Radiolab - Wake Up and Dream

Episode Date: January 24, 2012

In today's short, a man confronts a bully, and frees himself from a recurring nightmare that's terrorized him for more than 20 years.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts.

From W. N-Y-C. See? Yes. And NPR. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. The podcast.

And today, a story about facing, how would you put it? Facing. You're boogeyman. Yeah. But in this case, like, literally. Eh, that's... Almost. Almost.

And it comes to us from Matt, you ready? Yeah. From reporter Matthew Kilty. Steve. Yes. And another guy. How you doing? I never been better.

So, Matt, I don't know exactly how we're going to start this story, but maybe just introduce us to this guy. So this guy's Steve Volk. He's a reporter. A city reporter here in Philadelphia. I write about courts, crime, politics. But the thing that I read was a personal story of Steve's. Story starts.

with Steve in his early 20s, and one night he goes to sleep. Right. So I have this dream where I wake up in my apartment. There's nobody there but me, and I'm just sort of pacing around the rooms. And I feel that sort of, that kind of tremor or buzz almost, that something bad's about to happen. That feeling when like the walls kind of close in on you a little bit. I could just feel that something's about to happen. And I look over at the window, and there's this face. Outside his window.

This man. Just hovering there. And then he sort of recedes back into the dark and comes back again. And so it sort of bob up to where I could see it, and then recede back into the distance. And it was very, very threatening. Yeah. I don't know what's happening. I just think that this person's trying to scare me, intimidate me.

So he waits there for a minute, and a moment later, Steve hears this knock. Uh-oh. At his front door, he knows immediately it's this guy. And so I start hollering, using every expletive I know, you're going to scare me. I start daring him to come in so I can kill him. And I have this rage that, you know, I don't. I don't know that I've ever really felt in real life. So much rage that it made me feel sick.

He's just screaming at the door over and over. Come in here so I can kill you. It was really violent. And then all of a sudden, this guy just kicks open the door. And we fly at each other. We're both swinging and grabbing each other. And then... I wake up.

Literally with my fist, you know, my hand balled into a fist, and I've just thrown a punch at the air. And he's in an just absolute panic. Very, very profoundly disturbing dream. But it's just a dream. Yep. But the thing about this dream is that it wouldn't go away. Meaning.

Like any time there was any sort of anxiety that flared up in his life. Work deadline, relationship, family troubles. It's back again. And every time, the same thing. This face that comes up out of the dark. The face, the window. the door, the fight. You know, I wanted it to go away.

And so this is something, this persisted for how long? I would say I had this dream at least six times a year for about 20 years. 20 years. 20 years. So he must have had it like. Hundreds of times. So yeah, it was a dream that I wanted to be done with. And I wasn't sure how to be done with it.

But a couple years ago, Steve starts working on this book, basically looking at things that are kind of out there on the edge of science. but he's looking at him in this objective investigative way. And one of the things that he ends up bumping into is lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming. So this is where, like, you wake up inside your dream. Like you're awake. You're awake.

You're present. You're aware. You can control what's happening in your dream. You know, let me just ask you. Really? I mean, I've seen Inception. I've heard people say that they have lucid dreams, but I just always assume those people just don't know what they're talking about.

They're actually referring to something else. Yeah, it seems crazy and for a long time. Western science denied lucid dreaming happened. Yeah. It didn't exist. But the more Steve looked into it, he realized that the science behind this is real. It is. Yeah.

So... Sell me. We're going to start with this guy, Stephen LaBerge. Stephen LaBerge. So in the late 70s, LaBerge goes to Stanford. He wants to study consciousness. The reason he does is because he's grown up his entire life claiming to have lucid dreams. He claims he's been concerned.

controlling his dreams all his life. Yeah. But at the same time, he's also a scientist. So he had to find a way to show people objectively that lucid dreaming exists. Wait, hold up. How would you even go about doing that? Because if it's a dream, it's only in your head. So how can you prove something that's only in your head?

So that actually takes us back to LaBerge's advisor. A guy named William C. Dement. William C. Dement. He's conducting all these sleep studies at this Stanford. at Sleep Science Center. And one of the things he noticed is when people go into this dream state, their eyes behind their eyelids, they begin to just dart around like crazy. They go diagonally, sideways.

Basically what we know is REM. Or rapid eye movement. Right. But one day, DeMette has this subject. And he's watching this guy and this guy's eyes when he goes into REM. Out of nowhere, his eyes go from craziness to this really slow, controlled pattern. left to right and left to right

and left to right and to men I was so intrigued that he immediately went and woke them up and said do you remember what you were dreaming and they said yeah

I was watching a ping pong match but umpum right I mean it sounds like a joke but for LaBurge this is like a total revelation I mean think about it if you are in a dream and you like wave your hands around

or you shout you're not moving or anything on the you know in the real world but if you move your eyes in a dream. Someone sitting out there in the real world will actually see your eyes move. They'll see that. It's like this little hidden line that you can use to call out from the dream world to the awake world. And so Stephen LaBerge figures, okay, what I'm going to do then is have somebody monitor me while I sleep. And once I'm dreaming and become aware that I'm dreaming,

I will issue two smooth, controlled eye movements. In other words, I'm going to go to sleep, and when I become lucid in my dream, I'm going to move my eyes left, right, left, right. And then you, out here in the real world, you'll see my eyes actually move left, right, left, right. And that way, you'll know that I am lucid in my dream, controlling what's going on.

That's pretty cool. So LeBerge gets all hooked up to the machines, and his assistant sits there watching his eyes go all crazy, and then... Suddenly, instead of herky-jurkey movement... His assistant sees... Smooth, controlled movements. Left, right. Left, right.

