Lucid dreaming: associations with internal locus of control, need for cognition and creativity

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(99)00078-1Get rights and content

Abstract

A lucid dream is defined as occurring when an individual becomes aware that they are dreaming, and, while remaining asleep, can control some of the events or content of the dream. Frequent lucid dreamers have previously been shown to be more internal on Rotter’s Locus of Control (LOC) scale than are non-lucid dreamers. The present study found that frequent lucid dreamers (n=22) had higher scores than non-lucid dreamers (n=20) on the Internal dimension of Levenson’s LOC scale, but not on Levenson’s LOC Powerful Others and Chance dimensions. Frequent, and also occasional lucid dreamers (n=15), also scored significantly higher on Need for Cognition and on Gough’s self-assessed Creative Personality scale, than did non-lucid dreamers. The results indicate a continuity between styles of waking and dreaming cognition, just as previous work has shown a continuity of content.

Introduction

Lucid dreaming is defined as occurring when an individual becomes aware that they are dreaming while remaining asleep (Fenwick, Schatzman, Worsley, Adams, Stone & Baker, 1984). They can then consciously control some of the events or content of the dream. Snyder and Gackenbach (1988, p. 230) conclude that about 58% of the population have experienced a lucid dream once in their lifetime and that 21% report them once or more per month. Purcell, Mullington, Moffitt, Hoffmann and Pigeau (1986) show that self-reflectiveness, measured on a nine point scale, is significantly higher in dreams during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep than in other stages of sleep, and that 2.4% of REM dreams are lucid, which is the highest rating on their scale. Kahan (1994) found that in 2.3% of dreams the dreamer was aware that they were dreaming, and such awareness was significantly associated with, although dissociable from, conscious control of dream events. This paper addresses personality characteristics of individuals who report lucid dreaming. Blagrove and Tucker (1994) found that individuals who frequently have lucid dreams (that is, one or more lucid dreams per month, in accordance with the definition of frequent in Gackenbach, Heilman, Boyt & LaBerge, 1985) were significantly more internal on Rotter’s (1966) Locus of Control scale than were individuals who had never had a lucid dream, with infrequent lucid dreamers scoring mid-way between these groups. We wished to replicate this finding, but using an alternative measure of Locus of Control, that of Levenson (1981), because the single dimension of internal–external attribution on the Rotter scale is confounded by beliefs about whether the world is difficult, just, predictable, and politically responsive (Collins, 1974).

Levenson’s (1981) LOC scale differentiates internality (I), the belief in one’s own control over events and outcomes, from belief in powerful others (PO), and belief in chance (C). Unlike Rotter’s unidimensional scale, items that determine the I, P and C dimensions are phrased to be relevant to the individual’s experience, rather than their beliefs about people in general, and the dimensions have negligible correlations with social desirability. Levenson (1981) reviews findings that internality on Rotter’s scale correlates positively with I, and negatively with C, with the correlation with P being smaller; whereas P and C usually correlate significantly, they each have low correlations with I. Although there are differences between locus of control and active versus reactive engagement style (McKinney, 1981) and self-control (Palenzuela, 1988), internal LOC correlates positively with real life attempts to control the environment (Lefcourt, 1992, Rotter, 1966, pp. 19–21), such as information assimilation by patients, ability to use biofeedback, entrepreneurial activity, and helping behaviour (Levenson, 1981). Our prediction was thus, as in Blagrove and Tucker (1994), that frequent lucid dreamers would be more internal, but also, using the greater differentiation afforded by the Levenson scale, that the dimensions of belief in powerful others, or chance, would not have an association with lucid dreaming, which is concerned more with self-reflectiveness and active control.

As lucid dreaming involves a greater self-focused attention and is a cognitive skill that can be increased by attentional and mnemonic techniques learned when awake (Purcell et al., 1986), we hypothesised that it would be associated with high Need for Cognition (NFC). NFC is the intrinsic motivation to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive tasks, especially in contexts with minimal extrinsic incentives (Thompson, Chaiken & Hazlewood, 1993), and ‘represents individuals’ tendency to think about and elaborate on events in searching for reality’ (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). NFC correlates positively with Burger and Cooper’s (1979) Desirability of Control (Thompson et al., 1993), with self-appraised effectiveness at problem solving (Heppner, Reeder & Larson, 1983), and with field independence (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982), which has been argued by Gackenbach et al. (1985) to be related to lucid dreaming frequency. Furthermore, Martin, Silva, Newman and Thayer (1994) show that the cognitively complex factor of evaluative epistemological style (which involves one’s realisation of responsibility for epistemic choices) is positively correlated with NFC, with Desirability of Control, and with Levenson’s LOC-I, but not PO or C. This supports our predictions that frequent lucid dreamers would score higher on NFC and on LOC-I.

