Inward Bound

Like many people, I do not dream well. I suffer from bouts of insomnia and, when I can fall asleep, I have a stubborn inability to remember my dreams. I suspect that they are witty and dangerous, like those that are forever being recounted by the well-rested people around me, but I do not know for sure. ''To sleep: perchance to dream,'' Hamlet famously sighed. But if you don't dream, sleep is a boring affair -- and so, some would argue, is life.

Fortunately, there is now a tourist retreat for those, like me, who wish to connect more deeply with their nocturnal visions. While other travelers may choose to visit cathedrals or scale mountains, tourists on this getaway mostly lie on their backs and dream. What could be more exotic, after all, than the inner chambers of your own psyche?

One evening this past March, at the Kalani eco-resort on the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, I gathered with 15 other hopeful dreamers for a nine-day vacation. The trip was arranged by an organization in Palo Alto called the Lucidity Institute, which promotes the use of dream research for ''the enhancement of human health and well-being.'' In a traditional Hawaiian room with a high ceiling of wooden beams and windows opening onto thickets of papaya trees, we sat in a circle as a tropical storm erupted outside. Along with the smell of rotting jungle flowers, there was a gentle quirkiness in the air, an atmosphere that you would imagine accompanied demonstrations of mesmerism in the drawing rooms of 18th-century Vienna.

Before us stood our guide, Stephen LaBerge, a dream scientist who conducted research in the psychology department at Stanford for more than 20 years. A slender and rather boyish man in his 50's, dressed in baggy shorts, an aloha shirt and flip-flops, he bounced around the room as he spoke. ''Some of you are in for a treat,'' he said. ''You are about to enter a magic realm, the ultimate human freedom!'' LaBerge was here to teach us how to achieve a ''lucid dream'' -- the rare sort of dream in which you become aware that you are dreaming and are sometimes able to guide or manipulate the events that occur. During a lucid dream it is possible for the dreamer (or ''oneironaut,'' as LaBerge puts it) to think reasonably clearly, remember the conditions of waking life and act voluntarily, all while remaining soundly, restfully asleep.

Flying is one popular activity in lucid dreams. Sex is another.

As a clue to the nature of consciousness, lucid dreaming is an important, if minor, natural phenomenon. LaBerge devoted his early career in the 70's to the scientific investigation of it. But academic knowledge is not all. As the founder of the Lucidity Institute, LaBerge has become equally dedicated to acquiring (and, for a fee, imparting) practical insights about how to dream more skillfully and more often. He explained to our group what he sees as the possible therapeutic benefits of lucid dreaming, which range from the concrete to the New Age: overcoming the fear of nightmares; increasing your creativity; assuaging grief for the death of a loved one; bridging the gap between dreams and waking life. I was slightly disappointed that he did not mention what one Web site that discusses lucid dreaming describes as enjoying ''peak sexual experiences in complete safety.''

Our vacation would be organized around specialized sleep schedules and stimulating group outings to beautiful, dreamlike locales on the island. LaBerge would instruct us throughout the week in various techniques to help us take control of a dream -- for instance, inducing a tactile experience each time we realized we were dreaming, like rubbing our hands together or spinning our bodies. We were also given capsules of a nutritional supplement called galantamine. Derived from the common snowdrop flower, galantamine has been shown to stimulate a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, which is thought to heighten cognitive faculties, including those responsible for dreaming.

Finally, each participant was given a NovaDreamer, an electronic sleep mask that LaBerge and an engineer created in the 90's. Worn by a sleeping subject, it uses special sensors to detect the rapid eye movement, or REM, that marks the onset of dreaming. As soon as you begin to dream, the NovaDreamer shines a thin beam of red light onto your eyelid. A red light then appears in your dream. If correctly calibrated, the light will manage to jolt you into awareness without actually waking you up, thereby bringing about lucidity. The mask also features a button, the Reality Check, that activates a blinking light. If you are not sure whether you are awake or asleep, you try to press the button: if the light blinks, you are likely awake; if not, you are probably only dreaming that you pressed it and are still asleep.

As we prepared to go off to our rooms for our first night of sleep, NovaDreamers and galantamine in hand, LaBerge gave us a canny wink. ''Think of me as Hermes guiding you into the Underworld!'' he said. ''May you be lucid tonight!''

Accounts of lucid dreaming go back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Tibetan monks have long trained themselves to enter their dreams consciously, treating dream life as continuous with waking life. In the West, lucid dreaming was first explored systematically by the 19th-century aristocrat Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, whose book ''Dreams and How to Guide Them'' was published in 1867. The marquis conducted numerous dream experiments on himself, including one in which he had different women of his acquaintance wear different perfumes; when the various perfumes were sprinkled in succession on his pillow before bed each night, he dreamed of each woman in turn.

