 Van Eeden was the son of Frederik Willem Van Eeden, director of the Royal Tropical Institute in Haarlem.In 1880 he studied Medicine in Amsterdam, where he pursued a bohemian lifestyle and wrote poetry.Whilst living in the city, he coined the term lucid dream in the sense of mental clarity, a term that nowadays is a classic term in the Dream literature and study, meaning dreaming while knowing that one is dreaming.