A One Minute History of Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dreaming is also known as conscious dreaming, or being aware that “this is a dream!” while asleep. The phrase “lucid dreaming” was coined by Frederik van Eeden in the late 1800s. van Eeden used his lucid dreams to investigate properties of the dream world that can only be glimpsed by direct experimentation within the dream itself. Thanks to Charles Tart’s republishing on van Eeden’s classic essay in 1969, lucid dreaming was rediscovered by the scientific West. Even though it was later popularized by popular writer Carlos Castaneda, lucid dreaming was legitimized by science when Stephen LaBerge set up his lucid dreaming laboratory at Stanford University in the early 1980s.

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