The actual term ''lucid dream'' was coined in 1913 by the Dutch writer Frederik van Eeden in his work ''A Study of Dreams.'' Van Eeden observed about 500 of his own dreams, which he divided into nine basic types. The ''most interesting and worthy of the most careful observation and study,'' he wrote, were lucid dreams. He reported that he experienced and chronicled 352 examples of lucid dreams between 1898 and 1912.

Nonetheless, for many years critics doubted that the dreaming brain was capable of lucidity, arguing that such episodes were more like a trance or hallucination. Either way, there was no hard proof. But in the late 1970's, LaBerge, who was working toward a Ph.D. in psychophysiology at Stanford, helped to change that. Existing sleep studies had already established that some eye movements during REM sleep turned out to correspond to the reported direction of a dreamer's gaze. (For example, a subject might wake and recount a dream in which he was looking up in the sky; this would square with upward-looking eye movements registered during his REM sleep.) So LaBerge and his fellow researchers simply asked lucid dreamers to carry out certain eye movements in their dreams when they became lucid. Sure enough, the prearranged eye movement appeared during REM, suggesting that the subjects had indeed been lucid and able to control their actions during their dreams.

LaBerge used this strategy in a series of subsequent studies that demonstrated other correlations between the dreamer's subjective reports of his dream behavior and his recorded physiology. As he has written,

LaBerge and his fellow researchers have found, for instance, ''that time intervals estimated in lucid dreams are very close to actual clock time; that dreamed breathing corresponds to actual respiration; that dreamed movements result in corresponding patterns of muscle twitching; and that dreamed sexual activity is associated with physiological responses very similar to those that accompany actual sexual activity.''

Inspired by LaBerge's scientific credentials, I repaired to my room, which was in one of the resort's airy Hawaiian lodges, and put on my NovaDreamer. It was only 10:30 p.m., but the resort was silent; the rain softened, and I could hear the frogs shrill. I lay down and set the NovaDreamer to its weakest setting. Almost at once, I was asleep -- or I thought I was. In the total darkness of the NovaDreamer it was difficult to say, though I did have a vivid image in my mind of the spiders clinging to the webs that were slung across my paneless window.

At 7 a.m. I awoke to the sound of the wailing conch that called all dreamers to the collective lanai, or veranda, for breakfast. I found that I had slept beautifully but that I had not, in fact, dreamed (or at least had not recalled my dreams). On the lanai I found a lone Englishman and fellow dreamer named John, a laconic Internet millionaire who, like the rest of the members of the group, had paid $2,000 (not including air fare to Hawaii) for the trip. He was sipping his coffee and watching little birds flit around his scrambled curried tofu. Additional dream tourists joined us: Philippe, a Canadian circus artist with the experimental Mystic Family Circus in San Francisco, and Leo, a soft-spoken ex-soldier from Tennessee who said that he was on a global odyssey to rediscover himself after a nearly fatal motorbike accident. Others in our band were more circumspect. Anna, a middle-aged marriage counselor from Rome, looked strangely out of place amid the foliage with her platinum curls and wary glances. Sitting down with us, she admitted that she, like me, was having trouble dreaming. ''Tonight, however, . . . '' she said, tapping her eyes to indicate a NovaDreamer.

The basic pattern of our days and nights was soon established. After breakfast, LaBerge would lecture on the subject of cognition and consciousness, and we would discuss our dreams. Later we would disperse for the afternoon according to our whims or band together for a hike to the nearby Kilauea volcano. In the evenings, we gathered for another lecture that featured memory games to condition us to recognize ''dreamsigns'' -- preset clues that are designed to remind us in our dreams that we are not in waking life. The memory games were followed by screenings of dreamlike films that were supposed to show us, at an intellectual level, the fragility of our perceptual sense of reality -- movies like Luis Buñuel's ''That Obscure Object of Desire'' or David Cronenberg's ''Existenz.'' These were mixed with playful cognition games familiar to children, like making a point in your visual sphere disappear in your blind spot, the ''hole'' in our visual construction of the world created by a gap in the retina where the optic nerve passes through.

''So you see,'' LaBerge explained, ''there is no experiential difference between what we see in our blind spots and what we see elsewhere.'' Similarly, in Buñuel's famous film, few notice that the heroine is played by two different actresses -- we expect one character, so we see one character. ''This illustrates the role of expectation in our experience,'' he said, ''waking or dreaming.''

