Extract from

Interview with Celia Green, Author of the
1968 Classic, Lucid Dreams

CELIA GREEN and JAYNE GACKENBACH

Institute of Psychophysical Research, Oxford, England;

Athabasca University and University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Gackenbach: Have lucid dreams or any of these types of experiences been impor-tant to you in your own life cycle? If so how?

Green: I never had any metachoric-type experiences until I actually started study-ing lucid dreams. Then I occasionally had lucid dreams. I would not say they were terribly important to me, but they were certainly interesting. At least in my own case I think of lucid dreams as quite different from ordinary ones, both in perceptual clar-ity and in emotional tone. I have sometimes met people who have OBEs and who have told me mental techniques for trying to induce them, but none of these ever worked for me. I certainly have an impression that individual differences have a much more determining role in influencing who is able to get OBEs, while lucid dreams could probably be induced by deliberate training in most people. Further-more, lucid dreams arise fairly spontaneously as soon as somebody knows about them. I think this is illustrated in the people who presently work with me at the Insti-tute. None of them, including myself, have ever had an OBE but about 50% of them have had lucid dreams although they did not before they started to study them. This has arisen without any very deliberate efforts being made, just as a result of people being exposed to the idea and perhaps thinking about lucid dreaming as they fell asleep.

Apart from my fairly small population of lucid dreams, I have never had meta-choric experiences and I tend to think of myself as a sort of person who would not be easily induced to have any kind of hallucination.