Hi there,

I joined the lucidity mailing list a couple of weeks ago and I already postet some personal details about me in the "Lucidity Institute Oneironaut Network - Europe"-folder, since I'm from Heidelberg (Germany). I'm working in Heidelberg on my Phd about lucid dreaming and motor learning. I studied sportscience and therefor I'm very interested in the possible applications of lucid dreaming in sport. Paul Tholey, a German pioneer in this research area, claimed that he learned to ride a skateboard by practice in his lucid dreams (He rode the skateboard even in the handstand). What I'm interested in, is in reports like this. Now, if anyone in this forum has some experience with lucid dreaming and its application for sport, I would be very glad to read them in this posting-area!

Thanks Daniel

Hi there,

I try to displace the discussion from the "art and lucid dreaming" section to this section "lucid dreaming and sport".

Owen - thanks for your dreamreports about the piano and other instruments. Those reports are great (I wish you made those precise observations with sport skills in your lucid dreams!). And also thanks for your skeptical comments. You are right, if lucid dream practice is not more effective than mental practice, why should any professional athlet try to learn lucid dreaming. But the answere is: we have no idea how effective lucid dream practice is. In my work, of course, I argue that lucid dream practice better than mental practice, because of the difference between imagery and lucid dream experience. Stephen described this difference in a very clear way: "Waking mental images are weak sensory impressions that resemble actual experience but are generally not as vivid. For example, imagine an apple in front of you. If you are like most people, you can sort of "see" the apple, its shape, color, and position on the table. You can imagine what it would smell like if you could pick it up an sniff it, and what it would taste like if you could bite into it. However, you are not likely to mistake it for a real apple- if you visualize an imaginary apple next to a real apple, you will know which one you can really eat. Dreams, however, are mental images of completely convincing vividness. While in a - dream you may pick up and eat a dream apple and be absolutely certain that you are really eating an apple. If you become lucid, you have the power to realize that dream apples, despite their apparent reality, are not really real they do not fill your stomach. However, this realization does not diminish the vividness of the experience" (LaBerge, S. & Rheingold, H., 1990, 183'192). This difference mainly results because during dreaming more cortical areas are involved than during imagery and that your are cut off from external input. If we accept that mental practice enhances performance due to central neural processing we can conclude that lucid dream practice might have a greater impact on performance, because more cotical fields are involved in the neural process. But this is theory, to get an answere we have to investigate this issue and ask lucid dreamers to practice a specific motor skill in their dreams and record their performance in this skill before and after lucid dream practice, but thats not an easy experiment :-(. I want to come back to your interesting piano dreams. I had the impression that those experiences were not to pessimistic regarding lucid dream practice. In your first dream you described that you played the piano as if it were real, than you realized that their is a difference in the sound and you became skeptical about your play, I wonder, did you ever try to practice a piece on the piano in your lucid dreams for a longer time? I would be very interested in those results. Just take a piano play that your not able to play in your waking life and practice this piece repeatedly in your lucid dreams. After you feel competent to play this piece in your lucid dreams than try to play it in waking life and see how good you can play it! I think that this is the better way to test if lucid dream practice will enhance practice than the suggested blood test. I'm sure that the results of the blood group will be not better than chance, but the same would be true for imagined blood group with the difference that we know that mental practice enhances performance!

ups, thats a long text now... Daniel

Daniel,

I am happy to accept as a possibility that practice in lucid dreams might have some psychological benefit.

My feeling is that there is a major fundamental problem in explaining how lucid dream practice could improve waking skill through its effect on motor activity.

Let's think about golf, which I've played a number of times in NLDs. In my lucid dream I go to my golf pro and ask him to correct a fault with my swing that I have in the waking world. He changes my grip slightly, adjusts my stance and away I go with a bucket of lucid dream golf balls. Amazing: as I practice this new swing again and again, the balls land closer and closer to the flag in the distance. Given what we know about the movement of objects in the air in lucid dreams, do you think that this feedback I am getting from where the balls land is going to be of any use to me in the waking world. I don't think so. It is in the waking world, with waking world gravity and air resistance, that I need to practice.

You could design a golfing experiment to compare performance before and after lucid dream practice. Let's assume that you could separate out the motor aspects from the psychological aspects, and that you got a statistically significant result. I think then that you still have a major problem because as far as I can see there is no theory to explain the results. It is akin to evidence for ESP; yes there are low p values in card guessing experiments, but no TESTABLE theories to get you any further. I think that you need a good theory before you even begin to think about designing the experiments.

Owen

Daniel,

Your suggestion of a piano practice experiment could be feasible, but there needs to be good control so that performance before and after lucid dream practice could be assessed.