In the latter half of this century, behavioral psychologists and other scientists often dismissed the significance of dreams. The Nobel Laureate Francis Crick famously declared that dreams were little more than the rubbish of the mind being cleared out for the night. Dreams, in this view, are just the brain's white noise as it reorders itself during sleep -- a pseudo-profound illusion of meaningfulness.

But LaBerge, like Freud before him, cannot accept this. Where Freud, however, thought of the unconscious as seething with repressed energies -- and of dreams as messages generated by those energies -- LaBerge says he thinks dreams may play a less combative role in our psyche. ''I think that the dreaming brain,'' he says, ''is doing something very simple. Namely, exactly what it does whenever it is working: constructing a model of the world.'' He adds that dreams may play a critical and continuing role in the evolution of human culture by expanding the range and variability of our stock of ideas. ''Darwinian evolution,'' he has written, ''requires a variable population, a selective pressure and a means of reproduction of successful variations.'' It is possible that dreaming offers us a broad assortment of new ways of seeing and acting, some of which are adaptive in the changing environment. Thus, like useful genetic mutations, they are passed along to successive generations as part of our cultural evolution.

At some level, LaBerge argues, dreams will always remain difficult to elucidate because, though they are physical phenomena, they are important to us as mental experiences and sensations. ''The dream body,'' he says, ''is sensual but unphysical. It's also primeval. Curiously, we don't dream about writing, for example, because it's a relatively recent skill we've acquired; but we frequently dream about overcoming difficulty or danger because that's a human experience that goes back thousands of years.'' LaBerge is not concerned by the prospect that psychology or evolutionary science may never elucidate the significance of dreams. Even if dreams are some sort of biological side product or accident, he argues, they are still experiences. For us, dreams are narratives, which gives them emotional power, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they are often cryptic or puzzling.

''Dreams may not be messages,'' he says, ''but they are our own most intimately personal creations. As such, they are unmistakably colored by who and what we are, and could become.''

As the days passed, my fellow dreamers and I found ourselves dreaming consistently, and our dreams were more intense than usual. Some of us were having lucid dreams; others (like me) were not. Every morning, LaBerge would ask us the same questions: ''Is everyone awake? Are you sure?'' My dreams were becoming more vivid and noticeably long, with a sometimes sinister tone. I wondered if, in the event of a nightmare, I'd be capable of turning it around, spinning my dream body, or rubbing my dream hands, until I gained control.

My morning routine was to wander down to the black lava cliffs and swim in the ocean, mulling over the dreams I had the night before. Wandering through the jungle afterward, I couldn't help noting how dreamlike the landscape was, with its tunnels of papaya trees and ghostly palm groves, and how within me waking and sleeping life seemed to be merging together day by day.

On our last night of vacation, LaBerge took us to a collection of sulfuric hot pools near the sea. Wreathed in steam, the class bobbed about under the moon. Afterward, a few of us drove to a mostly abandoned village nearby, buried by a lava flow a few years earlier. We sat outside at a driftwood cafe that served only kava, a drink made from a mildly intoxicating root. That night, high on kava, I fell asleep.

During the night I woke and saw that the resort was bathed in milky moonlight. A few yoga types were doing exercises in the nude. I threw a towel round me and walked down to the swimming pool. The water looked extraordinarily silvery, and in a corner of the pool was Anna, my fellow dream tourist, swimming quietly by herself in a rubber bathing cap. We greeted and commented on how neither of us could sleep. We were sorry to be going; the trip had proved a curiously gentle experience. As I slipped into the water, we talked confidentially.

''I'm going back to Rome,'' she said, ''to sort out other people's problems, but I haven't sorted out my own.''

''Do you think we're awake now?'' I asked abruptly.

As I swam around her, I noticed that her body had become young and slim and that her hair had grown inordinately long, floating around her like kelp. I'm dreaming, I thought, and I reached up to touch the Reality Check button on my NovaDreamer. Nothing: I was definitely dreaming. It was a shame, I thought, marveling at Anna's newfound form, but what did I expect? In reality, she was sound asleep in her room -- as indeed was I.

Life, they say, imitates art, but perhaps life also imitates dreams. In one conversation with my fellow dream tourists, someone said that life itself was just a very effective lucid dream technique. It seemed like a banal statement at the time, but on my way back home, as I passed through Honolulu airport, I spied Anna all alone in the airport bookstore, staring into space. It was strange, for I felt as if we really had met and spoken in the pool the night before. So I left her there without saying hello, and vowed to take control the next time I had a dream.