A NightLight experiment

Link to the NightLight experiment: http://www.lucidity.com/NL42.1001Nights.html (Scroll down to number 8 for this text)

Quote:

For this study, people were simply to note the times when they awakened *
in the night, and whether they had just awakened from a dream or a lucid *
dream. This was part of the effort to discover the relationship between *
lucid dreaming and biological clock cycles.

Sixty-four people contributed, making a data set of thousands of *
awakenings. In 79 percent, people had just had a dream. Ninety awakening *
were from lucid dreams (7.6 percent), meaning that about ten percent of *
dreams remembered were lucid. That is a very high number! It seems that *
simply sleeping with the intention to be aware of what is going on *
during the night, whether one is awake or asleep, is enough to stimulate *
lucid dreams for many people. Almost 60 percent of the participants had *
at least one lucid dream during the week in which they were collecting *
times of awakening.

As for the times, lucid dreams happened on average later in the night *
than non-lucid dreams, and non-lucid dreams happened later on average *
than awakenings with no dreams recalled. This corresponds to previous *
work demonstrating that lucid dreaming probability increases with time *
of night. In fact, 90 percent all of the lucid dreams in this study *
occurred after 4 hours of sleep, and fully one half after 6.5 hours of *
sleep.

This is a very important finding. It clearly implies that, if we assume *
that lucid dream induction techniques are most effective when applied *
closest in time to the time when we hope to have a lucid dream, it would *
be best to focus our efforts as close to the optimal time for lucid *
dreaming as possible. The \"Back to the Nap\" experiment also indicated *
that wakefulness and induction exercises work better when practiced at *
6.5 hours into a sleep period than at the beginning of the night.[/b]

I found this very interesting, yet I've never seen it posted on DV before. Basically what it's saying is that trying to be aware during the night and remembering to do something (write down the time) increases your chances of becoming lucid. I've actually discovered this myself when I was trying to wake up to do a WILD. I found that my lucid experiences drastically increased whenever I set my alarm or had a clear intent to wake up at a designated time.

What a surprise, it just broke my 6-month dry spell last night. I knew it was good for somethin.

Still, one wonders about the data. People who know what the term 'Lucid' means know that it is better to have a Lucid dream than a non-lucid dream. Toward the end of a sleep session, when it looks like no lucid dream occurred, what harm is there in saying that one had a lucid dream. As you said, the study DID indicate an almost unbelieveable rate of Lucidity. It seems similar to the Masters and Johnson Sex interviews from a few decades ago where eventually it became very suspect that people were lying about their sex lives (NO! Who would ever lie about sex?)

The only way to know for sure that a person has a Lucid Dream if for that person to give an actual pre-arranged signal with encoded eye movements; for instance, two flicks up, two flicks down, two flicks left, two flicks right. That would verify an actual Lucid Dream. But just asking people who want to glorify themselves in the Mantle of Lucidity is to simply beg for heaps of false data.