Dear Diane,

Yes, good to hear from you again. And good to hear that the story is moving forward. I’ll see what I can do to help you out with these questions.

1.  I am not sure about whether a person in a lucid dream could annihilate him/herself, or his/her ego or his/her focus of perception at the time. I am not aware of many individuals who have tried this. I am aware of people who have tested the extreme limits of lucid dreaming in various ways, e.g., attaining cosmic consciousness or attempting to mutilate oneself. My observation about these kinds of personal experiments is that dreaming cannot easily be pushed to such extremes, that it requires sustained effort and resolve and that awakening from the state is the end result more frequently than not. Especially clear (and I believe this is what I had intended to communicate in the first place) is that it is quite difficult to voluntarily induce realistic feelings of pain in a lucid dream. Flying is quite possible during lucid dreaming, although most people report that there are often limits to how high, far, or fast they can travel. Many get embroiled in overhead wires, some sporadically lose their weightless feeling (and end up bounding along as if on the moon), some wake up when the sensations are too intense, etc.

2.  If dreaming was equivalent to REM sleep and not at all to NREM sleep, it would be easy to estimate that we dream about the same amount of time we are in REM sleep (and forget about NREM sleep). However, people sometimes don’t recall dreaming after REM sleep and they sometimes also recall dreams and other mentation from NREM sleep. In 2000, I published some normative data for 111 healthy, non-medicated adults (55 men, 56 women, average age 36.4 yrs) who slept in the sleep laboratory for a total of 127 nights. On average they spent 75% of their sleep time in NREM sleep and 25% of their time in REM sleep. For a typical 8-hr night, then, this means that people spend 6 hrs in NREM and 2 hrs in REM. In a separate review of 35 different studies of dream recall from REM and NREM sleep awakenings I found that on average subjects recalled mentation from REM sleep awakenings 82% of the time and from NREM awakenings 43% of the time. By combining these two sets of figures we can estimate, for the 8-hour night, that recall occurs for NREM on 43% of the 6 hours (or 2.58 hrs/night) and on 82% of the 2 hours (or 1.64 hrs/night). The estimate of dream recall for the entire 8-hr night is therefore 2.58+1.64 or 4.22 hrs/night. Rounded off, this means that based upon a sort of meta-analysis of many subjects, that recall of some kind of sleep mentation (including dreaming and ‘sleep thinking’) can occur a bit more than half the time under the favorable condition of being awakened from a specific sleep stage in the laboratory.

3.  Although I will have a better estimate of spontaneous dream recall soon (based upon 20,000 reports) but one previous study I am aware of found that in the U.S. the average person remembers a dream about every 2-3 days.

4.  Aha! You must have picked up the Newsweek Aug 9 issue! I just read that myself. I’m not sure where that conclusion about Prozac comes from but it might well be true. I seem to recall Roseanne Armitage once publishing on that question. I would have to check….

I hope that this helps. Best regards,

Tore

Please let me know when you expect the story to appear if you don’t mind. Thanks.

Date: / Sun, 08 Aug 2004 14:40:38 +0800
From: / "Diane Peters" <>Add to Address Book
To: / "Tore Nielsen" <>
Subject: / Re: media interview for Readers Digest Canada

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Hi Dr. Neilsen. If you recall, we spoke a few months ago for a story

I'm

doing for Readers Digest on dreams. I have a few follow up questions

for

my second draft. Hoping you can answer some or all of them!

-I've read in a story about a study you did that lucid dreamers can't

kill themselves. Is that true? Any other limits to lucid dreaming?

-How often and how much do we dream. I've read it's about 2 hours a

night

-How many of our dreams do we remember?

-I just read that people on Prozac dream much less, as much as half as

much, as others. True?

Thanks so much for all your help on this story.

Diane

tel: 416/516-0942

fax: 416/516-8973

email: