Event Details

The talk will cover recent advances in our understanding of the phenomenon of lucid dreaming (becoming aware that you’re dreaming, within a dream), and its potential uses and importance – something experienced fleetingly by many people, but rarely acknowledged.

Dreams and dreaming have received varying levels of scrutiny and understanding from the scientific community since the days of Sigmund Freud, who considered dreams to be 'The Royal Road to the Unconscious'. To mark International Sleep Day, this talk focuses on one of the more exotic aspects of dreaming - the lucid dream, in which the dreamer becomes aware of their state, and can, at times, shape the action within their dreamscape, and even communicate with the 'non-dreaming' world around them, or work on creative solutions that can be applied to real problems.

We look at techniques to potentiate lucidity, possible applications, and the implications that this form of altered state has for the 'hard problem' in psychology - consciousness itself.