STEPHEN LABERGE APPEARS SUDDENLY, slipping out from behind a partition at the back of the room, like the Wizard of Oz emerging from behind the curtain. “So the first big question we face,” he announces without preamble, “is what is this reality?”

It’s opening night of a workshop called Dreaming and Awakening, which LaBerge leads at the Kalani Oceanside Retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii. LaBerge, who is 66 years old, is the main attraction—the reason we’re all here. He’s the founding father of the science of lucid dreaming.

Kalani sunrise

If you’ve ever been aware that you are dreaming, but remained asleep, you’ve experienced a lucid dream. Some people claim to have had one at least once, if only briefly—usually just before waking up. With enough practice, say proponents like LaBerge, lucid dreamers can rescript their nightly narratives as they please. According to one recent study, the newly initiated most often use lucid dreams to satisfy sexual appetite or aeronautic fancy. The more experienced, though, claim to be able to create art or acquire skills in their dreams. It is not uncommon to hear testimonials stating that lucid dreaming “changed my life.”

LaBerge says one can choose to become lucid within a dream. Indeed, LaBerge claims to be an uncommonly prodigious lucid dreamer himself, having catalogued thousands of his own lucid dreams. He says it’s a skill that can be cultivated. That’s what two dozen or so paying customers, myself included, have come to Hawaii to learn.

“Are the fans too loud?” LaBerge asks. “We can lower them if you can’t hear.” A warm breeze billows LaBerge’s aloha shirt, printed with ferns in psychedelic swirls. He’s barefoot, and a shock of white hair accents his weary blue eyes. LaBerge believes that lucid dreaming isn’t just some quirk of consciousness—it’s a gateway to a broader theory of the conscious mind. So he’s really waiting for an answer. What is reality? Anyone?

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THE VERY EXISTENCE OF LUCID DREAMS has been widely debated. According to prevailing theory, areas of the brain that generate self-reflection and govern rational thought throttle down as dreams start up. As our slumber deepens, we lose our short-term memory and self-awareness and, as a consequence, can’t spot the non sequiturs that fill our dreams, or even locate the actual position of our bodies. Only in the cold light of day, when executive functions come back online, do we realize how outlandish our dream plots are.

Lucid dreamers, by contrast, claim to be able to regain a host of daytime cognitive faculties while still dreaming. With enough practice, say proponents, people can redirect their dreams, and by so doing, at least according to LaBerge, transform their real-life narratives as well.

When sleep scientists turned to the study of dreams in the 1950s, few considered the notion of lucid dreaming to be more than a curiosity. It was the province of occultists and parapsychologists. Not until LaBerge produced the first evidence for lucid dreams, during graduate work at Stanford University in the 1970s, did the topic gain a modicum of scientific respectability.

His pioneering work was barely acknowledged in the decades that followed, but a new generation of dream researchers is now revisiting those early experiments with renewed respect and greater interest. A handful, some of whom trained under LaBerge and have adopted his methods, are discovering how lucid dreams function, what they can be used for, and why they may be scientifically significant. The study of lucid dreaming has broken out of the scientific fringe and is being taken seriously. And yet LaBerge is running retreats in Hawaii. Lucid dreaming is undergoing a resurgence, and it’s happening without the man who started it all.

The workshops, organized through LaBerge’s Lucidity Institute of Palo Alto, began in 1995 on the Stanford campus and later moved to Hawaii. For around $2,500, you get eight days of lectures in the sun. The secluded Kalani retreat appears to be a haven for unconventional tourism. Nudists splash in the clothing-optional pool. On Sundays, dreadlocked bohemians frolic at “hippie church” dances.

The lucid dreamers—LaBerge calls them “oneironauts,” a neologism of his that means “explorers of the dream world”—fit right in, peppering their conversations with invocations of energy fields and alternative realities, as well as unabashed references to spirits, ghosts, and flying saucers. “Years of interest in dreams, religious mysticism, reality, and related subjects all came together to provide a truly life-changing experience for me,” wrote one attendee, in a testimonial for the Lucidity Institute’s brochure.

LaBerge says the workshops are a necessity because the institute serves as his primary source of research funding. Academic research grants dried up years ago. The workshops are the principle means by which LaBerge collects data for his studies: Attendees are experimental subjects as well as students. And LaBerge has attracted a significant following. His 1991 work, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, is in print and still selling. Movies like The Matrix and Inception have reportedly helped spread the word about lucid dreaming. There’s also now a Reddit subgroup devoted to lucid dreams that has almost 100,000 members.

Unfortunately, the arrangement alienates academic colleagues. LaBerge operates on “the fringe of the scientific community,” says Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard University and the past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. “I wouldn’t say it’s incompatible,” she says, noting that he remains one of the foremost authorities on lucid dreaming. “His research is taken seriously in main sleep research circles, mostly, but with the sort of edgy-fringy controversial quality.”

I talked to some of the retreat attendees, and most weren’t there as volunteers for a research project. They were looking for much more. Rachel, a lawyer, was enticed by “the possibility of changing my biology—brain hacking. Maybe I can make myself a genius.” Others talked about using lucid dreaming to find their “higher self.”

