According to the conclusions of a new scientific study, it would appear that people who claim to have seen angles over the course of history, or who are convinced that they've had religious visions and epiphanies, were having spontaneous lucid dreams.
The vast majority of encounters described in the Christian Bible, for example, can be explained through this simple and fairly common phenomenon, sleep experts say. The new study was carried out by scientists with the Out-Of-Body Experience Research Center, in Los Angeles, California.
In the experiments, about 30 healthy volunteers were instructed on how to perform a series of mental maneuvers meant to put them in a lucid state during dreams. They were to apply these techniques whenever they woke up or became lucid during the night.
All these steps were meant to put them in the state that was most likely to result in out-of-body experiences, the team behind the work reveals. Many such instances result in reported encounters with either angels or extraterrestrials. As many as half of the participants reported the encounters.
During the few weeks of the experiment, the majority of participants (24) reported at least one instant of lucid dreaming and encountering an angel. Test subject Anton M. describes what he experienced:
“I left my body and then summoned my 'guide,' and he came in the form of an angel. I asked him for some cookies and water. He gave them to me readily. I ate everything up, experiencing every taste sensation and the feeling of satiation. I returned to my body and fell right back asleep,” he says.
For this particular study, the participants were asked to imagine a story that appears in the Talmud, the Bible and the Quran, namely that of the prophet Elijah. In the Bible, Elijah's story detailing his encounter with an angel is described in the Book of Kings.
More than half of the participants in the study reported being able to replicate the prophet's experience with the angel, and reported receiving water and a loaf of bread, just like Elijah did. The team was not surprised at these results, since they were awaiting them.
“What we can learn from this is that we need a better definition of lucid dreaming, and based on that definition we need to distinguish lucid dreams from other forms of trances, visions and maybe even hallucinations,” explains Brigitte Holzinger, quoted by
LiveScience.
“A project trying to determine these states would be very interesting,” adds the expert, a psychologist at the Institute for Consciousness and Dream Research, who was not involved in the new research.
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