Lucid Dreaming

A lucid dream is a dream in which the dreamer is aware, while still inside the dream, that they are dreaming, a state studied within the psychological subfield of oneirology. The ability to have and sustain such dreams is a trainable cognitive skill, and during one the dreamer may gain some degree of deliberate control over the dream's characters, story or setting, although that control is not considered the defining feature of the experience. Lucid dreaming is treated as distinct from related states such as prelucid dreams, which can act as a precursor to it, and from ordinary vivid dreams, and it is also distinguished from other boundary states of consciousness such as lucid hypnagogia and lucid hypnopompia. The term itself was coined by the Dutch psychiatrist and author Frederik van Eeden in a 1913 article, although descriptions of dreamers recognizing they were dreaming predate that article, and the psychologist Stephen LaBerge, founder of the Lucidity Institute at Stanford University, is widely considered the leading modern researcher in the field, with some of the resulting research pointing toward lucid dreaming's possible use as a therapeutic technique.