ABSTRACT
Lucid dreaming has been documented and practiced across the world for centuries, both in ‘Eastern’ traditions (e.g. Tibetan Buddhism; Norbu, 2002), and in the ‘Western’ world. Despite this, oneirologists took a long time to explore this phenomenon; Freud and Jung, for example, didn’t discuss lucid dreams in their theories. Some lucky people don’t need to train to have lucid dreams; they just have them. But personality seems unrelated to lucid dreaming – at least, this is the case for the ‘Big 5’ personality traits of neuroticism, open-mindedness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. Lucid dreams are experienced as ‘real’ by the body: one study found that people who did squats in a lucid dream experienced an increase in heart rate, just as they would in doing exercise in waking life.
