What did you dream about last night? Did you rerun some mundane event of the day — a trip to the supermarket; a chat over the garden fence? Or did you have that recurring nightmare in which you're chased by an 8ft tax inspector with fangs, and your legs stop working properly? We all dream: researchers say that if you don't remember any night-time visions, it's just your memory failing you. What the experts still can't tell you, definitively, is why we dream, though that doesn't stop them theorising. Dreams may be an outlet for pent-up emotions, or they may help us organise our memories. They might, as Freud believed, contain subconscious messages about ourselves and the world. Or they could be just mental excreta, a useless by-product of the brain.
One leading researcher believes that dreams are much more exciting than all of that. Dr Stephen LaBerge says they are an underused adventure playground in which we can have the greatest fun imaginable, and bring fantastic feelings of euphoria and self-empowerment into our waking lives. LaBerge advocates "lucid dreaming" — which occurs when you know you are dreaming. At that point, claims LaBerge, you can take control and change the dream — its setting, its characters, its plot, its denouement. Colours and sensations become incredibly vivid. You can acquire super-powers — fly, breathe underwater, walk through walls. You can discover Atlantis, win Wimbledon (yes, even you, Tim Henman), get tickets for Glastonbury and have sex with a supermodel.
Periodically, LaBerge runs lucid-dreaming workshops on the east coast of Hawaii's Big Island. It's an inspired choice of location: this 50th American state, this weird paradise of pumice and papaya, ruled over in legend by the volcano goddess Pele, is itself the stuff of dreams.
It is Saturday morning, and LaBerge is giving a lecture to a class of 16 rapt dream students on the second storey of a big wooden hut at the Kalani Oceanside Retreat. As a ceiling fan whirrs overhead and a brief shower slaps the huge leaves of the coconut palms outside, he tells us about bedtime anarchy. Rules, you see, don't apply in dreams: you can float to the ceiling as easily as walking. In fact, if you ever find yourself flagrantly disobeying the rules of gravity, it's a sure sign that you're dreaming. If you find yourself walking down the street with no clothes on, bingo! You're probably dreaming — at least you hope you are.
This is just the first of many long sessions in which the 56-year-old scientist outlines the secrets of dream lucidity. Beside him constantly is Keelin, a 53-year-old female Californian dreamer who is the super-serene "facilitator" of this course, adding her own observations and keeping the show under control. LaBerge and Keelin are, effectively, the Richard and Judy of lucid dreaming, though the quick-fire, wisecracking LaBerge mixes the unpredictable gestures of Richard Madeley with the facial contortions of the late Hughie Green.
LaBerge is more than happy to call himself an "oneironaut" — from the Greek oneiros, meaning "dream", and nautes, "sailor". And as a charismatic Californian pusher of alternative life skills, with a bestselling book to his name (Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, co-written by the author Howard Rheingold), LaBerge ticks all the boxes for "new-age guru". But check his credentials.
He studied at Stanford University in California, where he began rigorous research into lucid dreaming in the late 1970s, obtaining a PhD in psychophysiology. By using eye signals in the depths of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, he proved that lucid dreaming is a genuine, scientifically observable human state. Thanks to Dr Stephen LaBerge, you can no longer lump it with astrology, tea leaves and fork-bending.
"Dreamsigns", says LaBerge, are a key to lucid dreaming; clues that potentially reveal we are not in ordinary waking life. As his book puts it, "When people realize they are dreaming, it is often because they reflect on unusual or bizarre occurrences in their dreams." Your dreamsign could be that 8ft tax inspector with the fangs, the appearance of a long-dead relative, or the fact that everyone is talking in Serbo-Croat. One of the students, Philippe Lewis, 32, who hosts "love parties" in San Francisco — "They're underground dance parties, except that they're more open; people can explore relationships" — has already spotted an extremely distinctive clue in his dreams. He catches himself... ahem, self-fellating. "It's like, wow! Suddenly I'm really flexible. And now, because it's happened a number of times, I'm trying to identify that as a dreamsign. It's a strange one — some people see pink cats, and I'll see that."
But you don't have to rely on dreamsigns alone to become lucid. Several of the students are tossing and turning at night wearing a device called the NovaDreamer, which is LaBerge's invention. It fits round your head like an ordinary sleep mask, but has built-in photoelectric sensors. When these recognise the flickering of your eyes in REM sleep — the best state for lucid dreaming — two red-light-emitting diodes in the mask start winking at you. If you're having a dream, which you don't know is a dream, and the little red lights suddenly appear in it, Bob's your uncle. The NovaDreamer, explains LaBerge, is a mass-market development from various prototypes he created in his sleep laboratory at Stanford. "It was an attempt at making the most inexpensive device that actually worked." You need to be a dedicated dreamer to own one, though: you have to pay about £450 for the privilege of frightening your spouse in the middle of the night. But it's a relatively small price for these students, who have already stumped up $2,000 to come to the retreat.
From the moment you realise you're dreaming, the "world", such as it is, is supposed to be your oyster. You can script your own adventure, solve problems, or dress-rehearse a tricky future real-life event "such as an oral exam, a dance routine, a meeting with an influential business associate, a surgical procedure, or a difficult discussion with a loved one", as LaBerge's dream bible has it. You can overcome fears by confronting your object of terror in a dream, and banish nightmares. If scary monsters are running towards you, try "embracing them with a loving heart", LaBerge lectures us, and they will be pacified.
If it's fun they're after, dreamers often plump for one activity in particular. "Flying is one of the things that most occurs to people when they become lucid," explains Jennifer Dumpert, 38, a computer consultant and Jane Fonda lookalike from San Francisco, who has had "phases of lucidity" in her dreaming life. "Often I think, 'Great! I can fly.' I once had a lucid dream there and took off over Manhattan. I went over Central Park, which had all these lakes in it, and there was a bright moon, which was reflecting in all these lakes. It was beautiful. I did a dream flight also over 19th-century London, which was remarkable — all these old grey roofs, and it was winter time."
Lynette Christensen, 40, a married woman who works at a hot-tub shop in Montana, says she's often whizzing through the air: "Sometimes I fly like Superman; sometimes I fly standing straight up; sometimes I spin while I fly. Sometimes I have on clothes; sometimes I'm naked. In one of my lucid dreams I actually flew to the stars. I've also flown with my cats, Sparkey, Abbey and Mike. My cats feature a lot. In one of my funniest dreams, my cats were running a cat dating service and I was their office manager."
Shortly before coming to Hawaii, Philippe Lewis also lucidly defied gravity, getting on top of a police car and using it as an airborne surfboard. "I decided, 'Okay, I'm going to have fun with this.' I decided to accelerate. But I didn't want to do this by myself, so I summoned this girl I'd met a few weeks before. She jumped towards me and tried to catch my hands, but she fell down. I said, 'Oh well, she's just a dream character, so it doesn't matter.'"
