Voss herself is more circumspect. Lucid dreaming is unusual and unstable, she insists, perhaps only “an exception, an accident.” She grants that regular dreaming may serve some critical biological function—nightly information processing, say, or bodily temperature control. But lucid dreaming “is not meant to be.”
In a more ruminative moment, Voss confessed that lucid dreams might offer a privileged view into the evolution of consciousness in the brain: progressing from the primitive activity of “a cold-blooded animal” during non-REM sleep, to the sparks of real cognition of “a rabbit or cat” during regular dreaming, to the peak of self-awareness, reasoning, and memory during lucid dreaming, in which the dreamer at last possesses “a human brain, a higher-order conscious brain.”