What is lucid dreaming? Lucid dreaming is a semi-unconscious state between waking and dreaming. It’s an interesting combination of dream activity and the reflective awareness of someone fully awake. As the brain is so entirely unknown, there is not a lot of information and research on this phenomenon well. The mere concept of lucid dreaming brings into question a lot that is thought to be known about consciousness. Lucid dreaming suggests that consciousness is not exact and much more of a spectrum than would be initially thought. 

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) published a study about lucid dreaming in 2009. The goal of this study was to seek physiological evidence that correlates to lucid dreaming. Their working hypothesis was, “…the brain must change state if the mind changes state.” They measured the electromyographic (the rate of electrical activity/ neurons firing as nerves are stimulated) activity in waking with eyes closed, lucid dreaming, and REM (desynchronized and low brain activity with rapid eye movements) sleep. They found that the similarities between the electromyographic activity between lucid dreaming and waking was more noticeable than between lucid dreaming and REM sleep. They came to the conclusion that their findings on power suggested that lucidity occurs in a hybrid state with some features of REM sleep, and some of waking.
They also experimented with ways to try to induce lucid dreaming. Their two methods were; introducing slight stimuli to try to stir the subject just out of REM sleep but not into waking, and making the subjects convince themselves that they are able to control their dreams right before going to sleep. Introducing stimuli would usually just wake the subject up, whereas having them convince themselves had a much larger success rate. They checked for lucidity in subjects by asking them to make a very specific eye movement once dreaming. 

Lucid dreaming is usually thought to arise from REM sleep dreaming, and that it was a part of REM sleep, but their results suggest that lucid dreaming is more of a hybrid state. In order to go from non-lucid REM sleep dreaming to lucid REM sleep dreaming, there has to be a shift in brain direction towards waking. The brain-mind-state is never consistent, instead it’s dynamic and constantly changing. Dreaming likely has far more subregions, like cardinal states, instead of dreaming just strictly being REM and non-REM sleep.