How To Lucid Dream - Lucid Dreaming Induction Techniques

As a sleep medicine physician, I typically diagnose and treat very common sleep disorders like sleep apnea, insomnia, restless legs syndrome and narcolepsy. However, occasionally I am challenged by less common sleep problems. A few years ago, I was presented with a patient who had Nightmare Disorder. He had already seen a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who had tried the usual treatments like medications and Image Rehearsal Therapy (IRT) but nothing had worked. I explained to him that as a sleep medicine physician I was not specifically trained in this area, as it was usually managed by psychologists and psychiatrists. However, since he had no luck using traditional means, I promised him that I would look in the medical research to determine if there were any other options. To my surprise, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) had just published guidelines entitled "Best Practice Guide for the Treatment of Nightmare Disorder in Adults." I scoured these guidelines for a method that my patient and not tried, and was confronted by two words that I had not thought about for years: lucid dreaming. This brought me back to pleasant memories of high school and my personal experiments with lucid dreaming. I explained to my patient that lucid dreaming was an option, and that I would try to find a specialist in the area. Unfortunately, no such specialist (of any good quality) exists in our area, so I began an arduous process of researching and learning the techniques of lucid dreaming myself, so I could teach him. Much differently than my naive approach in high school, I have approached this task as any good physician/scientist would: I'm looking for scientifically verified evidence in the published literature. As you would expect, I first went back to the AASM guidelines, but they were not really a "how to" but rather just mentioned lucid dreaming as an option. Thus, I did a medical literature search and was disappointed to find very limited information. I was stuck. I then went back to my days in college when I was getting my Master's Degree in psychology, and realized that I was searching the wrong database. I need to look at the psychological literature, not necessarily the medical literature. There I found many more resources but still limited. However, as I dug deeper, I discovered a whole world of research that was not available through many of the typical journals. A whole group of vibrant and creative researchers emerged and I started gathering resources from various esoteric resources: old dissertations, German publications, lucid dreaming newsletters, textbooks, and the occasional peer-reviewed journal. I have now been working on this project for many months, and it dawned on me that I should share some of my findings on a blog. This blog will chronicle my findings in the area of lucid dreaming.