Can You Know You Are Dreaming?

Many people think lucid dreaming is a rare gift.

Many people believe that knowing you are dreaming, while the dream is still going on, is a gift for a few special people. They picture monks who have trained for years, or people in films with strange powers. Everyone else, the belief says, simply sleeps and dreams and never knows the difference until morning.

That is not how it is. Many ordinary people have had at least one lucid dream, often without having a name for it. Some had it as children and forgot. And it is not only something people say about themselves. In sleep laboratories, volunteers have agreed on a signal before going to sleep, a set pattern of eye movements, left and right and left again. Later, while the instruments showed that they were clearly in REM sleep, the signal appeared on the recording. The body lay still, the dream went on, and the eyes sent a message out of it, like a lamp blinking from a ship in fog to someone waiting on the shore.

My brother did not need a laboratory. He came down to the kitchen one morning in late autumn and said it had happened to him.

My brother woke up knowing he had been dreaming.

It was a Sunday, and I had the day off, which on my calendar is rare enough to circle. I was standing at the stove, turning slices of bread in a pan, when he came down the stairs two at a time. His hair was flattened on one side. He was holding his phone, but he was not looking at it.

"I knew," he said. "In the dream. I knew it was a dream."

I turned the gas down. Since the stormy night a few weeks before, he had asked me twice whether a person could go back into a dream and change it. I had told him what I had read, that some people learn to notice they are dreaming, and that nobody can promise it. He had nodded and gone back to his drums. I had not expected him to try. I had certainly not expected it to work.

He sat at the table and told me the whole thing, slowly, the way you tell the route of a long journey so you do not lose a single change of train.

The workshop clock had no numbers on its face.

In the dream he was standing in the workshop at the back of the house. It was clean, the way we had left it after the storm, with the floor swept and the bench wiped. Afternoon light came in through the window. Our grandmother was sitting at the bench with a bicycle wheel upright in the stand, turning it with one finger and watching the rim for wobbles, the way she always did.

He said the first strange thing was the big clock on the wall. It was ticking, but it had no numbers on its face. There were hands, and they moved, but they moved over a plain white circle. He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at the radio on the shelf, and the dial had no stations marked on it either, only a clean line with nothing along it.

"And I just thought, this is a dream," he said. "Not scared. Just, oh. I'm dreaming. Like when you wake up on a bus and you know which stop it is before you see the sign."

What he did next is the part I keep returning to. He did not try to fly or change the room. He remembered the night of the storm and the grey dust, and he noticed that there was no dust now. So he walked over to the bench and stood beside her.

"I know this is a dream," he told her.

She kept turning the wheel. "Then hold the spoke key properly," she said, and handed it to him.

He laughed in the dream, and he laughed again telling me. He said he took the key and tightened one spoke, a quarter turn, the way she had taught him when he was ten. He wanted to ask her something important, but he could not find the words, and while he searched for them the room began to thin. He said it was like a radio drifting off its station, the voice still there but fainter, with a hiss rising behind it. Then he was in his own bed, with the real morning on the ceiling.

"I didn't get to ask her anything," he said. "But I was there. I mean, I knew I was there."

Sleep laboratories have watched dreamers signal with their eyes.

While the bread went cold, I reminded him of the laboratories I had told him about in early summer. During REM sleep most of the body's muscles are held still, so we do not act out our dreams. The eyes are an exception. They move under the closed lids, which is how this kind of sleep got its name. So the volunteers used their eyes as a signal, the only lever in the engine room that still answered.

What the recordings showed was simple and surprising. The sleepers were not awake and pretending. They were deep in dream sleep, and still some part of them knew it and kept the promise they had made before the lights went out. A lucid dream is not a special gift from outside. It is one of the things a sleeping mind can do, now and then.

I liked that the experiments needed so little machinery: a few wires on the skin, a quiet room, a person willing to fall asleep among strangers, and an agreement made before the journey began, the way travelers agree on a meeting point in case they lose each other in a crowded station.

I also told him what it is not. Knowing you are dreaming does not mean you can steer every part of the dream. It does not turn the people in it into real visitors. The grandmother at the bench was built by his own sleeping mind from what he remembered: her finger on the rim, the spoke key, her dry voice. That did not make her less dear to him. It made her his.

He thought about that and nodded. "So it was my version of her," he said. "Fine. My version is pretty good."

Something to Try Tonight

This is a small thing, and it is meant to be calm, not a contest. Nobody needs a lucid dream. But if you are curious, you can leave a door open for one.

