Having somewhat briefly but assiduously surveyed and studied parapsychology and trans-personal psychology on my own, I found Dr. Stephen LaBerge's "NovaDreamer" to be a most arresting and meritorious enabler of lucid dreaming. Its flashing of low-level LEDs over one's eyelids as the subject sleeps supplies stimulation which in turn engenders a nourishing sensory experience, allowing the person to remain within the dream while also providing lucidity to said dream. However, it must be stated that it can certainly be highly dangerous to engage in this practice without at least some guidance on the matter. As mentioned above, sleep paralysis is a risk. There is also the REM-Dreamer, which more directly detects motion. Dr. LaBerge's research in lucid dreaming began at Stanford as he sought his Ph.D. in Psychophysiology at Stanford. His work in the development of mnemonic pathways to readily dream in a lucid state is quite remarkable to read about. It should also be noted that lucid dreaming is best performed during, say, the late afternoon, for the duration of a rather transitory "cat nap," as it were. Lucid dreaming at nighttime for an extended period of time is probably ill-advised, speaking frankly.
Professor Jack Gallant at UC Berkeley, a neuroscientist, fairly recently undertook the demonstrably fascinating project of utilizing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. He wedded that to computer-generated models which meticulously reconstruct the visual viscera, so to speak, of dreams. The neural "recordings" for lack of a better term are amazing to read about.
Matters of the oneiric and ontological will forever remain of interest to me. For as long as I can remember, my sleeping patterns have never been consistent or stable. Not too infrequently, I will find myself staying awake throughout entire multiple days-spanning stretches. Just as dreaming during sleep is an incredibly engrossing subject matter, so too are the often deleterious, though admittedly sometimes almost delirious and borderline euphoric resulting sensorial experiences cultivated from too little sleep over an abnormally lengthy period of time.
However, when I do sleep, I tend to find myself ceaselessly dreaming. Occasionally, dark recesses of my mind seems to stitch together nearly ineffable, and, I imagine, surely, truly ineffable "epic dreams," fraught with psychophysiological ramifications stemming, primarily, I would tend to speculate, from philosophical inquiries. Certainly, "recurring dreams" undeniably strike me with considerable regularity. It is not uncommon for me to experience dreams in which an entire "film" of sorts is constructed, populated by utterly distinct and disparate characters--or at least the beginnings of such a film. And these stories will be wholly original, perhaps not in their atmospheres or even themes, but in every important specific. Of course, the mind is perpetually colored by what it has "consumed," so the claim to originality is forever tenuous.
And, assuredly, since some people are mentioning the phenomenon, déjà vu is one of those almost hapless "chicken/egg" anti-paradigms because any ontological or incorporeal mental understanding of a real life event is almost made into a continual time loop pertaining to phenomenology and the place of humanity as understood by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's application of what he called the "primacy of perception." Now, I'm not an avid admirer of Merleau-Ponty's theses or political or philosophical considerations, but he was the lone outstanding phenomenologist of his era to absorb the psychological aspects of phenomenology, which as an aside makes him interesting.
Going back to my dreams... Unquestionably, some of my dreams have been provided by real life experiences. One of the more strikingly recurring dreams which was clearly driven by what I had "consumed" was derived from a San Francisco Giants-Cincinnati Reds game in Cincinnati on Friday, July 29, 2011. The game was a seemingly endless back-and-forth duel displaying this dreadful sense of futility on an unbearably hot summer night. For over a year, the dream of a game which spanned days between the Giants and Reds in Cincinnati plagued my mind and festered within it, and it symbolized everything which was glorious and grueling about the sport, with each team's roster of players performing bold and daring feats and a mass, formless throng of people adorned in crimson and snow colorations. As time passed, the dream grew appendages and new characters and organic changes; I discussed this once or twice in the chatbox in early October 2012 when the Giants and Reds played each other in the NLDS. And in discussing it, the dream subsequently grew, particularly under the real world weight of that series. Finally, it was as though the dream manifested itself into a real life event as in Game 5 the Giants and Reds seemed mortally locked in an amaranthine battle with brilliant blue firmament slowly, gradually replaced by a fading, bruised purple sky, and soon as the stadium lights came on, Cincinnati was enveloped in caliginous darkness of night, and the players on each team, though unspeakably weary, continued to play on, ever valiant. And yet of course the actual Game 5 did not last nearly so long. It just felt like it did.