I learned as a child of five or six to control nightmares. For example, a dinosaur was chasing me, so I inserted a can of spinach into the plot, and upon eating it gained Popeye's strength and 'vanquished' my foe.

--V.B., Roanoke, Virginia

SOURCE: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge & Howard Rheingold, 1990, p.250-51. I added title.

EDITOR'S NOTE

On the next page, LaBerge tells of coaching his niece Madeleina (age seven) to handle nightmares about a shark in the local swimming hole. It worked; she went from fleeing to riding that shark! Fast learning, and proof kids can lucid-dream, but I headlined the Spinach Solution instead because unlike Madeleina, V.B. wasn't a kid learning from an adult expert in lucid dreaming--at the time there were no experts in lucid dreaming!--but was independently inventing lucid dreamwork. And how many more times has it happened?

So the next time you feel you really need an expert to tell you what to do, remember how a kindergartener with no training at all achieved lucidity and brought down a dinosaur through the mystical power of a canned vegetable.

--Chris Wayan

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