During the day, a few times, stop for a moment and ask yourself quietly whether you are dreaming. Then check: read a short line of writing, look away, and read it again. In waking life the words stay the same. In dreams, writing and clock faces often change or blur, the way the clock in my brother's dream had no numbers. Tonight, when you are lying in bed with the light off, picture a place you love, slowly, one detail at a time. Tell yourself once, softly, that you would like to notice if you are dreaming there. Then let the thought go and breathe out longer than you breathe in. Do not lie awake trying. Sleep comes first. If no lucid dream comes, you have still ended the day in a place you love.

My brother's friend asked whether she could choose a dream.

That afternoon my brother's friend from the band came over to practice. She was sitting on the back step, tapping a rhythm on her knees with two pencils, when he told her about the dream. I was hanging washing on the line and heard most of it.

She has told me she remembers almost nothing of her father: the smell of his coat, and a tune he whistled while he drove. She stopped tapping. "Could I do that?" she asked. "Could I choose to dream about him, and know it?"

I came over with the empty basket and sat on the step below them. I told her the truth as well as I knew it. A lucid dream cannot be booked like a seat on a train. It may come, or it may not, and nobody can choose who will be in it. And if he did come, he would be made from what she carried: the coat, the song, the stories her mother had told. That might not be much. But she had whistled that tune so often herself that its every turn was sharp in her memory, and the dreaming mind builds with whatever it has.

She looked at the pencils in her hands for a long time. "The coat would be enough," she said.

Tonight's Story

That evening, with the friend still at the table finishing her soup, I told them the story I had been saving. It comes from the same old book as the talking skull of the rainy spring night, the Zhuangzi. The teacher's personal name was Zhuang Zhou, and this passage uses it. At the end of the book's second chapter there is a passage only a few lines long, and it may be the most famous dream ever written down.

Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed that he was a butterfly. He fluttered here and there, a butterfly through and through, happy with himself and doing just as he pleased. He did not know that he was Zhuang Zhou.

Then, all at once, he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakable, Zhuang Zhou.

But he did not know whether he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming of being Zhuang Zhou. There must be some difference between them, the passage says. And it gives that difference a name: the changing of things.

A little earlier in the same chapter there is another passage about dreams. Someone who dreams of drinking wine may wake and weep in the morning, it says, and someone who dreams of weeping may wake and go out hunting. While we dream, we do not know that we are dreaming. Sometimes we even try to read a dream inside the dream. Only after we wake do we know it was a dream.

The old question turns gently in both directions.

My brother's friend put her spoon down. "So which one was real? The man or the butterfly?"

"The story doesn't say," I said. "I think that's the point. It leaves the question open, like a door on a warm night."

Then I told them how I had come to read it that year. When my brother stood at the bench with the spoke key in his hand, our grandmother was there, turning the wheel. In that room, at that moment, she was as solid as Zhuang Zhou on waking. Then the room thinned, and he woke, and she was gone. Which was the true picture, the workshop with her in it, or the kitchen without her?

I do not think the old book wants us to choose. A ferry crosses between two shores, and both shores are real, even if you can only stand on one at a time. In the dream, she lives; in the morning, she has died. Both of those are true in their own place. Grief is partly learning to travel between them without losing your ticket.

And there is one more turn to the question, the one I liked best. While we dream of the people we have lost, they move and speak in us. When we wake, we carry them out into the day, in the way we hold a spoke key or a pencil or a song. Perhaps the living are the ones who keep dreaming the dead, gently, so that something of them goes on changing with us.

Waking up is also a kind of arrival.

I know the moment of waking better than most people, because of the bakery. I wake at three in the dark and arrive in the day before the day has arrived. For a few seconds I am nowhere in particular, between stations, the radio dial between two voices.

Since that Sunday I have paid attention to those seconds. Sometimes a dream is still in the room with me, thin as steam on a window. I do not hurry it away now. I let it stand there while I find the floor with my feet, and then I go and turn the oven on.

Our grandmother loved the arrival of a night ferry, when the engines changed their note and everyone on deck turned toward the harbor lights at the same moment. Waking is like that for me now, a change in the engine's note before I know which harbor this is.

The friend came back the next weekend with a coat.

She came to practice again the following Saturday. She was wearing a coat I had never seen, dark wool, much too big in the shoulders, the sleeves rolled twice. It had been her father's, she said. Her mother had kept it in a cupboard all these years, and the friend had asked for it.

She did not say whether she had dreamed of him. I did not ask. Some things are for the person who carries them.

The two of them went into the workshop to look at a broken metronome my brother had found on our grandmother's top shelf, behind a box of radio valves. I heard them talking, then the small sound of a screwdriver, then nothing for a while.

Then the metronome began to tick, uneven at first, then steady, like a train finding its rhythm on the rails.

"Keep it," my brother said. "Our grandmother never liked a machine that just sat on a shelf."