There are some technical problems. Obviously in the lucid dreams, I could not practice the piece reading from sheet music! The staves and written notes would be morphing all the time. I would have to learn the piece by heart, feasible, then play it as control, then do the lucid dream practice for say 10 lucid dreams and then play again for the assessment. I'd probably have to do another experiment with a piece of similar technical difficulty, and visualise myself playing it during the practice, rather than doing it in lucid dreams. And of course such experiments ideally should be repeated, and using many subjects.

Owen

Daniel,

A piano practice that might be more relevant to sport and easier to test, might be to try to improve the speed of a specific task such as doing a trill with two notes or some similar repeating technical exercise with say three notes.

This seems to be different from my pushbiking and golfing examples. I'm not sure why. I can envisage getting faster and faster at trills in an LD and this affecting my motor system and carrying over in the waking world. Is it that unlike the golf the task does not involve feedback from the lucid dream environment. What do you think?

Owen

Sunday, 21 December 2003

Dear Daniel and all

Although there are some lucid dreams with relation to the motor system, I can't find one relating to learning motor skills especially. But one thing I can say: Lucid dreams with flying or fast running had a very positive effect on how my muscles felt. Simply more harmonic, I guess.

One example stayed in my mind, although I didn't write it down in that time. It was last year in September, when I was in hospital with broken left arm and leg. In the first three days I was somewhat tied to the bed. I had a short lucid then in the middle of the night (frequent awakenings - three people snoring in my room... one of them might have been me). I was running high speed, very consciously moved my left arm, remembered in the dream, that it is broken in waking life. It felt very vivid, I was filled with energy. Then, after awakening in physical body, my left arm (and all the body) felt much better, much more "normal", as if I have actually been allowed to use the full range of movement for some time. But my physical arm (and leg) couldn't move due to being in cast.

This example - like some other lucid dreaming experiences - makes me confident, that LD motor practice does affect motor system, in some aspects at least very similar to training while physical awake. These aspects might relate more to the programming of movements, that relates to functions of the neocortex. I'm not sure, whether motor routines engraved to cerebellum might be accessible / morphable in LD, too. But a kind of kinesthetic sense is still there in LDs, so even this might work.

We know that muscles do move in REM phases, but in a minimal way. Experiments have been done using wrist muscles to signal lucidity. Muscles seem to be active at least partially in relation to movements in the dream.

In one thing we certainly agree: Lucid dreams can be very moving ;)

Tons of lucids to all

Ralf

Hi, Owen

Nice to see you here and have a talk on science. I'm always pleased to do that. So, you made a good point in my eyes saying that there may be no theory to supply explanations for motor learning in LD. But I guess the science of motor system and dreaming both have better theoretical foundations, than psi - research. We still don't know for sure, how psi-effects work.

But for the motor system we have - testable - theories en masse, I would say. We have anatomical structures and all this... Yet there still are many things to discover, and the practice of motor system (like I do it in osteopathy) still has surprising turns. Theories of how everything in the joints works (according to osteopathy) seemed to be carved in stone, but vanished within a wink...

For the dreaming thing, as for perception in general, I'm rather fond of the constructivistic stream of explanation, similar to what Stephen LaBerge et al write in "Varieties of Lucid Dreaming Experience" (The global workbench model)

Loosely said I guess, that dreaming a certain movement from the brain's "point of view" is the same as doing it while awake physically. And lucidity might add another quality to this process. Some say, that the task of dreams is learning and preparing for the physical waking everyday fight with "the tiger." Why should it exclude the motor thing? Would make no sense in my eyes from an evolutionary point of view. I'm sure Daniel could say more and into deep of theories in these fields of motor systems and dreams.

And then another point, now that the psi thing is on the table: I guess, psi research were non - existent today, if it weren't for some scientists and laymen having time and again over the last 120 years recorded the psi effects, in spite of having no good theory, how they work.

I think it is good, that scientists study phenomena, that currently have no explanation. That seems for me to be a good way to widen our knowledge of universe.

Into the light!

Ralf

Hi Owen,

thank you for your comments. I totally appreciate this discussion. Your a keen-witted person! I try to give some answeres...

