[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: And today, a story about facing—how would you put it? Facing ...

ROBERT: Your bogeyman, I'd say.

JAD: Yeah. [laughs]

ROBERT: But in this case, like, literally.

JAD: Meh, not so ...

ROBERT: Almost.

JAD: Almost. And it comes to us from—Matt, you ready?

MATT KIELTY: Yeah.

JAD: From reporter Matthew Kielty.

MATT: Steve.

STEVE VOLK: Yes.

JAD: And another guy.

MATT: How you doing?

STEVE VOLK: I've never been better.

MATT: [laughs]

JAD: So Matt, I don't know exactly how we're gonna start this story.

MATT: Sure.

JAD: But maybe just introduce us to this guy.

MATT: So, this guy is Steve Volk. He's a reporter.

STEVE VOLK: A city reporter here in Philadelphia. I write about courts, crime, politics.

MATT: But the thing that I read was a personal story of Steve's. Story starts with Steve in his early 20s. And one night, he goes to sleep.

STEVE VOLK: Right. So I have this dream where I wake up in my apartment. There's nobody there but me, and I'm just sort of pacing around the room. And I feel that sort of—that kind of tremor or buzz, almost, that something bad's about to happen.

MATT: That—that feeling when, like, the wall's kinda close in on you a little bit.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

STEVE VOLK: I could just feel that something's about to happen. And I look over at the window, and there's this face.

MATT: Outside his window.

STEVE VOLK: This man.

MATT: Just hovering there.

STEVE VOLK: And then he sort of recedes back into the dark and comes back again. And so it sort of bobbed up to where I could see it and then recede back into the distance. And it was very, very threatening.

JAD: Yeah.

STEVE VOLK: I don't know what's happening. I just think that this—this person's trying to scare me, intimidate me

MATT: So he waits there for a minute. And a moment later, Steve hears this knock.

JAD: Uh oh.

MATT: At his front door. He knows immediately it's this guy.

STEVE VOLK: And so I start hollering, using every expletive I know. You know, "You're gonna—you're gonna scare me?" I start daring him to come in so I can kill him. And I have this rage that, you know, I don't—I don't know that I've ever really felt in real life. So much rage that it made me feel sick.

MATT: He's just screaming at the door, over and over.

STEVE VOLK: "Come in here so I can kill you." I was really violent.

MATT: And then all of a sudden, this guy just kicks open the door.

STEVE VOLK: And we fly at each other. We're both swinging and grabbing each other.

MATT: And then ...

STEVE VOLK: I wake up. Literally with my fist—you know, my hand balled up into a fist, and I've just thrown a punch at the air.

MATT: And he's—and he's in just an absolute panic.

STEVE VOLK: Very, very profoundly disturbing dream.

JAD: But it's just a dream.

MATT: Yep. But the thing about this dream is that it wouldn't go away.

JAD: Meaning?

MATT: Like any time there was any sort of anxiety that flared up in his life: work deadline, relationship, family troubles.

STEVE VOLK: Back again!

MATT: And every time, the same thing.

STEVE VOLK: This face that comes up out of the dark

MATT: The face, the window, the door, the fight.

STEVE VOLK: You know, I wanted it to go away.

MATT: And so this is something—this persisted for how long?

STEVE VOLK: I would say I had this dream at least six times a year for about 20 years.

JAD: 20 years?

MATT: 20 years.

JAD: So he must have had it, like ...

MATT: Hundreds of times.

STEVE VOLK: So yeah, I—it was a dream that I wanted to be done with. And I wasn't sure how to be done with it. But ...

MATT: A couple years ago, Steve starts working on this book basically looking at things that are kind of out there on the edge of science. But he's looking at them in this objective, investigative way. And one of the things that he ends up bumping into is ...

STEVE VOLK: Lucid dreaming.

MATT: ... lucid dreaming.

JAD: Lucid dreaming. So this is where you, like, wake up inside your dream. Like, you're awake.

MATT: You're—yeah, you're awake, you're present, you're aware, you can control what's happening in your dream.

JAD: Let me just ask you, really? I mean, I've seen Inception. I've heard people say that they have lucid dreams, but I just always assumed those people just don't know what they're talking about. They—they're actually referring to something else.

MATT: Yeah, it seems crazy. And for a long time ...

STEVE VOLK: Western science denied lucid dreaming happened.

JAD: Yeah.

STEVE VOLK: It didn't exist.

MATT: But the more Steve looked into it, he realized that, like, the science behind this is real.

JAD: It is?

MATT: Yeah. So ...

JAD: Sell me.

MATT: ... we're gonna start with this guy, Steven Laberge.

JAD: Steven Laberge.

MATT: So in the late '70s, Laberge goes to Stanford. He wants to study consciousness. The reason he does is because he's actually—he's grown up his entire life claiming to have lucid dreams.

