Dr Keith Hearne, born at Reading in Berkshire, England, is an internationally known psychologist who conducted the world’s first sleep-laboratory research into ‘lucid’ dreams (in which the dreamer becomes fully aware of being in a dream) for his PhD – completed in 1978 at Liverpool University. In the course of that research, he invented the ‘dream machine’. The original sleep-lab chart records from his pioneering research, and a dream machine, are on permanent display
at the Science Museum in London.