The history of lucid dreaming stretches as far back as human civilization. Although there are no records from pre-history, since most people will spontaneously experience a lucid dream a few times throughout their life and our basic biology has changed very little in the last 200,000 years, it is likely people have been having lucid dreams for as long as human beings have existed.
Ancient Egypt
There is the suggestion that lucid dreaming was used in Ancient Egypt, as far back as 3000 BCE. Hieroglyphs have been found combining two symbols; the bed, known to stand for sleep, and a single open eye, meaning ‘awakening’ or ‘to come awake’. The most literal translations of these, "Sleep Awakening" would seem to indicate lucid dreaming.
Ancient Egyptians believed a person existed in three forms; the corpse (Shat), the physical living body (Ka) and a spiritual/psychic manifestation (Ba). While some commentators translate ‘Ba’ as soul, others believe an ‘out of body’ state is more appropriate.
Tthere are some Egyptian paintings that include an image of the sleeping body and Ba (a figure with a human body and head of a bird)) hovering above it. Again suggesting some kind of out of body state associated with sleeping.
Neither of these are conclusive, but they do offer tantalizing hints, that lucid dreaming may have been integrated into ancient civilizations from their very beginnings.
Yoga Nidra
The first reliable documented evidence of lucid dreaming comes from India and the Upanishads. Although the exact date these foundations of Hindu theology were written is unknown, it is understood to be somewhere between 500 - 1000 BCE.
One of the states of conscious awareness referred to in the Mandukya Upanishad is known as prajna and actually goes beyond lucid dreaming to describe a lucid sleeping state where a person is simultaneously aware of both their internally created dreamworld and their physical sleeping body and its relationship with the external world. The deepest state of pranja is actually describes as a dreamless yet conscious deep sleep.
As Hindu and later Buddhist yogi’s sought to attain this state of prajna they developed the practice of Yoga Nidra, often referred to as ‘Dream Yoga’ in western cultures.
Through Yoga Nidra, Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism and many subsequently other philosophies that evolved from these beginnings, lucid dreaming has formed an integral part of many eastern cultures right across Asia. In some areas, these practices have continued more or less uninterrupted for over 30 centuries, right up to the modern day.
Aristotle
The first written appearance of lucid dreaming in the west comes from Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE) in his work On Dreams. He writes “when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which tells us that what presents itself is but a dream”