JAD: He claims he's been controlling his dreams all his life.

MATT: Yeah.

JAD: Yeah.

MATT: But at the same time, he's also a scientist.

STEVE VOLK: So he had to find a way to show people objectively that lucid dreaming exists.

JAD: Wait, hold up. How would you even go about doing that? Because if—because if it's a dream, it's only in your head, so how can you prove something that's only in your head?

MATT: So that—that actually takes us back to Laberge's advisor.

STEVE VOLK: A guy named William Dement.

MATT: William C. Dement.

STEVE VOLK: Dement has ...

MATT: He's conducting all of these sleep studies at the Stanford Sleep Science Center, and one of the things he notices is when people go into this dream state, their eyes behind their eyelids, they begin to just ...

STEVE VOLK: Dart around like crazy. They go diagonally, sideways.

MATT: Basically, what we know as REM. Or ...

STEVE VOLK: Rapid eye movement.

JAD: Right.

MATT: But one day, Dement has this subject, and as he's watching this guy. And this guy's eyes, when he goes into REM, out of nowhere, his eyes go from craziness to this, like, really slow, controlled pattern: left to right, left to right, left to right. And Dement ...

STEVE VOLK: Was so intrigued that he immediately went and woke them up and said, "Do you remember what you were dreaming?" And they said, "Yeah, I was watching a ping pong match."

MATT: [laughs]

STEVE VOLK: Ba dum bump! Right? I mean, it sounds like a joke. But ...

MATT: But for Laberge, this is like a total revelation. I mean, think about it. If you are in a dream and you, like, wave your hands around, or you shout, you're not moving or anything—on the—in the real world. But if you move your eyes in a dream, someone sitting out there in the real world will actually see your eyes move. They'll see that. It's like this little hidden line that you can use to call out from the dream world to the awake world.

STEVE VOLK: And so Steven Laberge figures, "Okay, what I'm gonna do then is have somebody monitor me while I sleep, and once I'm dreaming and become aware that I'm dreaming, I will issue two smooth, controlled eye movements."

MATT: In other words, "I'm gonna go to sleep, and when I become lucid in my dream, I'm gonna move my eyes left, right, left, right. And then you, out here in the real world, you'll see my eyes actually move left, right, left, right. And that way you'll know that I am lucid in my dream."

JAD: Huh.

MATT: Controlling what's going on.

JAD: That's pretty cool.

MATT: So Laberge gets all hooked up to the machines and his assistant sits there, watching his eyes go all crazy. And then ...

STEVE VOLK: Suddenly, instead of herky jerky movement ...

MATT: ... His assistant sees ...

STEVE VOLK: ...Smooth, controlled movements.

MATT: Left, right, left, right, left, right.

JAD: The same pattern they'd agreed on.

MATT: The exact same pattern.

JAD: And they were sure that Laberge was deep asleep during this pattern making?

MATT: Yeah, yeah. They were watching—they were watching on the EEG machines that he was in a deep sleep when he made that pattern signal.

JAD: So he was conscious while he was unconscious, is what you're saying?

MATT: Correct. He was lucid.

JAD: Okay. And he was able to repeat this?

MATT: Yeah, he went on and ended up replicating this with a lot of other people.

JAD: He published it?

MATT: Yeah, he published it.

JAD: Like, in a journal, not like just on the web.

MATT: Yeah.

JAD: Wow.

STEVE VOLK: And you won't find—at this stage, you won't really find credible dream researchers denying the reality of lucid dreaming.

MATT: So ...

STEVE VOLK: You will find them ignoring it routinely.

MATT: ... Steve gets in touch with Laberge, who, it turns out, is doing these workshops now teaching people how to have lucid dreams.

JAD: How to have lucid dreams?

MATT: On command.

JAD: This is something you can learn?

MATT: You can learn how to do this, yeah.

STEVE VOLK: Laberge has discovered a lot of different techniques for this.

MATT: He's got techniques.

JAD: What are the techniques?

MATT: So first of all, to become lucid in a dream, you have to realize in the dream that you're dreaming.

JAD: Yes.

MATT: Which is kind of, like how do you ...

JAD: How do you do that in a dream?

MATT: Well, you actually—what you do is, you practice in the waking world. You become, like, hyper-aware of certain things that work differently in the dream world than they do in the waking world.

JAD: Like what?

STEVE VOLK: One of the most easy for people to follow is print.

MATT: Like text. When you're awake, text is text. But text in a dream ...

STEVE VOLK: Changes really dramatically.

MATT: From moment to moment.

STEVE VOLK: Right now, there's a Viewsonic monitor across from me, and when I look away from it and look back, it still says Viewsonic. However, in a dream, when you look away from it, because it has no external reality, when you look back, it could be anything. It could be nuclear launch codes. It could be poetry.

MATT: The point of all this is to zero in on things that make you question.

