Many people often wonder about “dreams”. Questions like what is a dream, how it is created, and if it has any influence on the brain’s function are not commonly discussed topics. A lucid dream is a particular kind of dream where the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. However, lucid dreaming is an extremely rare experience and this kind of dream can seldom be bidden at one’s will. Recently, scientists have successfully peered inside the mind of lucid dreamers and discovered that they can make complex communication with the waking world. The findings, that were recently published in Current Biology, reveal how lucid dreams are processed.
In prior studies related to lucid dreams, researchers have studied the eye movements of the sleepers during their dreaming episodes. The eye movements indicate their brain activity during sleep. However, for these studies, documentation of the content of the dreams is unreliable, i.e., scientists were heavily dependent on the sleeper’s recollection of the dream, and many a time, the narrative about their dreams was distorted. To overcome this problem, Kristoffer Appel, sleep and dream researcher at Osnabrück University and the Institute of Sleep and Dream Technologies in Hamburg, and his colleagues discovered a novel way to conduct real-time communication with dreamers.
In a proof-of-concept study, Appel and his colleagues had sought volunteers who were regular lucid dreamers or individuals who acquired lucidity-inducing techniques. During their experiments, to confirm that the participants were sleeping, scientists performed electroencephalography (EEG) analyses of brain activity. Several methods were designed for communicating with the participants when they were in and out of dreams, for example, yes/no questions, simple mathematical problems, and means to distinguish stimuli in the visual, tactile, and auditory modalities.
This study was conducted using three different categories of participants. They are as follows:
(1) Qualified lucid dreamers
(2) Healthy individuals with insignificant previous experience in lucid dreaming and are trained to lucid dream
(3) Patients with narcolepsy which is a neurological disorder. Patients suffering from narcolepsy experience extreme daytime sleepiness, repeated lucid dreaming, and short-latency rapid eye movement (REM) sleep periods.
This experiment was conducted by four independent research teams located in Germany, the USA France, and the Netherlands. In Germany, the participants were asked math questions using the Morse code. The participants decoded the problem in their dreams and answered the question via facial or eye movements. In the French, American, and Dutch laboratory, scientists used spoken language to ask questions. They have substantially validated their research by establishing multiple successful two-way communication in all three categories of participants, and also with participants experiencing nocturnal and daytime naps.
This research has proved the possibility of interacting with a person in sleep and this has opened up a new avenue to study, investigate and understand dreams in greater detail. This research also has several real-world applications, for example, the concept of learning during sleep, exploring nightmare therapy, novel psychotherapy, etc. In the future, Appel and his co-researchers have planned to design more complex messages for the interaction with the lucid dreamers.