Left, right. The same pattern they'd agreed on. Exact same pattern. And they were sure that LaBerge was deep asleep during this pattern making? Yeah, yeah, they were watching. They were watching on the EEG machines that he was in a deep sleep when he made that pattern signal. So he was conscious while he was unconscious is what you're saying? Correct.

He was lucid. Okay. And he was able to repeat this. Yeah, he went on and ended up replicating this with a lot of other people. He published it? Yeah, he published it. Like in a journal, not just on the web. Yep.

Wow. And you won't find, at this stage, you won't really find credible dream researchers denying the reality of lucid dreaming. So you will find them ignoring it routinely. Steve gets in touch with LaBerge. who turns out is doing these workshops now, teaching people how to have lucid dreams. How to have lucid dreams? On command. This is something you can learn?

You can learn how to do this, yeah. LaBerge has discovered a lot of different techniques for this. He's got techniques. What are the techniques? So, first of all, to become lucid in a dream, you have to realize in the dream that you're dreaming. Yes. Which is kind of like how do you... How do you do that in a dream?

You actually, what you do is you practice in the waking world. You become like hyper aware of certain things that work differently in the dream world than they do in the waking world. Like what? One of the most easy for people to follow is print. Like text. When you're awake, text is text. But text in a dream changes really dramatically. From moment to moment.

Right now there's a Vuesonic monitor across from me. And when I look away from it and look back, it still says VueSonic. However, in a dream, when you look away from it, because it has no external reality, when you look back, it could be anything. It could be nuclear launch codes. It could be poetry. The point of all this is to zero in on things that make you question. Am I awake or am I dreaming? It's called a state test.

And what ends up happening if you start doing this in real life is you end up being in a dream. And because you've asked yourself this question a dozen times that day, am I awake or am I dreaming, that that thought will occur to you in the dream. And if it does? That might open the door to actually becoming aware and taking control. Man, you are more than halfway there at that point. So Steve, he started trying all this out, doing all these state tests, but it wasn't really working. So he ended up calling the Burge's assistant. And I called her, and we talked through different techniques in the book, and then we talked about this nightmare.

And when she heard about his nightmare, she actually suggested a different technique. In waking life, imagine the dream as it happened and then find the point at which you would like to gain lucidity. Something happens, something shifts, and this is the point where you'd like to become lucid. And he decided when the face first appears in the window. That's the moment. That very specific moment. When I want to gain awareness. And so I would imagine myself doing this over and over.

Face awareness. Face awareness. And then one night, he goes to sleep. I'm walking through my apartment. Nobody there but me. And I feel that sort of familiar buzz of anticipation. Something bad's about to happen. And I look into the window and there's the guy.

Just like usual. But this time he says, I was there. You're there and then suddenly you're there. Yeah. It's like my perspective shifts and I am in this body, in this place, not observing something but in it. So I could feel, you know, my fingers, tickling my palms. I could feel my feet on the floor. I locked into these feelings because they make the dream more stable. And I wanted this dream to be stable because this face has been showing up in this window. for 20 years.

And it does its thing. It recedes. It comes back. And I go to the door and I reach from the door and the handle is a door handle. It feels that real. And I turn in and I, boom. A moment or two later, the guy appears in the doorway. And there's this moment where we look at each other face to face.

And he's this total nondescript guy. Really? Like any old beer-drinking dude. So he looks at me, and he's clearly perplexed, because we're not going through our usual dance. You know, and I kind of backed up to give him room. Guy walks in. We're standing there, looking at each other,

and I hadn't thought about what I would actually say. I just thought I'd let him in. What does the guy do? Well, he pulls out a gun. At this point, when he pulls this gun out, the whole dream in this moment now becomes for me a kind of battle between what I know to be true,

which is that this is a dream and it has no external reality and the natural feelings of fear that crop up when somebody who's already been terrorizing you for 20 years has now pulled out a gun. And he is really carefully looking at me, like waiting for me to go back to my, normal reaction. So he pulls the gun up now and points it at me, looking at me like, okay, now are you

going to do what you usually do? Now are you afraid? And in my head, I'm just like, it's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream. And so I just stand there. And he starts firing. My first reaction is to look down at myself, right, to look at my chest and my stomach. And I can see that my shirt is just sort of billowing with each impact, with each bullet. But there's no blood, there's no nothing, I'm not hurting. I am taking this, and it's nothing. I really feel, and I had this thought at the time, I'm near. I am Superman.

This guy's firing bullets at me and nothing. I look up at him and he sort of looks at me and then he smiles and drops the gun by his sign. And the sensation I had was like that message was like, see, you got it. You got it. I'm nothing to be afraid of at all. And I woke up still feeling like Neo,

still feeling like Superman. And I have, never had that dream. It's never had it again. It's gone. It's gone. A dream is gone. Well, thank you, Matt. Hey, sure. And thanks also to Steve Volk, his book,

which goes into much more detail on lucid dreaming and many other things, is called fringeology. This puts me in mind of our solution to a problem I've had now for several years, you know. Like me beating up on you in your dreams? I should have just waded it out, really. I should have said, yeah, go ahead, stamp me. See, now I'll never hurt you again.

I mean, this is something that everybody can take home and use tonight. All right. I'm Chad, I'm Robert Kulwicz. Thanks for listening. Hey, guys. I'm Sean Fitzgerald, a radio lab podcaster from Victoria in Australia. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred T. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www.s.org. So good. I love that science. life.