STEVE VOLK: Am I awake, or am I dreaming?

MATT: It's called a state test.

STEVE VOLK: And what ends up happening, if you start doing this in real life, is you end up being in a dream, and because you've asked yourself this question a dozen times that day, "Am I awake or am I dreaming?" That thought will occur to you in the dream.

JAD: And if it does?

MATT: That might—that might open the door to actually becoming aware.

JAD: Huh.

MATT: And taking control.

STEVE VOLK: Then you are more than halfway there at that point.

MATT: So Steve, he started trying all this out, doing all these state tests. But it wasn't really working, so he ended up calling Laberge's assistant.

STEVE VOLK: And I called her, and we talked through different techniques in the book. And then we talked about this nightmare.

MATT: And when she heard about his nightmare, she actually suggested a different technique.

STEVE VOLK: In waking life, imagine the dream as it happened, and then find the point at which you would like to gain lucidity. Something happens, something shifts, and this is the point where you'd like to become lucid.

MATT: And he decided when the face first appears in the window ...

STEVE VOLK: That's the moment.

MATT: ... that very specific moment ...

STEVE VOLK: ... when I want to gain awareness. And so I would imagine myself doing this over and over.

MATT: Face, awareness. Face, awareness. And then one night he goes to sleep.

STEVE VOLK: I'm walking through my apartment. Nobody there but me. And I feel that sort of familiar buzz of anticipation.

MATT: Something bad's about to happen.

STEVE VOLK: And I look into the window, and there's the guy.

MATT: Just like usual. But this time, he says ...

STEVE VOLK: I was there.

MATT: You're there, and then suddenly you're there?

STEVE VOLK: Yeah. It's like my perspective shifts and I am in this body in this place, not observing something, but in it. So I could feel, you know, my fingers tickling my palms. I could feel my feet on the floor. I locked into these feelings, because they make the dream more stable. And I wanted this dream to be stable, because this face has been showing up in this window for 20 years. And it—it does its thing. It recedes, it comes back. And I go to the door, and I reach for the door, and the handle—there's a door handle—it feels that real. And I turn it and I open it. A moment or two later, the guy appears in the doorway. And there's this moment where we look at each other face to face. And he's this total nondescript guy.

JAD: Really?

STEVE VOLK: Like any old beer-drinking dude. So he looks at me, and he's clearly perplexed because we're not going through our usual dance. You know, I kind of backed up to give him room.

MATT: Guy walks in.

STEVE VOLK: And we're standing there looking at each other. And the—I hadn't thought about what I would actually say. I just—I just thought I'd let him in.

JAD: What does the guy do?

STEVE VOLK: Well, he pulls out a gun. At this point, when he pulls this gun out, the whole dream in this moment now becomes for me a kind of battle between what I know to be true, which is that this is a dream and it has no external reality, and the natural feelings of fear that crop up when somebody who's already been terrorizing you for 20 years has now pulled out a gun. And he is really carefully looking at me, like, waiting for me to go back to my normal reaction.

STEVE VOLK: So he pulls the gun up now and points it at me, looking at me like, "Okay, now are you gonna do what you usually do? Now are you afraid?" And in my head, I'm just like, "It's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream." And so I just stand there. And he starts firing.

[gunshots]

STEVE VOLK: My first reaction is to look down at myself, right? To look at my chest and my stomach. And I can see that my shirt ...

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK: ... is just sort of billowing with each impact.

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK: With each bullet.

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK: But there's—there's no blood, there's no nothing. I'm not—I'm not hurting. I am taking this, and it's—and it's nothing. I really feel, and I had this thought at the time, "I'm real."

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK: I am Superman! This guy is firing bullets at me.

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK: And nothing. I look up at him and he sort of looks at me, and then he smiles and drops the gun by his side. And the sensation I had was like that message was like, "See? You got it! You got it! I'm nothing to be afraid of at all." And I woke up still feeling like—you know, still feeling like Superman. And I have never had that dream. It's never happened again.

MATT: It's gone.

STEVE VOLK: It's gone. The dream is gone.

[gunshot]

[gunshot]

JAD: Wow. Thank you, Matt.

MATT: Hey, sure.

JAD: And thanks also to Steve Volk, his book, which goes into much more detail on lucid dreaming and many other things, is called Fringe-ology.

ROBERT: This puts me in mind of a solution to a problem I've had now for several years, you know?

JAD: Like me beating up on you in your dreams?

ROBERT: I should have just waited it out, really. I should have just said, "Yeah, go ahead, stab me!"

JAD: See, now I'll never hurt you again!

ROBERT: I mean, this is something that everybody can take home and use tonight.

JAD: All right. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: G'day, guys. I'm Sean Fitzgerald, a Radiolab podcaster from Victoria in Australia. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. So good! I love that science. Thanks, guys.]

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