A 35-year-old software developer from Colorado Springs named Matt Winzenried says he came to Hawaii to find the meaning of life. About four years ago, he told me, he fell into a deep funk. He felt stifled by an overbearing boss and lackluster job. One night, while lying in bed, he heard a scuffling noise. As it drew closer, he reached under his bed for a gun but found nothing. Then something clambered up the nightstand, and Winzenried saw a furry blue creature gnashing its teeth. “That’s when I realized I was dreaming,” he says.

Unexpectedly, the insight put him at ease. He felt a wave of “total acceptance and tranquility.” Winzenried was able to take control of his dream, grab the monster, and in one deep, long breath, inhale all but the creature’s skin deep into his own lungs. “There was nothing left except cloth,” he says. He awoke feeling “ready to tackle the world.”

Winzenried says that first lucid dream turned his life around. He enrolled in a personal development workshop. He got promoted. He began taking lessons in hockey and art. He started a small business. He joined Toastmasters to confront his debilitating shyness and soon became club president. “I was loving the way things were going,” Winzenried says. “But I wondered, is it leading somewhere? What’s my purpose?” LaBerge’s retreat, with its goal of directing waking and dreaming consciousness “toward fulfillment of personal goals,” promised an answer.

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LABERGE DOESN’T WANT TO BE a New Age icon. “I always wanted to be a scientist,” he insists. When he founded the institute, he says, “it wasn’t for doing deep psychotherapy.”

He was born—or, rather, arrived “from beyond the stars,” as he likes to put it—in 1947. As a child growing up in Florida, he was captivated by movie serials. One morning, he awoke from a dream in which he had imagined himself as a pirate. The dream was “particularly fun,” he recalled, but he was still disappointed. Unlike one of his adventure matinees, he couldn’t return the next night to the same dream to catch the next plot twist. Or could he? The next night, and the night after that, young Stephen somehow returned to the dream and was able to advance the plot. It would be decades before he understood what this meant.

In 1976 LaBerge was 29 years old, living in Palo Alto, and working at a pharmaceutical company, having abandoned graduate studies in chemical physics at Stanford. He later told an interviewer that he spent that period looking for “the holy grail of hippiedom.” In other words, he was exploring the basis of consciousness with the help of psychedelic drugs. That fall he spotted a book at the Palo Alto Public Library with an intriguing title: Lucid Dreams. The author, Celia Green, was the founding director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research, which concerned itself mainly with extrasensory perception and other parapsychological phenomena.

Green described the long history of self-experimentation into lucid dreaming, which began in the early-19th century, when French orientalist Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denys began looking into his own dreams. As a teenager, he noticed himself “developing a faculty,” as he put it, of becoming aware that he was dreaming while still in the dream. He published an anonymous account, Dreams and the Means to Direct Them, in 1867.

Thirty years later, Dutch psychiatrist Frederik Willem van Eeden collected some 352 dreams involving “reintegration of the psychic functions,” such as access to waking memory and volition. He called them “lucid dreams,” derived from the psychiatric term “lucid interval,” meaning a moment of clarity amid madness. The response was harsh; Havelock Ellis, the British physician and psychologist, said of these dreams, “I do not believe that such a thing is really possible.”

After reading Green’s book, LaBerge had several dramatic lucid dreams, which convinced him to resume graduate studies at Stanford, this time in the nascent interdisciplinary field of psychophysiology. There, LaBerge won approval to conduct his dissertation research on lucid dreaming. Though, at the time, the scientific community was not so sure this was an area worthy of study.

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FOR THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY, scientists believed that the sleeping brain was completely at rest. But in 1953, Nathaniel Kleitman, a University of Chicago physiologist, detected eye movements in sleeping subjects, and showed that the movements correlated with subjective reports of dreaming. He had made the field’s most significant discovery to date: the identification of rapid eye movement sleep, or REM, as the time when most vivid dreams occur.

A few years later, William Dement, a doctoral student of Kleitman’s, observed that these eye movements were not always random. Subjects’ eyes moved up and down while they dreamed of shooting baskets, or shifted side to side while they dreamed of, in one case, watching people throw tomatoes at each other. Dement’s findings, criticized at the time, were later borne out. In 1970, at Stanford, he opened the first sleep lab anywhere. A few years later, LaBerge asked to Dement to be his doctoral adviser. Dement took an immediate liking to the young man. “What I can say without any ambiguity whatsoever,” recalls Dement, now one of the nation’s leading sleep scientists, “is that I was excited by his proposal. I supported it enthusiastically and financially, and I’ve been a fan of his ever since.”

It was Dement’s dream scanning hypothesis—looking around in a dream corresponds with actual physical eye movements—that gave LaBerge a pivotal idea: maybe people could use eye movements to communicate from within a dream. Before subjects went to sleep, he could instruct them to signal their lucidity by shifting their gaze in a prearranged pattern in the dream. If successful, the pattern would appear as a distinctive pattern in the electrical signals recorded from the subject’s eyes, muscles, and brain. To those in the lab, the message would be clear: the subject had awakened inside a dream.