Editing SPOILER: Godlike Origins (section)

===Stephen LaBerge===
Dr. LaDerge is a psychophysiologist and a leader in the scientific study of lucid dreaming. He began to research lucid dreaming while working on his Ph.D at Stanford University. He developed techniques (REM cues) to enable himself and other researchers to enter a lucid dream state at will, most notably the MILD technique (mnemonic induction of lucid dreams), which was necessary for many forms of dream experimentation. In 1987, he founded The Lucidity Institute, an organisation that promotes research into lucid dreaming, as well as running courses for the general public on how to achieve lucid dreaming. His technique of signalling to a collaborator monitoring his EEG with agreed-upon eye movements during REM became the first published, scientifically-verified signal from a dreamer's mind to the outside world (the actual first confirmed signal coming from Alan Worsley under study in England - his group however witheld their results, awaiting more solid evidence and repeated successes, presumably from an understandable fear of ridicule from peers in the field of sleep and dream research, and hence LaBerge's Ph.D thesis results were published first).  Though the technique is simple, it opened up broad new avenues of dream research that are still only beginning to be explored, and pushed the field of dream research, or oneirology, beyond its protoscientific and largely discredited psychoanalytic roots, establishing it as a fruitful and respectable discipline. Other significant contributors to the scientific study of dreaming include J. Allan Hobson, Patricia Garfield, Tore A. Nielsen, Mark Solms, Francis Crick of Nobel prize fame for his co-discovery of the helical structure of DNA, and innumerable others.