Blagrove and Tucker (1994) found frequent lucid dreamers scored 13.2%, equivalent to 0.43 SDs, higher than non-lucid dreamers on Domino’s (1970) Creativity adjective check list, with occasional lucid dreamers scoring in between, but this difference was not significant, and Snyder and Gackenbach (1988, pp. 245–246) report generally no difference in creativity between lucid and non-lucid dreamers, except for some indications of greater creativity for females. However, Bernstein and Belicki (1995–96) found the frequency of lucid dreams correlates with imaginativeness as measured by the physiognomic cue test, in which subjects are assessed on their tendency to animate and anthropomorphize simple line drawings. We therefore assessed creativity in the present study, using the Gough (1979) adjective check list, which has advantages over the Domino scale in that it has some negatively weighted items, which reduces effects of acquiescent responding, and correlates better with independent criterion ratings of creativity within many different employment samples. We predicted that the greater cognitive complexity and reduced functional fixity of creative individuals (Charlton & Bakan, 1988–89) would be associated with increased likelihood of subjects recognising that they were dreaming.

Section snippets

Subjects

All subjects were university students who responded to advertisements asking for lucid and non-lucid dreamers. Demographic variables were: frequent lucid dreamers (male=13, female=9, mean age=21.5 (3.3) years), occasional lucid dreamers (male=9, female=6, mean age=22.8 (4.2) years), and non-lucid dreamers (male=10, female=10, mean age=22.8 (7.3) years). We acknowledge the possibility that some of our subjects may have undertaken training aimed at influencing their levels of self-awareness or

Results

Group means and SDs of scores on NFC, Creativity, and the three dimensions of LOC are shown in Table 1. The three groups were significantly different on NFC, Creativity, and LOC-I, with lucid dreamers (LDs) being higher on all three scales than non-lucid dreamers (non-LDs). For creativity there was a significant interaction of group with sex, F(2, 51)=5.56, p=0.007, although for each sex the LD groups scored higher on creativity than non-LDs; there were no significant interactions of group with

Discussion

We have replicated the result of Blagrove and Tucker (1994) that individuals who report lucid dreaming are more likely to believe in internal locus of control of waking life events, and we have extended that result by showing that the relationship is specifically with internal attributions, and not beliefs about powerful others or chance. This result accords with the finding of Kahan and LaBerge (1996) that when subjects give reports of a dream and also of an autobiographical waking event,

References (32)

  • D.M. Bernstein et al.

    On the psychometric properties of retrospective dream content questionnaires

    Imagination, Cognition and Personality

    (1995–96)
  • M. Blagrove et al.

    Individual differences in locus of control and the reporting of lucid dreaming

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1994)
  • J.M. Burger et al.

    The desirability of control

    Motivation and Emotion

    (1979)
  • J.T. Cacioppo et al.

    The need for cognition

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1982)
  • S. Charlton et al.

    Cognitive complexity and creativity

    Imagination, Cognition and Personality

    (1988–89)
  • B.E. Collins

    Four components of the Rotter internal–external scale: belief in a difficult world, a just world, a predictable world, and a politically responsive world

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1974)
  • M. Darling et al.

    The pattern of self-reflectiveness in dream reports

    Dreaming

    (1993)
  • G. Domino

    Identification of potentially creative persons from the adjective check list

    Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

    (1970)
  • P.B.C. Fenwick et al.

    Lucid dreaming: correspondence between dreamed and actual events in one subject during REM sleep

    Biological Psychology

    (1984)
  • T. Fitch et al.

    Variations in cognitive style among high and low frequency dream recallers

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1989)
  • D. Foulkes

    Dreaming: A cognitive–psychological analysis

    (1985)
  • J.I. Gackenbach et al.

    The relationship between field independence and lucid dreaming ability

    Journal of Mental Imagery

    (1985)
  • H.G. Gough

    A creative personality scale for the adjective check list

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1979)
  • R.E. Gruber et al.

    Lucid dreaming, waking personality and cognitive development

    Dreaming

    (1995)
  • P.P. Heppner et al.

    Cognitive variables associated with personal problem-solving appraisal: Implications for counseling

    Journal of Counseling Psychology

    (1983)
  • T.L. Kahan

    Measuring dream self-reflectiveness: a comparison of two approaches

    Dreaming

    (1994)
  • Cited by (78)

    • Fantasy and Consciousness

      2023, Psychology of Consciousness: Theory Research, and Practice
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text