power (especially in the
40 Hz range) in frontal regions of the brain (see Figure 1). These changes were
statistically significant.
Figure 2. Short and long range coherences obtained for waking (top), lucid dreaming
(middle) and REM sleep (bottom). Coherences are averaged across electrode pairs in 4 s
Figure 2: Short and long range coherences obtained for waking (top), lucid dream
epochs. Short-range (55 pairs) was defined as less than 10 cm and long-range (65 pairs)
as larger than 15 cm inter-electrode
(middle) distance.
and REM sleep Coherences
(bottom). are lowest are
Coherences in REM sleep and
averaged across electrode pa
strongly enhanced in lucid dreaming.
in 4 s epochs. Short-range (55 pairs) was defined as less than 10 cm and long-ra
We emphasize that the changes in cortical activation we have described are a con-
(65 pairs)auto-suggestion
sequence of pre-sleep as larger than 15 cm inter-electrode
indicating distance.
that in humans evenCoherences
primary are lowest i
consciousness, which is largely automatic, is partially subject to volitional force.
REM sleep and strongly enhanced in lucid dreaming.
This fact has important therapeutic implications as well as telling us that waking
(secondary) consciousness may differ from (primary) dreaming consciousness
owing to increases in the power and coherence of the frontal lobes of the brain.
Recent functional MRI results reported to us by our Munich colleagues sup-
port this conclusion by revealing that dream lucidity is correlated with increased
activation of the cortical areas that are thought to mediate the features of second-
ary consciousness. The selectively activated brain regions include the precuneus,
the frontopolar cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the temporal cortex and
the inferior parietal lobules (Dresler et al., p.c.)
Imaging studies of normal sleep have consistently shown that compared to wak-
ing, REM sleep is characterized by diminished activation of the dorsolateral pre-
frontal cortex (DLPFC) (Maquet et al., 1996; Muzur et al., 2002; Nofzinger et al.,
1997). Since the DLPFC is thought to be the site of executive ego function, it has
been suggested that the loss of volition, self-reflective awareness, and insight that
is typical of normal dreaming, may be related to DLPFC inactivation. In lucid
dreaming, these psychological functions are regained leading to the prediction
that lucid dreaming involves reactivation of the DLPFC.
We interpret our recent results and previous findings as follows. There are two
cardinal states of consciousness, waking and dreaming. Each has distinctive phe-
nomenologic and physiological features. Their co-existence in all animals that
evince REM sleep indicates shared brain mechanisms and functions for these
states. We have elsewhere argued that the two states are mutually reinforcing
(Hobson, 2009a).
In the current paper we describe our experimental results in terms of our
theory of bimodality. We have shown that lucid dreaming is an unusual but infor-
mative state with features of both waking and dreaming. As such its physiological
substrate demonstrates the simultaneous co-activation of brain circuits mediating
REM sleep and waking.
These observations and our interpretation of them have far-reaching rami-
fications for theories of consciousness. For example, the widely noted and much
appreciated unity of consciousness is called into question. Not only is conscious-
ness bimodal but at least two of its modes can be simultaneously activated, experi-
enced and observed. As such, lucid dreaming is a hybrid state in which one part of
the brain (and its subjective self) observes and controls another part of the brain
(with its own subjective self). It is in this sense that we allude to the famous split
brain studies of Sperry (1961) and Gazzaniga (1989); we suggest that brain-mind
splitting is not only anatomical and post-surgical (as in their cases) but also physi-
ological and post-training (in our lucid dreamers).
Multiple personality disorder, hypnosis, and major mental illnesses like
schizophrenia are all better understood via the recognition that even normal sleep
is characterized by surprising bimodality. The possibility that the observed bimo-
dality reflects profound and adaptive functionality serves to extend and naturalize
our understanding of otherwise puzzling conditions of the brain-mind.
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