Of all my memories of that summer in Peru—drinking pisco in the desert, finding a mummified baby, unwrapping it under less than scientifically optimal conditions— the one that stands out most is the memory of my first lucid dream. At 9 o’clock, I climbed into the bottom bunk and curled up in my sleeping bag, worn out from physical exertion and the monotony of digging. I set my alarm for 5 am and drifted off almost immediately, my body too tired to let my mind wander down its usual anxiety-laden paths.
And then, the scene changed. It was a summer afternoon—not the Andean summer, with its thin warmth and cloudy nights, but a real summer, the kind of heat so extravagant you jump in the water and dry off in the sun. I soaked up the warmth I’d been craving, treading water in some bucolic pool I’d never seen before. I don’t particularly like swimming in real life; I don’t like exercising in any form without the distraction of podcasts or Pandora. But this was different—effortless and sensual. I had a heightened awareness of every part of my body, the physicality of the cool water and the bright air and a surreal forest enclosing the pool in magnificent foliage. I woke up euphoric.
The memory had none of the haziness that usually clouds dreams, and the details remain perfectly crisp years later. But I wasn’t just elated; the whole thing was also vaguely disturbing. I hadn’t been in my sleeping bag in a dusty dormitory in Peru—I had been transported to some faraway place, and I preferred it there. My jaunt in the pool had shaken my sense of what was real, and I couldn’t explain it without sounding crazy. All I knew was that I wanted to do it again.
I spent the rest of the summer practicing tips from a secondhand copy of Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. I repeated LaBerge’s mantra ad nauseam: “Tonight, I will have a lucid dream.” I made up mantras of my own: “Tonight, I will fly to the moon.”
No one had done more to advance lucid dreaming than Stephen LaBerge. He is to lucid dreaming what Louis Pasteur is to pasteurization, Thomas Edison to electricity. In spite of his discoveries, LaBerge failed to attract much attention from the scientific establishment. Lucid dreaming didn’t seem likely to cure cancer, after all; it was thought of as weird, nonessential, if it was thought of at all. Instead of devoting himself to research, he had to find a way to make money. He set up a private company called the Lucidity Institute and began writing primers on lucid dreaming—like the one I found in Peru.
I learned to recognize the signs that I was dreaming, like finding myself flying or meeting dead people. Every couple of hours, I would do what LaBerge called a reality test, asking myself if I was awake or asleep—a trick that, once ingrained, LaBerge promised would trigger lucidity. I’d had lucid dreams on occasion, but couldn’t predict when they would come; I got lazy about my reality tests, and I didn’t always make time to meditate. Sleep was precious; waking myself up in the middle of the night was out of the question.
Yet the more I learned about the power of lucid dreaming, the more I wanted to be able to induce lucid dreams on a consistent basis. I wanted to learn from Stephen LaBerge himself.
On a hot, humid day in September, I flew into Hawaii’s tiny Hilo airport to find a bleary-eyed group already gathering. My fellow lucid dream enthusiasts had picked one another out without too much trouble; they were the ones milling around sheepishly, looking a little rumpled, a little apprehensive, not quite sure what they had signed up for. I joined them and we waited for the shuttle, exhausting the browsing potential of the kitschy gift shop with its cheap leis and turquoise hoodies, swapping names and dreaming résumés.
The whole district of Puna has a history as a magnet for seekers and searchers, a respite for pilgrims fleeing the pressures of modern life. Hippie co-ops and intentional communities are dotted across the area. So-called Punatics wander the black-sand beaches in dreadlocks and ratty clothes and loiter in the hot springs, smoking.
Natalie showed me to my room, a simple dormitory-like space with hokey pastoral paintings on the walls, a few pieces of wicker furniture, and little else. The primary source of light was a single bare bulb on the why-we-dream ceiling, but the electricity was out that night. I stumbled around with the tiny flashlight on my key ring and passed out.
When I drew back the flimsy curtains in the morning, I took in the scene properly for the first time. From my window, I could see luscious palm trees and tall tropical grasses misted over by a layer of fresh dew. My first thought was that the landscape resembled a desktop background come to life.
In the morning, we convened in a bright, airy structure on top of a hill, one side opening directly onto the rainforest. Knotted scarves hung from the window frames, and a portrait of the volcano goddess Pele, painted in fiery primary colors, dominated one of the eight walls. (I have never found four-walled rooms particularly stifling, but this space had been designed, according to the promotional literature, to liberate visitors from “box-based architecture.”)
LaBerge's assistant, Kristen—a clinical psychologist and master lucid dreamer, with the pun-embossed T-shirts and upbeat mien of a camp counselor—regaled us with tales of her lucid adventures. Kristen taught herself to induce lucid dreams in college after she learned about the phenomenon in a psychology class. “I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a commonly known thing,” she said. “I was just so in awe.” She had since trained herself to become lucid as often as three times a week and could even meditate and practice yoga in the dream state. She was outlining our curriculum for the week when she was interrupted by a low-pitched masculine shout.
“What are we doing here?” bellowed a barefoot man in a baggy Hawaiian shirt and shorts, bright blue eyes peering out from beneath bushy white eyebrows. Stephen must have slipped in through the back door while Kristen was talking; I had missed his entrance. His voice swung theatrically; each question began as a rumble and ended as a squeal.
“What is this all about?” he demanded. “How do I know you’re people? Maybe you’re robots or aliens or dream figures. Does anybody think that it really might be a dream?”
This barrage of questions was a fitting introduction; Stephen would spend much of the coming week training us to pay closer attention to our surroundings, to scrutinize the details of our environment, to search for incongruities and stop assuming that we were awake. He greeted us one by one, mustering an impressive show of curiosity over each person’s individual path. At 69, he had devoted the better part of his life to lucid dreams, and it was “revivifying,” he said, “to be with people who find the topic intriguing.”