Personality and Lucid Dreaming

Dr Mark Blagrove on lucid dreams, cognition and the nature of dreaming.

Lucid dreaming is the relatively rare ability to realise that one is dreaming while continuing to dream. While lucid it is then possible to intentionally control the dream. Lucid dreams occur during REM sleep, but are more prevalent during the later REM periods of the night. In this presentation various studies comparing frequent, occasional lucid dreamers and non-lucid dreamers on personality and attention measures will be described. These show that lucid dreaming is associated with waking life Internal Locus of Control, high Need for Cognition, high Creativity, and high attentional control on the Stroop task. The results support the Continuity theory of dreaming, which holds that waking life cognition, and individual differences in waking life cognition, are related to dream content variables.

Mark Blagrove is Reader in Psychology and Director of the Sleep Laboratory at Swansea University. He researches the psychology of dreaming and the aetiology of nightmares, and is on the editorial boards of the A.P.A. journal Dreaming (www.apa.org/journals/drm) and the Journal of Sleep Research. He is a past-president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (www.asdreams.org).

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