Frederik Willem van Eeden

The concept of recognising that one is dreaming while inside a dream is now known in Western science as lucid dreaming.

The term was coined in 1913 by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, who had been keeping a dream diary for many years and had experienced the phenomenon himself.

Van Eeden described a lucid dream as one in which the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the person remembers day life and their own condition, reaching a state of perfect awareness.

For decades, scientists were sceptical that lucid dreaming was a real phenomenon.

He believed dreams were the psyche's natural way of communicating important information to the conscious mind.

By the mid-20th century, the discovery of REM shifted dream research away from purely psychological theories and toward neuroscience.

In 1977, the psychiatrists J. Allen Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed the activation synthesis theory, one of the most influential neurobiological models.

According to this theory, dreams are the brain's attempt to make sense of random electrical signals generated by the brainstem during REM.

But I guess that it's a combination of several factors.

On a personal level, I think it was important that it was Frederik van Eeden who met Lady Welby and who brought back her ideas on Significs.

Because Frederik van Eeden was already at that time a leading figure of Dutch social life.

He was a member of the literary movement known as de Tachtigers, the 80ers.

He published novels, poems, essays, and they were all widely read.

They founded the Signific Circle and also the International Signific Study Group.

And finally, shortly after the Second World War, also the International Society for Significs.

And these three factors combined, meaning the personal influence of Frederik van Eeden, the context of the First World War and the interwar period, and then the fact that they were able to have a structured organization in their backs, helped the Dutch Signific movement to start in the country.