Stephen LaBerge

“Your experience is a dream; so is my experience. This stuff about how the frontal cortex is repressed during dreaming, lucid dreaming presents an obvious contradiction to it. The only difference is sensory input.”

“Not all lucid dreams are useful but they all have a sense of wonder about them. If you must sleep through a third of your life, why should you sleep through your dreams, too?”

“What is consciousness? Our brain simulates reality. So, our everyday experiences are a form of dreaming, which is to say, they are mental models, simulations, not the things they appear to be.”

“You just don't get funding to go out and find God. Even if you did, you'd have to first define what you mean by 'God.'”

“I have high-tech tastes. If I had $100 million, I would spend it on research equipment rather than a yacht.”

“From early childhood, I was interested in understanding how the world worked, and assumed I would be some kind of physical scientist or chemist. But the truth was, I didn't know there was another kind of world, the inner world, that was just as interesting, if not more relevant, than what was going on in the outside world.”

“In most of our dreams, our inner eye of reflection is shut and we sleep within our sleep. The exception takes place when we seem to awake within our dreams, without disturbing or ending the dream state, and learn to recognize that we are dreaming while the dream is still happening.”

“We dream every night, all the time.”

“In the dream state, the only essential difference from waking is the relative absence of sensory input, which makes dreaming a special case of perception without sensory input.”

“Lucid dreaming lets you make use of the dream state that comes to you every night to have a stimulating reality.”

“Dreams look real, but they're in your mind, so you realize that the physical world is also a construction, which shows that the mind can affect reality in more ways than you can imagine.”

“The fact that both ego and self say "I" is a source of confusion and misidentification. The well-informed ego says truly, "I am what I know myself to be." The self says merely, "I am.”

“Some people have vivid imagination, some not so vivid, but everybody has vivid dreams.”

“The consciousness of lucid dreaming is a cultural evolution. It's something that we are talking about and learning about, not biological evolution.”

“It is certainly important to be looking for cures to medical disorders, but it is equally important to conduct research on human health and well-being.”

“Lucid dreaming has considerable potential for promoting personal growth and self-development, enhancing self-confidence, improving mental and physical health, facilitating creative problem solving and helping you to progress on the path to self-mastery.”

“Although the events we appear to perceive in dreams are illusory, our feelings in response to dream content are real. Indeed, most of the events we experience in dreams are real; when we experience feelings, say, anxiety or ecstasy, in dreams, we really do feel anxious or ecstatic at the time.”

“We don't teach our children how to dream.”

“I'd say that we dream primarily the same way that we have consciousness of the world for the same reason. Basically, that our brains evolve to simulate reality and to control what's happening around us.”

“Dream research is a wonderful field. All you do is sleep for a living.”