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LaBerge's theories depart radically from the perception of sleep that dominated much of the 20th century. In the early 1950s, scientists identified REM sleep, and eventually many came to believe that dreaming most often occurs during REM. That's not quite right--dreams during REM aren't necessarily more frequent than dreams during other sleep states. They are more memorable, though. And yet sleep physicians have assumed that REM is so deep that no conscious thought can penetrate it.
LaBerge and others challenged this idea. Germain at the University of Pittsburgh offered the best explanation of how sleeping life and waking life are more similar than we assume. In lectures around the country, she is often asked, "Why do you care so much about sleep?" Her response: "Why do you care about wakefulness? Maybe the only point of being awake is to sleep."
After all, it is during sleep that our immune systems gather strength, and it is during sleep that we consolidate memories. It is both a joke and a fact that most men either fall asleep or want to after sex--although many women do too. Perhaps one biological necessity is linked to the other. Sleep specialists who treat insomniacs routinely recommend that the bed be used not for reading or TV or texting but only for sleep--and sex. Germain's idea suggests that the species has survived not because we hunt, gather, work and socialize but because we spend a third of our lives asleep and then a small but crucial portion having sex.
LaBerge spent part of his early career studying people in high REM-sleep activation--the deepest sleep we experience, which can be dense with dreams. REM sleep has at least two physiological phases--one in which our eyes move left and right, and another in which we begin to breathe rapidly. LaBerge created a device that sits over your eyes as you sleep and flashes white lights when your eyes begin moving left and right. The idea behind what he calls the DreamLight seems Pavlovian: after wearing it for days or weeks, your brain will begin to recognize when you're in deep sleep--and therefore when you're dreaming. At that point, you can take conscious control.
The device is a main physiological part of his training. A psychological part involves a sort of extreme form of IRT: you ask yourself five to 10 times a day whether you're dreaming. The question becomes rote, something you ask yourself all the time--and so a question that will begin to occur to you as you fall asleep, and then again in those twilight minutes before you wake up, and eventually during the night, even in the deepest REM sleep.
At least I think that's the idea. LaBerge has no controlled trials to prove any of this. But his self-actualizing notion of dream control is at least more appealing than wearing a CPAP mask for the rest of your life. After all, when you wake up with a large tube attached to your face, it's easy to think you're having a terrible dream. Which is funny and a bit sad: the best solution we have for nightmares can cause the very thing they're meant to prevent.