To your first comment: You asked for a good theory about how I can explain the learning effects, the theory I use is from the area of mental practice and I think it is plausible also for lucid dream practice. Usually I refer to Herbert Heuer a well known sportpsychologist in Germany, but this article is published only in German, so I hope I can transport his main ideas. He differentiate the specific motor learning effects gaining from mental practice in two categories: cognitive effects and motor effects. (in most experiments about mental practice unspecific effects like motivation is good controlled, so he excludes those general psychological effects) The cognitive part of a movement is the part which you can practice on a cognitive level. For example if I describe a dance step in words like: stand in a shoulder-wide-stand than put your left foot in front, take it back and now put your right foot in front and take it back. You can read those instructions and immediately do this "dancestep" physically by yourself. Also you can practice this movement by learning the words or rather the sequence of the steps on a cognitive level (you don't have to do them). With time you will became an "expert" for this dancestep and do it very fast. It is not suprisingly that cognitive parts of a movement can be practiced by mental practice and this is well shown. What is interesting is that also motor parts of a movement can be enhanced by mental practice. For example to balance on a small seesaw is a task with high motor aspects (instructions like when you fall to the right then lean to the left are not very helpful to accomplish this task, in fact they are disturbing). But studies have shown that people can practice such tasks also mentally. This is possible because those movements have central nervous aspects, which are represented in the brain, and those central aspects can also be activated by mental imagery. The classical example is a study in which subjects had to execute a hand motor task either mentally or physically. At the same time the brain was scanned by PET. A sophisticated technology to identify active parts of the brain. The results showed that primary motor areas are active only in the physical condition not during imagery. But that supplementary parts of the central motor system are active in both conditions. This supplementary motor area is known as a part of the brain where movements are programmed (this area is also active during preperations of movements). So what you practice in mental pracitce are those central programming processes of a movement. The problem - and thats the main point of your first comment - is "exterenal" feedback!

to summerize: mentally executed movements are movements on a central nervous level, the difference is that our body limbs are not moving and that we do not get "external" feedback. And if you repetetivly execute a movement mentally you will get better with time, because you improve the central neural programming. That's the theory behind mental practice as well as for lucid dream practice. I posted in the last comment what I think the difference is between lucid dream practice and mental practice.

But back to the feedback problem. We do not have external feedback, but we have plenty of "internal" feedback, schemata of our everyday life, which will produce an internal-external feedback for us. And maybe thats the difference why you speculated that the speed practice for the keyboard task might be helpful whereas golf practice is not. Because the feedback depends more on external factors. The more complex the movement task is and the more open the environment is, the less effective might be mental or lucid dream practice. Thats a testable hypothesis!

Writing this comment I came up with a very nice experiment. Thanks Owen for your comment two and three!!! I will write more about this experiment when I implemented it...

Daniel

Hi Ralf,

thank you for your dream example. During injury and rehabilitation are exactely some areas where I think lucid dream practice might be very helpful, also for professional athelets. If they are injured they could practice their sport skills in lucid dreams and due to that practice might sustain their skills. Also those lucid dream movements might have a healing aspect emphasized by Ralf in his comment!

The experiments about the minimal activity of muscle activation (measured by EMG, electromyogram) during hand movements in lucid dreams underline my point from my last comment. We have central processing during dreamed movements which is very similar to real movements, but due to brainstem mechanisms the bodylimbs are inhibited: Again, doing a movement in a dream is like doing a movement in real with no execution of bodylimbs.

I see like Ralf differences between the PSI and the motor system examples and I would agree that we have much more well known theories about motor performance and mental practice than about PSI phenomena.

Daniel

Owen and Daniel

Sounds more promising for me, too, to test for tasks which we can easier quantify. But I'm not sure, whether training in LD increases muscle - power, I guess rather it won't. Like I understood you, tests must more likely include coordination. Owen, your thoughts about feedback with LD environment are interesting. Maybe one should exclude as many factors, as possible to design a clear experimental situation. I just think about jump roping. If you want to do it faster, you need a good coordination - at least in my experience ;) And then it resembles running very closely. OK, we have the problem, that a rope is maybe not "available" in lucid dreams. But at least we can run and imagine skipping.

So, number of successful jumps per minute could be a parameter. Number of participants / trials is always a problem in exploring lucid dreaming, Owen. Aren't there statistical means to overcome that? I've heard of statistical methods working with small samples.

But I think, maybe this is not the place to go into details about statistical methods. I want to say, that I have in the last days decided to work harder on having WILDs. This means especially working again on relaxation exercises and on crossing the abyss consciously. I'll keep you updated.

Hi, Daniel. Just see you are online.

I'll mail you privately on ASD questions.

Ralf

Daniel and Ralf,

Interesting discussion!

I see that previously I was focusing on the learning of tasks that depended on feedback.

Now I think I can see that some activities can be practiced profitably in lucid dreams.

Ralf lying in hospital, or someone who has suffered a stroke could benefit from carrying out practice of movements in lucid dreams.

I'm still standing by my feedback golf example though. In fact I suggest that practicing golf repeatedly in lucid dreams might actually damage performance in the waking world. OK, someone who has suffered from a stroke might get back their swing by practicing in LDs. But ironing out a golfing problem, where waking world feedback is needed, is altogether a different problem. You practice the wrong swing repeatedly in LDs and surely your waking world performance would decline?

Owen