Thread: Lucid Dreaming: From D'Hervey, to Eeden, to Tholey

Frederik van Eeden can be analogously seen as the 'Buddha of modern lucid dreamers'. In his book Little Johannes, influenced by the ethics of Spinoza and sympathising with early socialism, a philosophical Eeden writes: 'Where mankind is, and her woe, there is my path.' The protagonist of his existentialistic story represents every person who grows up to face the harsh realities of life, going through a phase of hoping for a joyous hereafter, only to realise that it is only an empty dream, finally discovering meaning in the mitigation of suffering that surrounds him.

Eeden was concerned with the mental well-being of others as a psychiatrist, and did what he could to understand the human condition in order to find ways to improve it. In America, he contacted William James, who is regarded as the 'father' of American psychology. In Vienna, he met Sigmund Freud! He also familiarised himself with psychosomatic observations made by the likes of Gustav Fechner, whose psychophysics demonstrated how mind and body relate—coming up with the formula: S=K ln I, the foundation for the Weber-Fechner law.

It is not surprising, then, that Frederik van Eeden would discover lucid dreaming. If a man is in the habit of paying attention in waking life, eventually, he'll find himself paying attention in dreams. Indeed, he is credited with having coined the term 'lucid dream', but he was certainly not the first oneironaut to have distinguished and identified those dreams in which the dreamer is awake and aware of the situation.

Before Eeden, there was a Frenchman who stumbled upon such paradoxical sleep, one known as the Marquis D'Hervey de Saint-Denys, one of the earliest oneirologists who came to be known as the 'father' of modern lucid dreaming. At the dawn of adolescence, D'Hervey began to diligently record his dreams and described many instances of being aware of dreaming in his book Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them: Practical Observations. We can take valuable lessons from both men: Eeden was very observant and descriptive; D'Hervey was good with trials pertaining to dream control, testing the oneiric waters, as it were.

Another great oneironaut to be remembered, who emphasised the importance of questioning reality for every aspirant lucid dreamer, is Paul Tholey. This oneirologist inspired serious research on the behaviour of dream figures, which, as we have discovered, can be good with language and creativity but terrible with arithmetic. Because of Tholey, we learned that dream characters are surprisingly better at multiplication and division than addition and subtraction, despite the fact that they make terrible mathematicians—often being worse than primary school children!

Tholey's studies also concluded that dream characters can write and draw as instructed, and can even come up with words whose meaning is unknown to the lucid dreamer. Even more astounding is that these characters seem to have access to waking memory as well as memory of previous dreams! Reports from Tholey's subjects also revealed that dream people are capable of witty retorts and assert sentience when questioned on these matters—ostensibly lending some credit to theories that they are conscious or represent prototypes for multiple personality alter egos.

Based on the cognitive abilities demonstrated by dream characters, Paul Tholey concluded that they should be 'taken as seriously as if they had consciousness of their own'—something that Frederik van Eeden was already doing with his oneiric devils who exhibited a 'lower moral order' by mocking him and seemingly deriving pleasure from it.

Feel free to add more information about these three pioneering researchers of lucid dreaming and conduct your own experiments. I certainly won't be relying on dream characters to be my personal calculators!