Lucid dreaming is essentially the state of being aware that you are dreaming while the experience takes place. This absorbing field of discovery began in France in the latter 19th century, when the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint Denis wrote the book Dreams and How to Guide Them. The term "lucid" was first used by Frederik van Eeden, a Dutch writer who in 1913 submitted a paper about this type of dream to the British Society for Psychical Research, and it has stuck ever since. Until the 1970s, mainstream science had dismissed lucid dreaming as either a fantasy or just a "micro-awakening", an odd phenomenon in which an individual is awake for a very brief period while believing they are asleep. However, more recently, the objective reality of lucid dreams has been successfully validated. In 1978, UK experimenter Alan Worsley pioneered the use of eye movement signals to communicate to the outside world the fact that he was in a lucid state. To ensure these were not mistaken for random eye movements, Worsley moved his eyes to the left and right eight times in succession. In other laboratory tests, he was able to provide accurate estimates for the lengths of whole dreams and for parts of dreams. A second research pioneer, Stephen LaBerge of Stanford University, moved his finger in front of his eyes during a lucid dream while being recorded successfully by measuring instruments. The use of eye movements greatly limits the extent of possible communication, but at present it's